Haringey, Islington, and Camden Average Rents Exceed What Several Friends Earn Monthly

By Lowri Griffiths | The London Prat

I looked at the Rightmove data for North London this week, which is something I do occasionally when I want to feel the specific combination of rage and helplessness that only property listings can produce, and found that the average asking rent for a one-bedroom flat in Haringey has increased by another 8 percent over the past year, bringing it to a figure that I will not state specifically because the last time I wrote about London rents someone emailed me to say I was encouraging landlords by publicizing their prices, which is the kind of logic that happens when a housing crisis has been running long enough to make everyone slightly unhinged.

The Numbers

The average one-bedroom asking rent in Haringey is now approximately £1,850 per month. In Islington it is approximately £2,200. In Camden it is approximately £2,400. These numbers are not the expensive end of the market, which runs considerably higher. These are the average asking prices for ordinary flats occupied by ordinary people trying to live in London, which is increasingly something that requires either a very good income, a very generous family, or a very lucky council housing allocation.

I know people who earn £2,200 per month before tax. Asking them to pay £2,200 per month in rent is not a housing market. It is a mathematical impossibility with a Rightmove listing. The fact that flats continue to be let at these prices means that either there are people who can afford them, which is true, or people who cannot afford them are sharing them with more people than the flat is designed for, which is also true, or people are moving further from London and commuting for increasing amounts of their day, which is also true. All three are true simultaneously, which is how London’s housing market works.

What Actually Helps

The policy responses available to a city government in London are limited by the fact that planning and property taxation are largely national policy matters, and the national government has been promising meaningful housing reform for roughly forty years while delivering incremental improvements that do not touch the structural causes of the crisis. Build more housing, yes, obviously. The planning system is being reformed again. This has been happening continuously since the 1980s and London is still short of approximately 90,000 homes per year relative to household formation rate.

What I actually want is rent control, which economists tell me will reduce supply, and more social housing, which politicians tell me is unaffordable, and a land value tax, which nobody tells me anything about because nobody wants to discuss it. In the meantime, the average one-bedroom asking rent in Haringey is £1,850 per month and my friend Maria is looking for a flatmate even though she lives alone and has lived alone for six years and is forty-one years old, because she cannot afford not to.

For London housing news and tenant resources, see Evening Standard. For North London community coverage, visit MyLondon. For London property and rental market data, see CityAM.

Lowri Griffiths writes from North London with the directness of someone who has watched the city change around her and formed views about whether the changes are improvements. London in 2026 remains simultaneously extraordinary and exhausting, beautiful and unaffordable, among the world’s great cities and among its most difficult to live in without inherited wealth or an income in the top decile. She covers it because it is where she lives and because the story it tells about urban life, economic inequality, culture, and community in the twenty-first century is worth telling with honesty and occasional outrage. She does not claim to be neutral. She claims to be accurate, which is harder and more useful.

I started writing about North London because I lived here and nobody was writing about it the way I wanted to read about it: honestly, with affection and criticism in equal measure, without the twee village-in-the-city framing that lifestyle journalism uses and without the class anxiety that serious journalism uses when it notices that people are paying extortionate rents to live somewhere that has a good bus service and a Waitrose. North London is a place where people actually live, and living somewhere is more complicated than either of those framings captures. I write the complication. Lowri Griffiths, bigsmokebrokecom.

The North London I cover is not the North London of property supplements, which features period features and excellent school catchment areas and the phrase ‘up and coming’ applied to every street within cycling distance of a farmers market. It is the North London of the 141 bus, the Haringey housing waiting list, the Turkish social clubs on Green Lanes, the Hackney planning meetings, the Tottenham High Road, and the Overground trains that are reliable enough to build a commute around. It is a place, not a postcode lifestyle category, and I am stubborn about covering it as a place.

What London journalism owes its readers is the same thing all journalism owes its readers: accuracy about what is actually happening, context for why it is happening, and the honesty to say when something is going wrong rather than finding the positive angle that makes the story easier to read and less useful. North London is going through changes that are making it both better in some ways and less affordable, less accessible, and less diverse in others, and both things are happening simultaneously and deserve simultaneous coverage. I am trying to provide that coverage, one piece at a time, from the perspective of someone who lives here, pays rent here, takes the bus here, and wants the place to be better than it is.