Bargain basements
Sally Gimson
The most alarming aspect of living in London, for many people, is the extortionate cost of renting or buying somewhere to live. On the open market, it is difficult to rent a room anywhere for less than £70 a week, or to buy a modest family house for less than £350,000.
You are bound to wonder if there is some way round this inconvenience. You may even wonder whether it might be possible to change career and become, say, a vicar, the Dean of St Paul's, a housekeeper, an au pair girl or a teacher at a private school which gives its staff accommodation. Or you simply move to a charming but upand-coming area where prices are lower — but it soon becomes clear that most areas, including some which are not very charming, have already up and come. Those that haven't are priced by landlords and estate agents as if they have.
So how did my friend Charles live for free, and in luxury too, in a flat in Hyde Park Square? The answer was house-sitting. 'I lived in an Arabian sort of luxury,' he says smugly. 'Ridiculously thick carpets and silk curtains.' The only drawback was working out a rota with the men in the four other flats in the block so they didn't leave the property unprotected.
Charles got the flat through a firm called Ambika Security, run by Paul Cooke, who in 1988 started getting his friends to live in empty flats belonging to the Crown Estate in Regent's Park: They had a massive problem with squatters at that time,' Ambika now looks after properties not only for the Crown Estate but also for developers, local councils and housing associations all over London and parts of the South-east. The contracts vary from a month to several years, but the caretakers — who are mostly male and all work in teams — will usually be found another place if they want one. New Zealanders, Australians, South Africans and a few Brits live in these places, and you can only join Mr Cooke's list by personal recommendation. Once in you can stay for a while: 'There are guys who've been with us for seven or eight years, whether living in a palace or a knackered pub.'
It may be worse than a knackered pub. Mr Cooke described his contract with Camden council, which employed him to clear a block, Gray's Inn Buildings, that they wanted to redevelop. 'There were 140 flats and four crack dens. They were evicting people from the flats and putting up steel doors. Dealers pulled them down and made safe rooms with them. We put 50 Kiwis in these blocks. At the end of the contract we had freed up the whole thing.'
While living for free like this might let you save for a mortgage, or at least another stretch of backpacking, it does mean you have to be at home quite a lot of the time. The other sort of cheap accommodation available in London means hardly being at home at all. Fabricio Manica advertised the cheapest bed in Loot on 20 March. He is an Italian student working in pubs in London and was looking for a third guy to share a room in Lewisham, which he already shares with a friend. The rent is £43 a week. 'We never see each other,' he insists. 'We work, we study.' There are two other rooms in the house, with two girls in one and three boys in the other, including people from Brazil, France and the Czech Republic. There's a big kitchen, Sky TV and a cleaner who comes twice a week, 'It's very nice,' said Fabricio. I asked him what he does if he wants to take a girl back. He laughed. He makes an agreement with his room mates.
Living on a low rent can mean you get trapped in unsatisfactory circumstances. Fabricio will probably go back to Italy, but Sarah, who is 46, is stuck in a north London housing co-operative with her husband and their two children aged eight and 12. If they leave they will have to move to some distant suburb. Sarah has been in this house for more than 20 years, first squatting and then as part of an official co-op with a government grant. She and her husband pay £200 per week for four rooms. The house has a huge communal kitchen and garden. 'It would be wonderful if it wasn't for the fact that you have to share,' she said, rather despondently. 'But I can't move because I can't afford to live so centrally.' The waiting list for her co-op is closed.
The problem you keep coming across in London is the vast gulf between public housing, where many people pay about £100 or less a week for a three-bedroom flat (with the money sometimes coming from housing benefit), and the private sector, where it is hard to pay less than £350 a week for a family flat. So while it has become increasingly difficult to get a council flat, it has become equally hard to get out of one.
Options such as shared ownership schemes in London look expensive and unattractive. If you are single and earning £20,000 they may just be worth trying. You couldn't raise any mortgage on that level of earnings, but you might just manage a quarter of a mortgage on a £150,000 onebedroom flat. Yet with a subsidised rent for the other share and service charges you still wouldn't pay much less than £150 a week to have your own front door.
A family like Sarah's, looking to move out of cheap accommodation, is in an even worse situation. They would have to raise at least £100,000 to own just a quarter of a house in centralish London, plus they would have to pay rent on top for the other 75 per cent.
This is why the government is lending key workers larger and larger lump sums to buy their homes; John Prescott has just announced equity loans of £100,000 for some staff. Getting on a scheme like this must be an idea worth considering, especially as the definition of key worker now extends to town planners. Tim Seward, marketing manager of the housing association Circle 33, advises putting your name down on the council house waiting list and on the databases of all the housing associations in your area, whether you are a key worker or not.
All this may sound painfully unromantic, and even humiliating, to readers of this magazine. Why not live on a houseboat instead? There is a romantic London belief that living on a boat is cheaper than living in a flat. Like so many other things, it is an urban myth. Robin Jenkins, a 30year-old architect, lives on a one-bedroom narrowboat on the canal at King's Cross. He bought the boat two years ago for 140,000 but has to pay £415 a month for moorings (they cost between £80,000 and £150,000 to buy), which makes his boat at least as expensive as a one-bedroom flat in the area.
Most people, he says, live on the canal because they are strange and eccentric and like the way of life. He finds working from home quite difficult: 'When I bought it I worked in an office but now I've gone freelance, and a narrowboat is not the ideal place if you are using large prints.'
I believe Guatemala is still quite cheap.
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