Rats in the kitchen and beds in the living room: Why London's Generation Rent has had enough

As a report finds we’ll be tenants for longer than ever, Phoebe Luckhurst says London's unwilling renters are having a breakdown.
London: Rental breakdown (Picture: Paul Dallimore)
Paul Dallimore

What would you consider a plumbing emergency? For example, does spending three weeks showering at the gym because your flat doesn’t produce hot water count? What about if the kitchen sink fills with foul-smelling sludge when the dishwasher is on? Bath backs up regularly? Or perhaps when your loo handle breaks and no longer flushes?

I am a stoic and loathe to cry “emergency” when something might be better termed an “inconvenience” or “amusing anecdote”. But a few weekends ago, when our toilet broke on a Saturday morning, I reckoned it counted. I didn’t want to spend the next two days flatsharing with a pooling U-bend of human waste, so emailed the landlord asking him to dispatch a weekend plumber. He replied to say it didn’t constitute an “emergency”, as you could flush it “with a bucket”. The plumber came on Monday.

This is the passive-aggressive tone familiar to many trapped in London’s rental market. Often it feels like the territory being fought over is not the property but the tenants’ sanity; landlords have you at their mercy because if you won’t tolerate it, they’ll easily find someone else who will.

Like an increasing number of Londoners — and pretty much everyone I know — I’m an unwilling member of Generation Rent. A report published by accountancy firm PwC this week states that by 2025 more than half of people under 40 will be living in property owned by private landlords. House prices are predicted to rise by five per cent a year; the number of new homeowners will fall over the next decade as the high cost of raising a deposit makes buying a home impossible. Help to Buy doesn’t help that much when there is a shortage of affordable homes on which to use it.

Cosy: this tiny flat in Princes Gate, Kensington is currently on the market for £295,000 (Picture: Rightmove)
Rightmove

According to figures released by the House of Commons in May, rent consumes more than half of pre-tax income in 13 of London’s 32 boroughs. The average rent is £300 a week, which is 49 per cent of the average weekly wage of £617.80. Private rental also incurs admin charges: exorbitant “reference checks”, deposits that swill from property to property (so you never get it back, really), or are gobbled by landlords for “scratches” or “stains” you know weren’t yours.

What else? No one has any storage and we move every year because rent goes up, or flatmates move in with other halves to cut costs. Many “hutch up”: squeezing flatmates into every corner; my bedroom is the “living room” of ours. One friend says she’s heard of London renters “hotbedding” — sharing a bed, platonically, to save on rent. Nights spend at boyfriends’ flats are planned strategically.

If you overlook the relentless misery it’s almost funny. Now that the dust has settled and I’ve stopped crying tears of rage, I reminisce almost fondly about the afternoon my landlord yelled at me in my bedroom because it was definitely my fault Virgin couldn’t install the internet in our flat.

Plumbing is a persistent issue that frequently calls for extreme measures. An east London writer had to “charge his shower into life” every time he wanted to use it — dangling the head upside down for a while until it felt like dispensing water. Another thirtysomething is just “recovering” after three months without hot water.

“At one point we had two showers in the house,” says a north London-based consultant. “One stopped working and we requested it be fixed. After two months without it, the other shower broke too. The only way we got it sorted was by cancelling our standing orders and not paying the rent.”

One 25-year-old producer thought renting from a family friend would preclude the miseries of the average punter’s experience. When he moved in, “there was always an issue with condensation and damp air. After about six months I peeked behind the couch to see that half of the wall had turned green and blue with mould. The landlord blamed me, saying I wasn’t opening the windows regularly.”

It got worse. “The walls in the flat started bubbling, cracking and peeling off, the window sills started to rot. I told my landlord I would start paying her 50 per cent rent until she sorted the problem out, so then she threatened to kick me out because I was holding her to ransom. Eventually we came to an agreement and I left a few weeks later — turns out the hot-water tank in the flat had a hole and was leaking slowly around the house.”

Renting options - in pictures

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Mould was the least of one 25-year-old writer’s problems. During his first year in London he rented a two-bed “dingy little dump in Clapham South” with his girlfriend and another housemate. “When we signed the lease we hadn’t been warned that our neighbour beneath us was mad. She’d rant and rave in the middle of the night, screaming, slamming doors, making horrible noises. We rang up the landlord and he said, offhandedly, ‘She’s never been physically violent towards anyone — yet. But she’s very verbally abusive, so just don’t interact with her’.”

They felt sorry for her — no one ever visited — but were disturbed by the noise. They bought earplugs, “though we didn’t get used to it”. Then, during the hot summer of 2013, the whole flat started to smell “really nasty”. “We poured stuff down the sink, took out the rubbish, but the weird, dank smell didn’t go away.” One night they all collided in the living room at witching hour and had the same horrible thought. The next day, the police broke into the flat to remove her dead, bloated body.

“When we moved in to our flat there was a hole in our kitchen stuffed with plastic bags as a genuine solution,” says a 23-year-old trainee doctor who lives in Archway. “Then we had rats for two months. We kept telling the landlord and they did nothing. Eventually, two people came round and filled in the holes all over the kitchen with filler, which the rats chewed through in an afternoon. Though they did leave for a while when being inside the house was colder than being outside — as the boiler is about 20 years old we couldn’t afford to turn on the heating.”

One 27-year-old former publishing assistant “found rat droppings everywhere. I was told it was ‘probably a friendly squirrel’.”

Then there are the quibbles over money, which can start before you’ve even moved in. A brand consultant in his mid-20s tussled with a dishonest agent over a flat in Wimbledon. As she was transferring the deposit she was told that rent would be £50 a month more than agreed (“I offered an additional £50 on your behalf, so that’s been accepted”). Outrage was met with: “We are where we are, what’s

£50 in this property market? You should count yourself lucky.” Make yourself at home: the rats are very accommodating.

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One of the many treats of the rental market is moving every year — invariably to somewhere smaller and further away that costs even more...

Dalston to Hackney Wick

Dalston’s graphic designers started making real dollar and nudged you further along the Orange line.

Stokey to Clapton

Stokey’s superparents might look like they’re made of hemp and dreams, but they’re actually shrewd operators and they’ve ramped your rent right up. Clapton’s got the same residential vibes (although it is even worse connected).

Brixton to West Norwood

Remember when Brixton was a bit dodgy and you could get huge Victorian townhouses for pennies? Forget that now, get on the 432 and start househunting.

Kilburn to Willesden Green

West London wealth keeps creeping along the Jubilee line. At least you can predict where it’ll go next.

Peckham to Deptford

Peckham was packed full of students and art school squatters — until it was full of well-heeled graduates who had (marginally) more cash to splash. DLR to Deptford it is then.

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