Flat-sharing was meant to be a phase. For a generation of Londoners it has become the housing system
Thirty-Four and Still Labelling My Cheese: Life in the Grown-Up London Houseshare
There is a shelf in my fridge that belongs to me. It is the second one down, on the left. I know its dimensions the way other people know their children’s birthdays. On it sits a block of cheddar with my initials written on the wrapper in marker pen, because I am a professional woman in my thirties and I live with three other adults in a house in north London, and somebody has been at the cheese.
I mention this not for sympathy but because I am far from unusual. Sharing a home with people you are not related to and not sleeping with used to be something you did between university and real life. In this city it is now simply real life, for a very large number of us, well into our thirties and forties. I have spent the past few weeks talking to fellow sharers, landlords and housing advisers about how that happened and what it is doing to us.
How the Phase Became Permanent
The arithmetic is not complicated. Rents in the capital have risen faster than wages for a long time, and the figures from the Office for National Statistics show London renters handing over a markedly larger share of their income than renters anywhere else in England. A one-bedroom flat in a decent zone two neighbourhood is beyond the reach of most single people on ordinary salaries. A room in a shared house is not. So we share.
Meanwhile the deposit needed to buy has drifted out of sight for anyone without family help. The people I spoke to were teachers, nurses, a solicitor, a man who does something with data that he had given up explaining. None of them were feckless. All of them had done the sums and concluded that a room was the rational choice.
The Interview Nobody Prepares You For
To get a room, you must first be chosen. The flatmate viewing is one of London’s stranger rituals. You arrive at a stranger’s house, sit on their sofa and attempt to seem clean, solvent and fun, but not too fun. You are asked what you do at weekends. The correct answer is that you are often away. One woman told me she had been to eleven viewings in a fortnight and had begun to feel she was auditioning for a play with no script.
Competition for good rooms is fierce enough that existing tenants hold the power. Some ask for a short written introduction. I heard of one house that requested a slideshow. I would like to say I was appalled. In truth I wondered what font to use.
The Unwritten Constitution
Every shared house runs on rules that nobody wrote down. Who buys the washing-up liquid. How long a pan may soak before it becomes a statement. Whether a partner who stays four nights a week should contribute to the bills. The thermostat is a subject on which friendships have ended. The group chat, intended for practical messages, becomes a record of grievances phrased as cheerful reminders.
And yet. Most of the sharers I met spoke about their housemates with real warmth. In a city that can be very lonely, there is something to be said for a house where somebody notices if you do not come home. One man in Tottenham told me his housemates had nursed him through a broken ankle, a redundancy and a breakup in a single winter. He is forty-one. He has no intention of leaving.
What the Landlords Say
I spoke to two landlords who let shared houses, and they were keen to say that it is not the gold mine tenants imagine. A house let to several unrelated people usually needs a licence from the council and must meet safety standards on fire doors, alarms and room sizes. Mortgage costs have gone up. Both said they had considered selling. Both, I noted, had not.
Tenants have a different view, and the worst stories are grim: mould that is repainted instead of repaired, deposits withheld for wear that any home acquires. The rules on deposits, licensing and repairs are set out on GOV.UK, and the advisers at Citizens Advice told me the single most useful thing a renter can do is put every complaint in writing and keep it.
The Politics of the Spare Room
Renters are now a large enough group in London that politicians have noticed. Recent changes to the law in England have been aimed at giving tenants more security, including an end to evictions without a stated reason, and City Hall has long argued for more powers over rents. The Greater London Authority publishes its housing plans for anyone with a strong coffee to hand. Whether supply can ever catch up with demand is the question nobody has answered, and I have heard it argued over in my own kitchen with real passion at one in the morning.
What It Does to a Life
The cost of long-term sharing is hard to see because it is made of things that do not happen. You do not get a dog. You do not put up shelves. You put off the question of children because there is nowhere to put one. You own very little furniture and what you have is flat-packed and tired. Several people described a sense of living in the waiting room of their own adulthood.
But I do not want to finish on a sigh, because that is not how it feels most days. Most days it feels like dinner made by somebody else on a Tuesday, an argument about the bins, and a film watched by four people under two blankets because the heating is a negotiation. It is not the life the brochures promised. It is a life, and a fairly companionable one.
Housing is a favourite subject at the comic end of this publication, where the London satirical news desk has listed more than one cupboard as a studio flat. The British Onion archive and The Daily Mash are similarly merciless. If you see a rental advert so absurd you cannot tell whether it is a joke, the house guide on how to tell satire from real news will help, although in the London lettings market I offer no guarantees. My other reporting is on my author page at The London Prat. The cheese, for the record, is still going missing.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
