For the first time practically ever, I do not have a landlord. I’m technically still living in someone else’s house, but it’s my life partner’s and they own it. The chunk of cash I haemorrhaged into someone else’s mortgage payments is now going towards a deposit for a property that will one day have my name on the deed. My stuff occupies every room of the property, not just the bedroom and a shelf in the fridge.
Renting in London is like running an ultra marathon through a swamp where you get charged an increasing fee every for every mile you run. Everyone has horror stories, but in honour of spooky season (best costumes: read here) and my newfound freedom, allow me to share my lowlights from a decade in the tenancy trenches. Ironically, for large chunks of this time I was a property journalist, reporting on the very system by day that kept me up at night with worry. While welcome, the Renters’ Rights Bill came far too late for me and countless other tenants.
Like unhappy families, every landlord-based situation is terrible in its own ways. There was the owner of an ex-council flat in south London who liked to remind us this property was his sole pension every time we alerted him to problems. For a retirement fund, he didn’t seem to care all that much that the place was falling apart around our ears. When we moved in, we discovered the washing machine had been erroneously plumbed into the sink, and had sat for over a month gathering fetid water that exploded into the kitchen upon opening.
When the flat-roofed building’s downpipe furred up so badly that our shower would backfill and flood into the room below during heavy rain, I was the one who chivvied the council into essential maintenance work. The landlord sent round his “handyman” who “sorted” the water damage by taping pieces of art supply shop foamboard to the ceiling with sticky tape he purloined from my desk.
Next, pigeons infested our balcony in aborted attempts to nest. Did you know that pigeons are continuous, rather than seasonal, breeders? To thwart the avian plague, I bought netting with my own money and asked the landlord if it could be fixed to the walls. The handyman was dispatched, and tacked it to the top and bottom of the railings. Pigeons are smart enough to sneak round the sides but dumb enough to get stuck there. Every morning I would have to shoo them out of the accidental aviary that had been created with a mop handle before I left for work.
That tenancy was particularly egregious because the letting agents were a) useless and b) scammers. They charged us more per month than we initially agreed because we’d initially viewed another, more expensive flat and they sneakily transferred the offer over when they gave it to a higher bidder.
When we finally got out of there, they withheld our deposit despite confirmation in writing from the landlord that he was very happy and we could have our money back. Eventually they blocked my number, so I took to calling from different phones in my office to collar them. They coughed up eventually, when we threatened small claims court. It’s a point of personal pride that I have never lost a penny from a deposit, but I’ve paid through the nose in time and sanity.
Another cursed letting agent in east London threatened to evict us during the height of the pandemic over a spurious noise complaint. Again, it was an ex-council flat given the landlord special, with hard tiled floors and no living room — every room bar the kitchen was occupied by a tenant.
During a lockdown, a couple bought the flat downstairs and became incensed by the sound of us walking between each other's rooms or watching TV with a window cracked. I appreciate everyone went a bit mad during those months we could only leave for a solitary 30 minute walk a day. But there’s a special place in hell for people who attempt to make others homeless during a global crisis, and the letting agents that prioritise property owners over their paying customers.
Renting directly from the landlord never solved the problem, though. My best one was gently negligent, simply asking us to transfer the rent money via his local electronics shop each month, leaving us to fill the rooms with a rotating cast of characters.
It was essentially a frat house; I won the room in a Spareroom battle by tracking my future housemates to a local pub and downing a pint to win their approval. I was the only one with vaguely traditional hours and it was always somebody’s weekend, so the endless party in the living room only stopped when enough people passed out on the sofas we had dragged in from the street.
I once won a room in a Spareroom battle by tracking my future housemates to a local pub and downing a pint to win their approval
For 18 months, it was a blast. But I finally decided I had had enough when my housemate decided the solution to no-one lasting more than a couple of months (because he liked being able to hog the freezer with his egg white cartons, and fill the back garden with his motorbikes. He also regularly set fire to his Friday ‘cheat meal’ in the oven) was by renting out the other rooms on AirBnb.
Then there was my first London flat I rented from a university friend’s father, one of many in a family portfolio, while the (ex) friend lived there for free and developed an online shopping habit. It was pricey even for mates rates. I had to ask permission to use the shower, was allowed only one overnight guest a week, and couldn’t use the kitchen between the hours of 10pm to 10am.
Things came to a head when I utilised the communal washing rack without two days notice, so I gave my notice. That winter I spent Christmas overstaying my welcome with my family and sleeping on a schoolfriend’s sofa in west London. They were very kind, even though the stress exacerbated my sleepwalking habit.
My last true landlord was very upset when we didn’t renew our tenancy. Getting our deposit back required sitting through an hour-long lecture on the stress they suffered as an ‘accidental’ landlord of multiple properties. They didn’t think they could ever get tenants as good as us again. But I’m not sure what they expected when they’d decided to raise the rent by £1,000 a month out of nowhere, for yet another ex-council flat, where the jury-rigged showerhead faced perpendicular to the bathtub.
I have never paid so much to be treated so shoddily, as when renting in London
Exhausted and out of options, I was thrown a lifeline by very dear friends who had a spare room and, bizarrely, were lonely homeowners looking for a reliable lodger. For £500 a month all in — the cheapest rent I’d ever paid — I had a room in a family home with a dog and a garden. I’d have probably stayed forever, but they want to start a family and I have to grow up.
I am under no illusion that bad landlords and substandard housing is unique to London. My childhood landlord was the Ministry of Defence, and army quarters had their fair share of yellowing chipboard wallpaper and those weird rubbery tubes you jam onto taps to create a makeshift shower. One of my worst landlords was an absentee one who owned the student house I shared in York, whose useless letting agents tried to claim that the reason the house was so mouldy a mushroom grew in the downstairs loo, was because we had furniture near exterior walls.
But I have never paid so much to be treated so shoddily. My budget was small — I topped out at £750 plus bills at my penultimate rental — and my standards low. Still I was shoved from pillar to post, moving house 10 times in a decade, sharing space with scores of strangers, never able to relax before the next move.
As a property journalist, I knew my rights. Still, I was shafted regularly. London’s rental crisis is only getting worse — monthly rents on new lets in the capital are £2,332 on average. If I hadn’t become a lodger, I would have had to leave the city I’ve called home for longer than anywhere else.
To me, the solutions seem obvious, if radical. The private rental system is a failed project. The mayor should be given the authority to introduce a city-wide rent freeze. We must return to our social democratic principles for housing. Councils should have their post-war, pre-Thatcher powers to build social housing at scale, with genuinely affordable rent profits ploughed back into building more homes and maintaining buildings and facilities.
Unless that happens, and soon, London will wither away as its families and young people are pushed out. Already our schools are closing, while homelessness is pushing our councils to bankruptcy as they overspend by hundreds of millions of pounds. My landlord hell stories are amusing now that I can look back on them from a privileged position of safety. But all over our city, people are spending vast sums to live in crappy rooms under constant fear of eviction or a rent raise. I hope that one day my landlord stories will just be spooky tales from history rather than a living nightmare.
