Lowri Griffiths Has Looked at 14 Flats in Four Weeks and Has Opinions About the Phrase ‘Chain Free’ That She Would Like to Share

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

By Lowri Griffiths | The London Prat

I have been looking for a new flat for four weeks. I have viewed fourteen properties. I want to share what I have learned, not because it is useful — it is not useful — but because processing experience through journalism is how I cope with things that are not useful, and the Zone 2 London property market in May 2026 is definitively not useful.

Things That Flats in Zone 2 Say in Their Rightmove Listings vs What They Mean

“Chain free” means the vendor has already moved out for reasons that you will discover during the survey. “Characterful” means the walls are listed. “Bright throughout” means there is a skylight in the bathroom which also counts as the kitchen. “Period features” means the windows are single glazed and the radiators are decorative. “Close to excellent transport links” means you can hear the Overground from the bedroom if the bedroom window is closed, and definitely if it is open. “Sought-after location” means the asking price is forty thousand pounds above what comparable properties have sold for in the same street in the past eighteen months, and the agent knows this, and has decided that someone will pay it, and may be right.

The Viewing Experience

I have been shown fourteen properties by seven different estate agents, of whom three were helpful, two were not there when I arrived, one spent the entire viewing on their phone, and one was so relentlessly positive about a flat that had mould in the bedroom that I began to wonder whether they had a financial relationship with the mould. The helpful ones were very helpful. One of them told me, unprompted, that the asking price was about twelve percent higher than market and that I should offer at market if I wanted the flat. I did not get the flat. Someone offered above asking. They were probably paying a year’s rent in advance, in cash.

What I Have Learned

The Zone 2 property market is a machine that converts the savings and anxieties of a generation of people who would like to live somewhere stable into revenue for landlords, estate agents, and the occasional surveyor who charges four hundred pounds to tell you that the boiler is old. I say this without particular anger, because anger implies surprise, and I am not surprised. This is what Bohiney Magazine’s housing coverage has been documenting for years: the housing market does what housing markets do when supply is constrained and money is cheap, which is to say it does whatever the people with the most money want it to do. The people with the most money want it to appreciate. It appreciates. I keep looking. The fifteenth flat will surely be the one. The London Prat has been tracking this crisis since before I needed to live in it personally.

More laughs at The Daily Mash and NewsThump.

What This All Adds Up To

North London in 2026 is a city within a city within a crisis, and living in it requires a specific combination of resilience, dark humour, and the ability to find joy in things that are technically fine — an on-time train, a good sandwich, a flat viewing that went moderately well. I have lived here long enough to know that the standard of “fine” adjusts continuously downward in response to baseline conditions, and that the joy is genuine despite being calibrated to a low benchmark. The rental market is breaking people’s financial plans. The buses are philosophical. The coffee is excellent and expensive and I will continue to drink it with the slight guilt of someone who has thought carefully about their principles and then ordered the oat milk flat white anyway. More from North London next week, assuming I survive the commute. More from across London at Bohiney Magazine. More irreverence, always, at The London Prat.

Personal Note

These observations are, of course, entirely personal, entirely North London in their register, and entirely the product of a person who has lived here long enough to know that the complaining is a form of love. You don’t complain about places you don’t care about. You don’t notice the coffee being both excellent and too expensive unless you are buying it regularly, which means you have chosen to live in the place where it costs this much, and that choice is a statement about values whether you frame it that way or not. I love North London in the way that you love things that are imperfect and expensive and occasionally very beautiful, and I am grateful for the platform at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat that lets me write about it every week. The next piece will be about the Overground. It will run late. The piece, not the train. Actually, possibly both. And I will return to it next week with fresh material and slightly lower expectations for public transport, which is the correct preparation for covering a city that is always both better and worse than you left it. Thank you, as always, for reading. More at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, where the coverage is comprehensive, the satire is affectionate, and the coffee metaphors are probably excessive but I am not stopping.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/flat-hunting-zone-2-london-lowri-griffiths/