On rent, flatmates, and the peculiar institution of sharing a kitchen well into your thirties

There is a particular London institution that the rest of the country does not fully understand, and it is the houseshare that refuses to end. Elsewhere, people share houses in their early twenties and then, at some reasonable point, move on to live alone or with a partner, like functioning adults. In London, the houseshare extends indefinitely, deep into one’s thirties and beyond, a permanent condition rather than a phase, and I, Lowri Griffiths, am writing this from the kitchen I share with four people I met through an advert.

The Economics of the Endless Share

The reason for the endless houseshare is, of course, the rent, which has reached a level that makes living alone in London a fantasy available only to the wealthy and the deluded. To rent even a modest flat by oneself in this city requires an income that most of the people actually doing the city’s work do not possess, and so we share, not because we are young and carefree but because the alternative is financially impossible. The houseshare is not a lifestyle choice. It is a survival strategy.

The figures on London rents are genuinely alarming, and outlets that track the housing market, alongside official data from the Office for National Statistics, document a situation in which the cost of housing has decoupled entirely from the incomes of ordinary Londoners. The result is that people who, by any historical standard, should long ago have achieved the independence of their own home, find themselves instead negotiating fridge space and bathroom schedules well into an age when their parents owned houses and had children and had, in general, sorted their lives out.

I have done the arithmetic on what living alone would cost, the way one might idly calculate the odds of winning the lottery, as a fantasy with no connection to reality. The number is absurd. It is more than I earn. It is, in fact, more than most people I know earn, which means that the houseshare is not the experience of the unlucky few but the near-universal condition of an entire generation of Londoners, all of us sharing kitchens, all of us waiting for an independence that the economics will not permit.

The Sociology of the Shared Kitchen

Living with strangers, or with people who began as strangers, produces a peculiar and intense form of human relationship found nowhere else. Your flatmates are not your friends, exactly, nor your family, nor your colleagues, but some fourth category for which there is no good word: people with whom you share the most intimate domestic spaces while often knowing almost nothing about their inner lives. You know how they load a dishwasher, which is to say you know their soul, while remaining entirely ignorant of their hopes and dreams.

The shared kitchen is the great theatre of the houseshare, the stage on which all the small dramas of cohabitation play out. The passive-aggressive notes. The mysterious disappearance of one’s clearly labeled food. The washing-up that accumulates according to laws of physics not yet understood by science. The negotiation, never explicit, always tense, over whose turn it is to buy washing-up liquid, a substance that vanishes constantly and that no one will admit to using. These are the conflicts that define the houseshare, petty and eternal.

And yet, against all odds, the houseshare also produces moments of genuine connection, the unexpected late-night kitchen conversation, the flatmate who notices you are having a hard week and quietly does your washing up, the strange intimacy of having witnessed one another at our least presentable, hungover and pyjama-clad and human. You did not choose these people, and you may never see them again once the lease ends, but for a while you shared a life, in the most literal sense, and that creates a bond that nothing else quite replicates.

The Adulthood That Waits

What the endless houseshare really represents, I have come to believe, is a postponement of adulthood imposed not by immaturity but by economics, a generation prevented from reaching the milestones that once marked the passage into full adult life. The own home, the settled existence, the independence, all of it deferred indefinitely by a housing market that has made these things unattainable for ordinary people. We are not refusing to grow up. We are being prevented from doing so, by the rent.

This produces a strange suspended quality to life in London, a sense of permanent provisionality, of waiting for a real life that is always just out of reach. You hesitate to acquire furniture, because you will only have to move it. You hesitate to put down roots, because the next rent increase may uproot you. You live, in a sense, in a permanent departure lounge, perpetually about to move on to the real thing, which never quite arrives, because the economics that would permit it never quite materialize.

And so we share, and we wait, and we make the best of it, finding in the houseshare what comforts it offers, the company, the shared cost, the occasional genuine friendship, while the independence we were promised recedes ever further into a future we are no longer sure will come. I write about this suspended life, and the city that produces it, over at my home on The London Prat, because it is the defining condition of my generation in this city, and it deserves to be documented, even if it cannot be solved.

If you too are sharing a kitchen at an age you did not expect to be sharing a kitchen, know that you are in vast company, and that the fault is not yours but the market’s. More from the front line of London’s housing reality appears at The London Prat, and the grim official statistics are there to confirm that none of us is imagining it.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/