Mortgage lending growth still firm despite new regulations July 10, 2014 The number of loans for house purchases rose by a quarter in the year to May, according to figures released yesterday, suggesting no dramatic effect from the raft of new regulations for the sector. The Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) announced that house purchase lending was up in value by 25 per cent to £9.6bn [...]
Bow, Tower Hamlets: All you need to know about London’s new eastern hotspot October 30, 2014 Everyone knows how well Hackney is doing in the property stakes, with house price increases outstripping any other borough in London over the last 12 months. But how about its neighbour Tower Hamlets? As a borough, it’s building more new homes than any other in the country. Bromley-by-Bow, in particular, has been popular with [...]
Focus on Chiswick: Why are families flocking to west London? November 13, 2014 Many people seem to think that, between oligarchs buying up prime central London and renters occupying the trendy suburbs, the capital is becoming a place of transition. But there’s one place that’s defying that trend: Chiswick. This ancient country retreat, which was once part of Middlesex, is every inch the traditional London village. [...]
Fighting forward: The Black Farmer’s Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones talks sausages, political incorrectness and willpower May 31, 2015 Being an entrepreneur is all about timing. You can have the best-laid plans in the world, a huge amount of skill, but it’s really about catching the zeitgeist.” This is Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones’s opening line to me. After a brief pause, he adds, “life is also all about timing”. This is something the founder of [...]
Maximum excitement on the six nations with sporting index February 5, 2015 THE SIX Nations is a really competitive affair and makes for a great betting heat. Scotland and Italy’s wait for a first title in the new format looks certain to go on, so we are down to four teams who could take glory. Sporting Index traders can’t split England and Ireland on their Outright 60 [...]
UK property prices: House price growth still falling – but mortgage approvals are up April 9, 2015 Growth in house prices fell again in the three months to March, to 8.1 per cent, down from 8.5 per cent in January, research by Halifax suggested today. That puts growth at a "similar" rate to September 2014 – although it's now "significantly" below July's peak of 10.2 per cent, it added. Month on month, [...]
Miliband to tax mansions to fund new NHS splurge September 22, 2014 ED MILIBAND will today deliver a key pre-election speech at his party’s annual conference in Manchester, in which he is widely expected to announce a funding boost for the NHS. Miliband is thought to have found a way to pay for a budget increase for the health service as he seeks to position Labour as [...]
Green & Black’s founder Craig Sams on his plans to get us drinking real kola beans with Gusto Cola July 26, 2015 Back in the 1980s few people even knew that cocoa came from a pod grown on a tree. Absurd though that sounds, even supermarket buyers were unaware of cocoa’s provenance. As an experiment, Craig Sams, a legend in the macrobiotic diet community and founder of organic food company Whole Earth, decided to have some [...]
Car review: Don’t judge the Audi RS3 Sportback by its flashy logo June 29, 2015 Do you chuckle when you press your car’s accelerator to the floor? Do you have an exhaust that barks so loudly it startles passersby? Does your car cover ground so quickly that it’s just a blur to pedestrians? If you wish you could answer yes to these questions, then Audi’s new £40,000 RS3 could [...]
Stamp duty up over £900m in last 12 months June 19, 2014 THE ANNUAL total stamp duty bill has soared to £5.6bn in the year to March 2014, up by over £900m from £4.7bn for the previous year, as home buyers are increasingly being hit by the levy as house prices rise while stamp duty thresholds remain flat, according to research by Lloyds Bank. The increase means [...]