Marcus Tanner: Let's hope gentrification's had its day

So the slump is coming, house prices are crashing and there's a gnashing of teeth among the City traders, yuppies and young professionals. It's the bonfire of the bankers, the Notting Hill chronicler, Rachel Johnson, writes at the weekend. Boo hoo! Well, not me.

Us downwardly mobiles feel a spring in our step. We never worshipped at the altar of "gentrification". Indeed, I left my first pad in north London to escape gentrification. I didn't like the cut of those hard little couples who poured in, and drove out the sleepier, more amiable inhabitants along with all their muddled, musty shops.

I fled to the then pleasantly dusty suburb of Stoke Newington – but it was only a brief respite. One day just the kind of beady-eyed couple I'd come to dread accosted me and asked – totally seriously – "Is this the new Islington?" "Oh, yes", I replied. I made a mental note to sell immediately.

The crumbly area I moved to a little further to the south-east looked a safer bet, with its wreck of a high street, full of blowsy African mums rummaging through Marie Curie cancer shops and Oxfams. But I wasn't safe there long, either.

Like a red squirrel quietly nibbling away in the last copse not overtaken by greys, I felt briefly and unwisely secure. My new homeland looked impregnable – a static social environment of musty-looking librarians, other assorted grey heads, amiable Kurds and churchy black OAPs, quietly shoving copies of Watchtower through my letterbox and occasionally inquiring about the state of my soul. It was wonderfully silent, no one seemed to come in or out, except via a coffin, and there wasn't a cappuccino bar in sight.

But as UK property prices rose ever higher, that teeming, restless and oh-so-busy army of young white professionals began sending out raiding parties. For a while, the stigma of living in an "E" as opposed to an "N" postcode held them back; a belt of garlic warding off the circling vampires. But this imaginary Maginot Line steadily lost its power to deter. In fact, the development of a street off the local park into a weekend "street market", with its full complement of overpriced cakes and fancy cheeses, soon turned the trickle of orcs coming out of the Mordor of N1 into a flood.

Now they've simply taken over, bringing their noisy, barging ways with them, and turning my pleasantly becalmed neighbourhood into an agitated hellhole of White Urban Professionals, or WUPs. Thanks to the WUPs' horrible "work hard, play hard" philosophy and lifestyle, weekends have become sleep-free events, the streets echoing to chugging taxis disgorging giggling partygoers at 3 or 4am, who then spend what seems ages bellowing into mobiles in their phoney Mockney accents.

Good manners, along with the old, usually somewhat pointless, chitchat in the street ("A bit nippy, isn't it?"), have disappeared. The incomers have no time for that rubbish. They talk about how the area has become a "village" but it's never seemed less like a village to me.

"I just take my hearing aid out dear," my 90-something neighbour told me, when I asked how she coped with the frightful nocturnal racket generated by our new, young, thoughtless, wealthy, shouty, professional neighbours. "Why should you have to?" I replied, shocked. For a while I have been planning my next escape, but maybe this mysterious thing called a slump is going save me, and send the WUPs back where they came from. Peace at last!