What does your postcode say about you? Quite a lot, according to Carrie Segrave's New London Property Guide. Postcodes convey "a powerful emotional and financial message", which Londoners absorb "with their mothers' milk".
Postcodes were once simply devices to help the mechanical sorting of mail. When the Royal Mail introduced the codes between 1959 and 1974, the well-to-do did not like having them at all, just as they once preferred to have house names rather than numbers. As Nancy Mitford advised in Noblesse Oblige (1956), the ideal upper-class address was simply a place name, a describer and a county: something like "Shirwell Hall, Salop", for example.
It was the pioneering gentrifiers in the 1960s, doing up run-down Georgian terraces on the wild north London frontier, who first saw the power of the postcode as a marker of upward mobility. Streets Ahead, Alan Bennett's 1966 series of television sketches about Camden's media darlings, was subtitled Life and Times in NW1, a formula later borrowed by Mark Boxer for a cartoon strip.
In his 1974 book Soft City, Jonathan Raban noted that London postcodes were becoming like talismans, "endowed with curiously absolutist values" and "magical guarantees of a certain kind of identity". In more recent years, the snob value of postcodes has increased. They are now actuarial shorthand, used at no cost to themselves by banks, insurers and retailers to classify potential customers and to target services.
Postcodes are ambiguous, not just because they arbitrarily overlap the more natural divisions of districts and neighbourhoods, but because they are interpreted crudely. Most estate agents and housebuyers concentrate on the outward code (the first part, which denotes the general area) and ignore the inward code (the second part, which pinpoints the specific street). The latter would be a more accurate indicator of class and status in London's complex demography.
But we are all snobs now. Because houses are the major financial investment of our lifetimes, all homeowners have to participate in this status-seeking game. Postcodes have a collectively agreed meaning, which is mysterious, authorless and difficult to control. It is a prime example of market group-think, in which, as John Maynard Keynes wrote, we all try to second-guess "what the average opinion expects the average opinion to be". There is an endlessly circular relationship between monetary value and the collective wisdom about what makes a "nice" residential area. A valuable house or address is one that is already "sought after" or "desirable". Golden postcodes add thousands of pounds to a property's value, with startling price anomalies existing between near-identical houses on either side of a postcode boundary.
In London, the middle class rarely makes up most of the population, even in the most rebranded areas. So the symbolic power of the postcode fulfils the useful function of policing class boundaries. Some estate agents have started talking about "clean", "confused" and "polluted" postcodes, depending on the extent to which they are infiltrated by downmarket neighbourhoods. But, as The New London Property Guide puts it bluntly, "poor people cannot be uninvented".
Joe Moran lectures at Liverpool John Moores University
