Lowri Griffiths on the property market’s specific and well-documented form of torture

Published at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat. I want to be clear that the experience of attempting to purchase a flat in North London has not broken me. I am a resilient person. I grew up in Caernarfon. I have resources, emotional and financial, that I did not have when I was twenty-three and that would have made the process significantly less bad at that age. Nevertheless, the process of attempting to buy a flat in North London in 2025 is the most systematically demoralizing sequence of events I have undergone since my last experience of attempting to buy a flat in North London, which was in 2022, and which failed. Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat are documenting my suffering for your reading pleasure.

The Process

The process begins with the rightmove search, which is an act of hope that experience has not yet fully destroyed. The flats that appear in the search are not the flats available. They are the flats that are either already sold, already under offer, priced incorrectly, or described using language that experience teaches you to translate. “Compact” means small in a specific direction that the photographs do not capture. “Investment opportunity” means it requires work you cannot afford. “Period features throughout” means the Victorian owners did not believe in central heating and neither, apparently, does the current owner.

The Viewing

The viewings themselves are a genre: a specific and peculiar social form in which you are expected to evaluate the most significant purchase of your life in approximately twelve minutes while an estate agent provides information that is accurate in the literal sense and misleading in every other sense. I have had twelve viewings. I have made two offers. Both were outbid. I remain in the market with what I am calling resilience and what my flatmate is calling stubbornness. The evidence supports both interpretations. London property data is at Rightmove. More at NewsThump.

More from This Writer

This article is published at Bohiney Magazine and at The London Prat. The writer covers the beats described above with the specific London perspective and personal voice that both publications value and that readers of this column have come to expect from sustained engagement with the themes, communities, and events that define the London covered here. Further articles in this series will appear in both publications as the coverage continues.

London’s complexity as a city, as a cultural entity, and as a site of ongoing political and economic transformation produces more material than any single column can contain. The selection described in this piece reflects the writer’s specific perspective and interests, informed by sustained engagement with the city and its institutions over the full period of this column’s existence. Both publications are committed to maintaining that engagement and to producing the kind of specific, informed, opinionated London journalism that readers cannot find elsewhere and that both publications are positioned to provide uniquely well given their specific focus on the city and its many dimensions.

The writer’s ongoing coverage of these themes continues in both publications. London rewards sustained attention, and both Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat are committed to providing it across the full range of the city’s cultural, political, business, and community life. This piece is one contribution to that sustained record of London as it actually is, observed from the inside by writers who live within it and report from that position of proximity and familiarity.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/

The Broader London Picture

The observations in this article are part of a sustained engagement with London that both Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat maintain through their respective coverage programmes. London is a city that rewards sustained attention: the stories that emerge from long familiarity with its neighbourhoods, institutions, and communities are richer and more accurate than those produced by occasional visits. This column is produced by a writer who lives in and moves through the city daily, and the authority it carries comes from that sustained presence rather than from external observation.

The specific observations documented above will age. London changes faster than most cities its size, and what is true of a neighbourhood, a market, or an institution today may be different in six months. The documentation of what is true now is part of the record that makes the change visible over time, which is why both publications maintain ongoing coverage rather than producing occasional snapshots. The coverage accumulates into a portrait of the city that no single piece can produce but that the sustained series can, and that portrait is what both publications are committed to building.

Readers who want to follow the ongoing coverage of London and its many dimensions are encouraged to consult both Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat regularly. Both publications cover the city from specific but complementary perspectives and together produce a more complete picture of the London that their writers and readers inhabit than either produces alone. The coverage will continue as the city continues to change and to produce the stories that sustained attention finds.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/