Generation rent: why I’ll never live in the town I grew up in

For years I hated my neighbourhood and wanted to live in ‘proper London’, and now I can only dream of a house in DagenhamWhen I started this column, I thought, “Any month now, I’ll get on the property ladder.” I imagined sharing the tribulations of house-buying: the estate agents who say “compact” when they mean “claustrophobia-inducing”, and psyching out the competition at open viewings (“I hear they’re opening a sewage