Being one of the most expensive places on earth in which to live, London has all kinds of different arrangements in which people live. Here is a rough guide.

Flats

There are lots of flats ('apartments' for the North Americans) in London.

Shared Accomodation

It is commonplace for people in their forties and fifties to share accomodation in London. It is quite common for people who haven't met before to share a room. It's very expensive here. It's just the way it is.

When I was an eighteen year old backpacker, I was kicked out of my Aunt's place in London following a very unfortunate incident involving the destruction of her washing machine.

I was taken in by some Aussie and Kiwi friends in Notting Hill (not quite so nice back then).

It was a two bedroom flat with thirty people staying in it.

Fifty quid a week got you two meals a day and a piece of foam on the floor right next to, as it turned out, a very cute Australian girl.

Good times. Gumtree is the place to look for such arrangements (and most other types of accomodation in London).

Two up / two down

If you're talking about houses (as opposed to flats) I'd say the majority of people in London live in this type of housing - it is literally all over the place. As the name suggests, this type of house has two rooms upstairs and two downstairs. They are usually terraced, meaning this house is joined on either side by other houses and makes up a long row. Such arrangements are usually the stuff of horror for the Americans. They're small, comfy, old and usually with a slice of garden at the back. Your little slice of heaven assuming that the neighbours aren't amphetamine fueled death-metal heads.

Council Estates

All of the London boroughs are legally required to provide a certain amount of affordable housing and these usually take the form of council estates ('social housing' in politically correct speak). The benefits of this policy are that the poor and less well paid of London are not consigned to a ghetto in the East. If you're of the cynical frame of mind that that's what the poor deserve then you can take comfort in the fact that at least you'll have a teacher / nurse / fireman when you need one as they haven't been forced to live in Wales.

Some council estates in London are really quite nice. Kind of like a mid-range hotel, they have a concierge, decent accomodation, well thought out areas where the kids can play and people can socialise, etc. On the other hand some council estates in London are literally third world. I say this from first hand experience. They are awful places full of rubbish, graffitti and pigeon poo where literally everything that can be destroyed or set on fire has been. They can be very dangerous places.

There are council estates all over London, including Westminster, Chelsea, Islington, etc. Don't get me wrong. I lived on a council estate myself for a few years and genuinely liked many of the people that I met there. By far the majority of the people that live on the estates are perfectly ordinary law-abiding citizens. But, and I think most Londoners would agree, it is your proximity to the council estates that will determine your exposure to petty (or not) crime and gangs of hooded youth taking inappropriate interest in your MP3 player.

I have moved some very posh people to some very rough estates and wondered if they really knew what they were getting themselves into. Having said that, if you've got reasonable street smarts and, crucially, know how to handle the kids without letting them provoke you, you'll find the people genuine, the rent relatively cheap and you'll gain lots of street credibility with your ability to score drugs and / or stolen goods at a moment's notice.

Boats

A surprising number of people live on boats in London. I met one guy who was paying £150 / month in rent by staying on his yacht in the Surrey Quays. (Unfortunately I was helping him pick up his 1300cc Hyabusa (motorbike. His pride and joy) after the local kids had stolen it and thrown it out the back of a moving van at the pursuing police... He was absolutely gutted. Ah, South London. You can dress her up but you just can't take her out.)

The bloke on the yacht was not technically allowed to live on the boat. There are very few marinas that allow this but, if you're not an idiot, most operate a 'don't ask / don't tell' policy towards a limited number of liveaboards for security reasons.

It's very easy to buy a yacht / Dutch barge / houseboat / longboat (long, narrow boat designed for Britain's extensive canal system). Unfortunately it's almost impossible to find somewhere where you're legally allowed to moor and live on them. The waiting lists are, apparently, years long.

There are houseboats on the Thames. I think it costs a small fortune to live on them. There are large numbers of longboats all over the country but, once again, limited places where you're allowed to stop them for more than a couple of days.

The areas more amenable to liveaboards seem to be in the Docklands.

Live / work studios

These are usually aimed artists although I suppose if you can do your work in a studio then you could also live in such an arrangement.

The idea, as the name suggests, is that you live in the same place that you work. They are often grouped together such as in Forest Hill, where the artists get together for exhibitions and so on.

I don't know why but artists seem to be automatically drawn to the rougher parts of town and in London this can be extremely rough. I moved quite a few artists from live/work studios in Hackney Wick which, for the most part, is a derelict industrial wasteland of broken glass and twisted metal decorated with oil. It is one of the rougher places I've ever seen and, personally, I would exercise extreme caution before moving here. But... If living in a derelict ex-warehouse with your fellow artisans is what gets the creative juices going then there seem to be quite a few of these places here...

Squats

The rules used to be that if someone was resident in your home (whether by your choice or not) then you had very limited rights to evict them and doing so required a long and drawn out court procedure (during which the squatters remained legally, rent-free, in your house). There were stories of squatters taking over multi-million pound houses with the owners powerless to stop them. I believe that squatting rights are a hangover from feudal days when the lord of the estate would evict whole families from their houses into destitution so that he had somewhere to keep his pigeons.

These days squatting is much more rare although there are still quite a few squatters around. If people are squatting it is usually with the tacit approval of the building owners. (They live in derelict / empty / soon to be demolished buildings with the idea that they provide some sort of security for the building and prevent real squatters from invading). There is even an organisation (click here) set up to place people in derelict buildings for which they pay (suprisingly high, to my mind) rent.

The Bishop's Avenue

There are detached houses in London and some can be seen on The Bishop's Avenue in Golder's Green, North London. This is Russian oligarch country and the houses come with obligatory electric gates, helicopter pads and more CCTV than MI5 (Russian oligarchs have a very bad survival rate in London due to the attentions of what used to be the KGB whose methods are as ingenious (poisoned umbrella tips, radioactive sushi) as they are lethal).

To an American these would be large but not unusual houses in a fairly average suburb. If you've lived in London for any length of time at all you will only be able to stare in wonder that anyone could possibly have enough money to afford such a place.

Comments (0)

Show/Hide comment form