A plea for the real estate industry to learn lessons from recent challenges. Fears that the rating system may not be fit for purpose. And moans about Marble Arch. Sound familiar?
Back in 1953, as the country was preparing for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, Estates Gazette, as it was then known, invited industry leaders to pen a series of coronation messages to readers.
As celebrations begin for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, revisiting those pages underscores how many of the challenges faced by the sector remain seven decades on – but it also highlights a steadfast belief in the industry’s ability to navigate difficult roads that should inspire readers today too.
Read more from the Estates Gazette coronation issue >>
George Arnold Coombe, then the newly installed president of the RICS, wrote of his hopes that the coronation would mark “the beginning of a reign full of hope and promise, and also, we may pray, the end of eight troublesome post-war years of readjustment”.
One hundred years earlier, Coombe wrote, when Queen Victoria had taken the throne, the country entered “an era more pregnant with possibilities for the profession than any other before or since”.
“Perhaps a hundred years hence, our descendants may reflect that, in this mid-twentieth century, there were equal opportunities for the profession,” he said. “May they also be able to say that we were not unprepared.”
The industry faced “many problems”, Coombe acknowledged, offering a checklist that will resonate with readers in 2022, including a rating system that could need review, rent restriction that “cries out for modification” and inquests on the leasehold system that “cast a cloud over property transactions”.
“But the challenge will be met,” he added. “Men and women are available not only to devise solutions to our problems, but perhaps more important, to carry them into effect.”
Granville Morris, president of the Incorporated Society of Auctioneers and Landed Property Agents, sounded an equally optimistic but measured tone, describing the coronation as “a time for great rejoicing in many lands throughout the world” but also “an occasion for quiet reflection and an opportunity for us to learn from the events of the past”.
Morris pointed to a speech made by the then-Princess Elizabeth on her 21st birthday, in which she said her life would be “devoted to your service” but added that “I shall not have the strength to carry out this resolution unless you join in it with me”.
“That call to service and cooperation is one which can and should inspire us in our great profession,” Morris wrote. “We can look back with pride on what has been achieved but our task is not yet complete and we must not seek to rest upon the memory of past successes.”
Yet another rallying cry came from Myles Francis, president of the Chartered Auctioneers’ and Estate Agents’ Institute.
“I call on those who look to the [institute] for leadership to take the coronation as an occasion for reflecting on the influence their work can have on the health, prosperity and happiness of their fellow citizens,” Francis wrote. “Rightly conceived and rightly executed, the labours of this profession can greatly help to make the reign of Her Gracious Majesty Queen Elizabeth II outstanding in the annals of the British race.”
Elsewhere, in the “Topics of the Day” section, Marble Arch came in for criticism as a site long “identified with frustration and unfulfilled hope”. Estates Gazette quoted W.W. Hutchings, author of London Town Past and Present, describing the arch as having “no beauty, either of proportion or of ornamentation”, and as “a monument of extravagant folly”. Today’s critics of the doomed Marble Arch Mound will sympathise with those views.
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