If you live to be nearly 300 years old you might just be able to afford your first home in south London.

That’s the worst case in Wandsworth anyway – in other boroughs you might be luckier and only take a mere 36 years to save up enough money to get on the property ladder.

Research has looked at how difficult it is for someone in London to buy their own home without help from the ‘bank of mum and dad’ or a partner.

It took the average salary in the capital of £34,320, banks lending buyers up to four times this figure and the average cost of a flat in London being £457,000.

After crunching the numbers it came up with a figure of £320,000 which prospective homebuyers would need to find to make up the shortfall from the loan of £137,280 they could get.

It then calculated that if wannabe property owners put 10 per cent of their net salary away each month it would take a typical Londoner 121 years to buy that first home.

Even saving 20 per cent of take-home pay, it would still take 60 years to get the keys to an average priced flat.

The figures, provided by residential crowdfunding platform Property Partner based on information from the Land Registry and Office for National Statistics, fluctuate wildly across the capital and even just in south London.

In Wandsworth, for example, you’d need to keep working and putting 10 per cent of your earnings away for 273 years to reach the required £723,570 deposit.

Whereas at the other end of the scale in Bexley it would take just under 36 years to £94,311 – start now and you’d be there around this time in 2052.

Near the top end again, the time needed would be 130 years in Richmond and 100 years in Merton.

And lower down the order, it would be 52 years for both Croydon and Sutton.

This is how the figures for our various south London boroughs stack up:

The London borough where it would take the longest to save a deposit for an average price one-bedroom flat based on the numbers here is Kensington and Chelsea – 389 years.

Wandsworth Times:

The shortest time needed is 31 years in Barking and Dagenham – although if you were living rent-free and lucky enough to be able to save half your net annual income, it would take a more realistic six years.

Wandsworth Times:

Dan Gandesha, founder of Property Partner, said: "It's staggering that if you have no help from family or friends, and you hope to buy on your own, it's now almost impossible to afford anywhere in London.

"Even in the ten most affordable boroughs you'd need to be saving an ambitious 20 per cent of your net annual salary to stand a chance of getting the deposit together before you reached middle age.

"With record low interest rates and inflation rising, savers are seeing their money slowly erode."

Mr Gandesha added: "The housing market is broken and we need a major shift in thinking.

"The British obsession with owning their own home is now for many, at least in London, a pipe dream.

"More needs to be done to incentivise the private rental sector. In Germany, long-term renting is generally accepted and the cohort of long-term renters in the UK is growing, by force of circumstance.

"Build-to-rent is one of many ideas to help solve the UK's housing crisis, and the quicker we can provide good quality, professionally managed homes, for both the public and private lettings sector, the better."