Let’s start with the fact I am rich. Not mega rich. Not London rich, where at least someone reading this paper will have had it delivered by their butler to bed. But richer (marginally) than the average Londoner, who earns £49,000. Rich enough to be able to rent a flat, which is richer than the poor sods in their early twenties — 63 per cent — still living with their mum and dad. I am a professional (apparently).
And so, I gave myself a not unreasonable (I thought) budget of £2,000 a month for a London flat. Note, the average monthly mortgage payment is £1,500. And I plan to fund my return to London by renting out the five-bedroom Somerset cottage I bought during Covid (because after four years I’m bored with the countryside and want to come back). Turning to the Tinder of rentals, Rightmove, I began swiping. If you live in London, you already know the punchline to this joke: I was living in fantasy land.
I see flats with living situations so preposterous they stretch the definition of ‘bedroom’, ‘kitchen’ and ‘flat’
For £2,000 a month, Rightmove spews out a shocking array of unliveable hovels so unbelievably rank they make you want to call up Andy Burnham and beg him to relocate, not just Parliament, but all of us to Manchester. (Where £2,000 could probably get you a five-bedroom house).
In London for the same money, the options are dire. I’m presented with a line-up of kitchens with beds masquerading as “studio flats”. Are the estate agents who write these property particulars, describing them as a “superb studio”, on crack?
I see flats with living situations so preposterous they stretch the very definition of the words “bedroom”, “kitchen” and “flat”. There is one with a single bed lying parallel to kitchen counters, with a freezer at the end. I am lazy, but not so lazy that I want to make my breakfast literally in bed.
The rise of the bed-chin
Imagine the horrifying practicality of living in one of these absurd kitchen-bedrooms: watching grease from the stove top spurt onto your pillowcases as you cook; lying under your duvet suffocated by the smells of the curry you whipped up earlier that night. In this heat consuming anything besides cereal would be intolerable.
What happens if you get mice? Leaving aside these absurd bed-chins (a portmanteau it’s amazing no estate agent has adopted yet) there are other spectacles to behold: bedrooms with loos, kitchens with showers — at this point we should ditch all classic room definitions entirely and just designate everything as “space”. I see “mezzanine apartments” with beds buffering the ceiling like sleeping in a sarcophagus. (You’d never have sex on top).
There is a studio for £1,600 with a flip-down bed so by day you must fold yourself away like you don’t exist. There is a “self-contained studio” more like a prison cell, complete with window bars and a sad metal sink. Who lives in homes like this? (Home is an absurd word). Presumably minimalist depressives with frantic social lives and only a toothbrush to pack. Classic euphemisms like pied à terre no longer cut it when you’re dealing with spaces like this.
It’s true that many of the places I’m looking at are in Zones 1 and 2, but is it crazy to want to live near central London? My dad lived in Soho — it was normal once. Now perhaps I have to venture to Zone 5 to find somewhere liveable?
None of this is new news to anyone already struggling in London, where average rents are rising by almost five per cent a year in some boroughs. And, according to ONS figures, tenants spend 42 per cent of their income on rent.
Caught out by fraudsters
A tragic report by Generation Rent revealed Londoners spent five months of their salary paying for somewhere to live, so by the time it gets to June 2 every penny of their earnings has gone to their landlord.
The Renters’ Reform bill, which came into force on May 1, so full of “hope” has only exacerbated the situation. Small landlords have panicked, rushing to leave the market in case stringent new rules land them with squatters. As a result even fewer flats are available on the market. I see hovels I hate and when I call the agent — the day they hit Rightmove — they have already gone. Desperate to secure accommodation, some poor tenants have been caught out by fraudsters — told they must pay holding deposits to stop someone else getting the place, which they pay only to have dodgy companies steal their cash.
This is the part where I start to reminisce about how my first London flat cost barely 50p a week. Not quite, but I did rent rooms for hundreds and a flat for £1,000. That felt bad enough! At one point I lived in a squat with about eight other people — you could never really be sure who was actually living there and who was just sleeping a party off.
Where are those shit-holes now for people who want to pretend to be “artists”? Now if you earn £50,000 after tax then spending £2,000 a month means coughing up half your salary on rent. You can sit in your bed-chin crying.
Sadiq Khan promised rent-controlled homes for key workers capped at 40 per cent of their salaries — what about the rest of us?
Katie Glass is a freelance writer
