A REPORT THAT A LONDON FIELDS house offered at £10 million sold quickly on social media has delivered an electric shock to the already lively Hackney property market.

Since the late 1990s developers and investors have been busy in the borough, feasting like vultures on its many pickings. Until this autumn they would have gulped in astonishment if a sale hit £3 million. Now the moneyed predators will be looking  to replicate the success of the stunning sale in Navarino Road, Hackney.

Take a wander along that E8 street, starting at the northern end, in busy Dalston Lane.

On your left in Navarino Road, the east side, you pass a delicately beautiful 1901 Art Nouveau housing estate; on the right a Georgian cottage similar to the £10-million property. Its pub-chain owner has just popped into Hackney council a planning application to enlarge the property. Coincidental timing?

Across the bridge and down the now gently sloping street, you pass grander houses.

Cross over Graham Road. You enter a section of Navarino Road where residents have had to endure the sound of builders banging and shaking the aged bricks and beams, often excavating tonnes of soil to enlarge basements.

The house on the west side painted in the still fashionable (only just) battleship grey is on sale for £7.5 million. Expenditure was conspicuous: an articulate lorry turned up direct from the Netherlands one morning to unload the front and rear gardens. 

When Hollywood star David “Friends” Schwimmer was said to have bought in the street, residents speculated this might be the place.

At the SW end of Navarino is the £10 million house. It was one of several that started life a few hundred years ago as the neat double-fronted cottage of an upwardly mobile family. 

The co-owner of a small chain of hipster bars bought it for £3.25 million then embarked on a high-cost project to give it Premier League footballer/popsinger appeal. Bling beat taste as imposing marble fireplaces and other period features were tossed out and a building that looks like a second house grafted — with thought for Georgian symmetry — to the rear of the house.

A gym, sauna, cinema and bar, swimming pool and more bedrooms and bathrooms, six of each in all, were added. London Fields Lido pool is only a two-minute walk, a popular classy gym five minutes away. But of course, the rich dislike inclusivity: sharing is either not desired or not possible.

One social media poster said “Truly hideous inside — what is this aesthetic?” The commenter has a point: even a non-architect could envisage better ways to turn a dignified classic into a lux pad. 

Not that the unfortunate renovations would bother the kind of buyer being sought. One candidate, say baristas in local cafés, is rapper Drake. A fabulously rich pop star buying a house in zone 2 hemmed in by neighbouring homes?

He might have have been wise to look further afield. In rustic Northamptonshire a royal couple (Hubby’s a duke) are selling their Elizabethan mansion for half the price of the Hackney house.

The hip-hop star who used to hang in the ’hood and now features on the Forbes List would get 11 hectares (27 acres) with the £4.5 million mansion. And the property is easy limo distance from the famous kind of independent school the mega-rich want for their children. 

Whatever, let’s keep it real: for the many Hackneyites who can barely afford to rent a 40 or so square metre of flat space, the upmarket shenanigans of the rich will not help. They will push rents up. 

David Altheer 031022

* Backstory: Six million pound house in Victoria Park; Hackney council quickly pops squat house on on sale; A Hackney buy or a rental?; Dalston secret delight; What it costs to live behind an E8 faux-Georgian terrace; Public kept from hearing at Hackney council planning meeting

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