Come, muse, and sing of New Malden!

There's a funny Fry and Laurie sketch in which an ordinary suburban father reveals to his ordinary suburban son that the son is, in fact, the Chosen One who must defeat the evil Pewnack the Destroyer with the aid of the multi-bladed knife Berwhale the Avenger. The son, who had always secretly suspected something of the sort, is then persuaded to move to yonder town of Saffron Walden to wait until the fourth moon of Trollack rises above the Cylinder of Eyelass, and in the meantime to take a job in a canning factory. The sketch ends with the father reporting to the mother that their son seems to have swallowed the story - they thought he would never move out.

There is an online contingent who reminds me of the son. Although they are, in reality, the children of ordinary suburban parents, they feel a great and apocalyptic moral crusade upon them: they are chomping at the bit to pick up Berwhale the Avenger and destroy the evil Pewnack (otherwise known as the Selfish Generation of Boomers) which, they feel, is all that stands between them and a promised land of affordable family homes in south east England. 

What we need to do, perhaps using a trick similar to that played by Stephen Fry, is persuade them to move, not to Saffron Walden, but to its even more prosaic rhyme-mate, New Malden.

Let me explain. An MP made an ill-judged attempt at populism the other day, contrasting "your £500,000 house with a drive in Surrey" with Northern terraces. The internet duly resounded to plaintive cries of "where are these £500,000 Surrey houses with driveways?" Well, I thought I'd have a look for them. It turns out that there are in fact quite a few houses with driveways in Surrey which can had for half a mill. Click that link and you'll see that pretty much all of these houses have driveways. Now I'm sure that the picture in everyone's mind prompted by the MP's tweet is more along the lines of an old Georgian rectory in the gin and jaguar belt of Surrey with an in and out driveway rather than a modest 30s semi with off road parking, but the point still stands: these are decent family homes at which you can charge an electric car.

But now let me tell you a bit about New Malden. It's a London suburb: Surrey in address but London zone 4 in public transport terms. It has good trains to Waterloo (about 8 trains an hour at peak times, almost all of them with a 26 minute journey time). There are lots of primary schools and even some grammar schools in the borough (which bears the distinguished title of the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames). It's internationally famous for its Korean community, so it's got some diversity and good restaurants too. Wikipedia says that Stormzy lives there, although I feel that may be stretching a point. 

Now, leaving Stormzy aside, I haven't got any great claims to fame for New Malden. If he were real, I doubt Pewnack the Destroyer would be seen dead there. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that Reggie Perrin was eleven minutes late because his train was stuck there once. But it looks like a good place to settle down and bring up children. Parks, playgrounds, a High Street and so on, and all within easy commuting distance of London. That, as I understand the online Chosen Ones, is the promised land.

And here's the thing: you can buy a three bedroom house with a driveway there for half a million pounds. Honestly: the dream of a house with a garage and a garden in London with a decent commute is alive and well, and it lives in New Malden. Here's one that sold earlier this year for £460,000. It's not the world's most beautiful house. But if you wanted 1200 square feet of indoor space and a 55ft garden in zone 4 then it could have been your house, for £460,000. And there are a few more of similar ilk on the market. Again, these are not houses to make you swoon - they are not even the fashionable Victorian terraces I talked about before - but they are homes which will accommodate a young and growing small family. They are probably not unlike the drab homes that the Boomers bought once upon a time and which now make the Chosen Ones green with envy.

So pack up your multi-bladed knives and lie low in New Malden, biding your time until the day of the Great Reckoning. In the meantime, you might end up making a quiet suburb a little more lively - and a hefty profit on your deposit too.