Photo by Joerg Buschmann/Millennium Images

In my six years of living in London, I have lived in eight flats, with 17 different flatmates. Thanks to a combination of the generosity of property-owning friends, their property-owning parents, the pandemic and a definitely illegal sublet, I haven’t paid market rent since about 2020. In fact, my rent now – £615 – is a tenner less than it was when I first moved here; I’m like the renting Benjamin Button. But that’s all about to change.

My beautiful girlfriend and I have decided to move in together. Our future looks bright: our bank balances do not. I’ve never paid more than £750 rent. SpareRoom says the average room in London now goes for £985, and there are no tick-boxes to specify rich friends or a global pandemic. The most my preferred budget can get me on the open market, it turns out, is a shed in Ilford.

I look back fondly on my first forays into renting, the first being a flat in Tooting. While one room didn’t have an external window and the living room was a glorified cupboard, it did have a garden. But the landlord’s mother did once knock on our door asking when she could come round to pick the fruit from the tree in the garden. I suggested that an appropriate time would be in two weeks when our lease was up. She and her son argued that the fruit would be spoiled by then. I held firm. I was paying good money for that fruit. That was my fruit. I let it spoil.

I moved out of that flat in August 2020 and entered the anarchic rental market of the pandemic. I bounced from a sublet in New Cross for two months, then another two months in a warehouse in Stoke Newington with six others, then to Fulham for a month in a friend’s spare room, paying just half the price of the room because there was someone else’s furniture there. My last interaction with the invisible hand was in February 2021. I moved into a three-bed flat in Brixton, minutes from the station, where I paid £695 a month each.

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From there, I was given shelter from market prices altogether. A friend offered me the chance to move into his parents’ four story townhouse in Earls Court for £750. My next arrangement was with a landlord who asked cash for a room in Clapham North: she was proactive when the washing machine needed replacing, I didn’t ask about tax avoidance. From there I moved into a flat a friend owns in East London where I pay £600 a month in rent. We’ve been living ever since in a developmentally arrested bachelors’ bliss. He told me that he couldn’t ever imagine me moving out but I’ve let him down by deciding to move in with my girlfriend, partly due to love, partly so we don’t end up like Morecambe and Wise.

I’ve fallen on my sword. I’ve re-entered the free market, and I don’t like it. I feel like Ray Liotta glaring at the helicopters in *Goodfellas, *sweatily aware that the jig is up. And I’m sure that letting agents would argue that Stath Lets Flats, Jamie Demetriou’s Channel 4 sitcom about a Cypriot called Stath who lets flats, was unfair to them but having interacted with some for the first time in five years, I’m not sure it went far enough.

Well, what’s the point? What advice can I give to anyone staring down the barrel at £1,500 pcm for a cupboard with three strangers? I feel like the old Duke of Westminster giving business advice to budding entrepreneurs but instead of “Make sure one of your ancestors was a close friend of William the Conqueror” it’s “Make sure you made friends with people in university halls that will own property they can let you one day.” It’s just not practical. Writing this article is my last desperate act. I come cap in hand. I have posted Instagram stories begging my followers to let me know if they or anyone they know wants to offer their favourite former podcaster a sweet deal. All I got was the offer to move in with one of them. There’s definitely a sizeable portion of the New Statesman readership who despite their lefty ideals never sold their second property. I’d like to invite them to soothe their consciences by letting their one-two bed flat in Zone 2 East London to a Scottish professional couple with no pets or kids for reasonable rent. We’ve got plenty of references. 17 in fact.

[Further reading: The housing market has already crashed]

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