The 1990s collection

Home ownership down and renting up for the first time in a century
Office for National Statistics, 2015 · source
Confidence: A — Official series
Curator note: From ONS analysis of Census of England and Wales tenure. Owner-occupation peaked in this decade (68% in 1991), the high-water mark of Right to Buy. Private renting had fallen to 9% — its low point — while the social sector continued shrinking. Households, not families.
Source note: ONS analysis of tenure 1918–2011 from the Census of England and Wales, interpolated between census years. Reported as % of households: owned (owner-occupied), private rented, socially rented. Data CSV at https://static.ons.gov.uk/visual/2015/06/data.csv (HTTP 200 verified and byte-identical to the local copy). Figures are for households, not families — single-person and low-income households pull the tenure mix differently than a median four-person family would.
Assumption: The composite family

Earnings time series of mean gross weekly earnings from 1938 to 2025
Office for National Statistics, 2025 · source
Confidence: A — Official series
Basis: Weekly figure
Curator note: From the ONS long-run earnings series. 1990 (April sample, NES): adult male full-time £295.60/week; adult female full-time £201.50/week. Great Britain. Individual earnings, not family income. The decade began in recession (1990–92) and saw the start of the long real-wage slowdown.
Source note: Long-run weekly earnings series. 1938–1968 from Annual Abstract of Statistics (adult manual workers); 1968–2003 New Earnings Survey (NES); 2004+ Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE), weighted to LFS population totals. Male/female reported separately for 1938–1969; a combined all-employee series is available from 1970. Discontinuities at each methodology change are documented in the file. Data file resolves at /file?uri=.../current/19382025.xlsx (HTTP 200 verified).
Assumption: The composite family
Assumption: Values are shown in period money

The effects of taxes and benefits on household income: historical datasets — income, tax and benefit data by household type
Office for National Statistics, 2019 · source
Confidence: A — Official series
Basis: Annual figure
Curator note: From the ONS effects-of-taxes-and-benefits historical dataset, financial year 1997/98, non-retired households of two adults with two children. Original income £30,047; plus £2,018 of cash benefits, gross income £32,064; less £7,130 of direct tax and employees' National Insurance, disposable income £24,934. This is a mean across such households, not a median, and it is income after tax — the US rooms' anchor is gross money income, which is why the two are not chained. It is the income anchor for this room.
Source note: One worksheet per financial year, 1977 to FYE 2017/18, from the Living Costs and Food Survey and its predecessors (Family Expenditure Survey). The cited row is 'Disposable income' — original income plus cash benefits, less direct taxes and employees' National Insurance — for the non-retired 'two adults with two children' household type, the closest published UK counterpart to the museum's four-person composite. It is a mean, not a median, and the two adults are not necessarily the children's parents; see the uk-household-not-family assumption. Values are transcribed by scripts/uk_etb_extract.py, which locates the column by its composed header because the header block shifts between the 1980s and 1990s sheets.
Assumption: The composite family
Assumption: Getting to a family of four
Assumption: Values are shown in period money
Assumption: UK income statistics measure households by type, not a four-person family

Employee earnings in the UK: Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, Table 1 (all employees)
Office for National Statistics, 2025 · source
Confidence: A — Official series
Basis: Hourly rate
Curator note: From ASHE Table 1.5a, all-employee sheet, 1997 — the first year of the survey. Median £7.07 across 20,858 thousand employee jobs; the mean was £8.90, and the full-time median £7.92. The all-jobs median is used as the wage anchor because it describes the hour of work actually on offer; the full-time figure sits about 12% above it. Great Britain-consistent back-series; the survey samples April pay for employees on adult rates whose pay was not affected by absence.
Source note: Table 1.5a is gross hourly pay and Table 1.9a total paid hours worked; the rooms cite the median of the 'All' sheet for both. The median over all employee jobs includes part-time jobs and so sits below the full-time median, which is transcribed alongside it in each fact's notes. ASHE runs from 1997 (a back-series recalculated from the New Earnings Survey for 1997-2003, weighted from 2004). Transcribed by scripts/uk_ashe_extract.py.
Assumption: Values are shown in period money
Assumption: The UK wage anchor is the median over all employee jobs
Assumption: The affordability axis

Employee earnings in the UK: Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, Table 1 (all employees)
Office for National Statistics, 2025 · source
Confidence: A — Official series
Curator note: From ASHE Table 1.9a, all-employee sheet, 1997. The median employee job was paid for 37.0 hours; the mean was 35.1, pulled below the median by part-time jobs. Full-time jobs alone: median 37.9, mean 40.0. Total paid hours includes paid overtime.
Source note: Table 1.5a is gross hourly pay and Table 1.9a total paid hours worked; the rooms cite the median of the 'All' sheet for both. The median over all employee jobs includes part-time jobs and so sits below the full-time median, which is transcribed alongside it in each fact's notes. ASHE runs from 1997 (a back-series recalculated from the New Earnings Survey for 1997-2003, weighted from 2004). Transcribed by scripts/uk_ashe_extract.py.
Assumption: The composite family

General Lifestyle Survey: 40 years of data collection (Figure 40.2 — consumer durables and cars)
Office for National Statistics, 2013 · source
Confidence: A — Official series
Curator note: From GHS 40-year overview, Figure 40.2 (unweighted). Colour TV reached 93% in 1990 (95% by 1993) — effectively universal, as black-and-white-only sets became rare.
Source note: Figure 40.2: percentage of households with consumer durables and cars, 1972–2011. Reports colour television, home computer, telephone, and car or van (the fuller durable basket — central heating, refrigerator, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, dishwasher — is in a separate table not included in this overview). Unweighted data. The GHS covered Great Britain (England, Wales, Scotland); the survey was discontinued after 2012. Values transcribed from the figure's underlying data CSV (ghs-data-chart3.csv); an OCR pass of the figure misread two cells (telephone 42→43, colour TV 61→60), confirming the CSV, not the OCR, is authoritative.
Assumption: The composite family

General Lifestyle Survey: 40 years of data collection (Figure 40.2 — consumer durables and cars)
Office for National Statistics, 2013 · source
Confidence: A — Official series
Curator note: From GHS 40-year overview, Figure 40.2 (unweighted). Home computers, first recorded by the GHS at 9% in 1984, reached 21% in 1990 (24% by 1993) as home PCs and early internet use spread.
Source note: Figure 40.2: percentage of households with consumer durables and cars, 1972–2011. Reports colour television, home computer, telephone, and car or van (the fuller durable basket — central heating, refrigerator, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, dishwasher — is in a separate table not included in this overview). Unweighted data. The GHS covered Great Britain (England, Wales, Scotland); the survey was discontinued after 2012. Values transcribed from the figure's underlying data CSV (ghs-data-chart3.csv); an OCR pass of the figure misread two cells (telephone 42→43, colour TV 61→60), confirming the CSV, not the OCR, is authoritative.
Assumption: The composite family

General Lifestyle Survey: 40 years of data collection (Figure 40.2 — consumer durables and cars)
Office for National Statistics, 2013 · source
Confidence: A — Official series
Curator note: From GHS 40-year overview, Figure 40.2 (unweighted). Fixed-line telephone neared universality (88% in 1990, 90% by 1993) after BT privatisation and network expansion; mobile phones were just beginning (this GHS series counts the fixed line).
Source note: Figure 40.2: percentage of households with consumer durables and cars, 1972–2011. Reports colour television, home computer, telephone, and car or van (the fuller durable basket — central heating, refrigerator, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, dishwasher — is in a separate table not included in this overview). Unweighted data. The GHS covered Great Britain (England, Wales, Scotland); the survey was discontinued after 2012. Values transcribed from the figure's underlying data CSV (ghs-data-chart3.csv); an OCR pass of the figure misread two cells (telephone 42→43, colour TV 61→60), confirming the CSV, not the OCR, is authoritative.
Assumption: The composite family

General Lifestyle Survey: 40 years of data collection (Figure 40.2 — consumer durables and cars)
Office for National Statistics, 2013 · source
Confidence: A — Official series
Curator note: From GHS 40-year overview, Figure 40.2 (unweighted). Car ownership reached 67% in 1990 (68% by 1993), approaching the levels of the denser US suburbs but still well below US national family ownership.
Source note: Figure 40.2: percentage of households with consumer durables and cars, 1972–2011. Reports colour television, home computer, telephone, and car or van (the fuller durable basket — central heating, refrigerator, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, dishwasher — is in a separate table not included in this overview). Unweighted data. The GHS covered Great Britain (England, Wales, Scotland); the survey was discontinued after 2012. Values transcribed from the figure's underlying data CSV (ghs-data-chart3.csv); an OCR pass of the figure misread two cells (telephone 42→43, colour TV 61→60), confirming the CSV, not the OCR, is authoritative.
Assumption: The composite family

House price data: annual tables (UK House Price Index)
Office for National Statistics, 2026 · source
Confidence: A — Official series
Basis: One-time price
Affordability anchors: All employee jobs in the United Kingdom — full- and part-time, both sexes — on adult rates, whose pay in the April survey pay-period was not affected by absence; a 1% sample of National Insurance numbers; Non-retired private households in the United Kingdom of two adults with two children — averages (means) per household, in current (nominal) prices
Denominators measure: hours axis: median gross hourly pay; income axis: household disposable income (after cash benefits and direct tax)
Curator note: From ONS house price annual tables, Table 31 (unadjusted), 1997. The same figure appears in Table 28's all-dwellings column, where the average recorded income of the borrowers that year was £26,086 — a mortgage-market population, not the whole country, and higher than the household anchor above. Cash purchases are not in this survey, so the average is of dwellings bought with a mortgage.
Source note: Table 31, 'simple average house prices, United Kingdom', unadjusted (nominal), annual from 1991; previously DLUHC live table 571. Table 28's 'all dwellings' column reproduces Table 31 to the pound and carries the average recorded income of the borrowers beside it, which is how the transcription is checked. Data to 2002 are from a 5% sample; 2003 onwards from an enhanced sample; from September 2005 collected via the Regulated Mortgage Survey. The workbook in the archive is the .xls — the file served with an .xlsx extension is the HTML landing page.
Assumption: Values are shown in period money
Assumption: The affordability axis