This article is taken from the April 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
It’s early evening, and I am saying goodbye to my friends at a restaurant in Vauxhall. While they finish dinner without me, I will be on my way to view a flatshare on the other side of town — approximately my tenth such appointment in the last month.
The room in question is technically not a bedroom but part of the living room, which the two young women currently in residence have blocked off so that a third can help pay the rent. This means it isn’t fully private: conversation will easily be heard in what remains of the shared living area, over the top of the bookshelf that separates them. But that doesn’t bother me too much.
The flat is pleasant, and located in an attractive apartment building close to a Zone 2 station; at £1,000 per month I can just about afford it. I imagine what it would be like to call this place home, and the relief I’d feel at my search being over.
In the kitchen, which, though crowded when all three folding chairs are in use, is clean and tastefully decorated, I make conversation with the prospective flatmates, knowing that this is the real test. They have been friends since university; one is a civil servant and the other works for a mental health charity. I ask about their upcoming holiday and compliment the artwork on the walls. Afterwards, I make sure to send a text saying how much I liked the flat and enjoyed meeting them.
A few days later, I receive a by-now-familiar response: unfortunately, they have chosen one of the other candidates that applied for the room. They wish me the best of luck in my continued search.
The average cost of a room in London has doubled in the last 15 years
Eventually I did find somewhere to live, through an “in” with an acquaintance. But until then, house-hunting had become like the demoralising experience many describe with dating apps. Sending message after message, often with no response; the constant juggle to organise viewings around work and other commitments; the need to summon the energy to show up as your most likeable and enthusiastic self in the hope of finally being chosen.
I was lucky there was no particular rush for me to move. For others, with a tenancy end date ticking nearer, perhaps with children in tow, the stress must be immense. This side of the rental experience is not always captured in discussions of the current housing crisis, which usually focus on the difficulty young people face in “getting on the property ladder”.
According to rental website SpareRoom, the average cost of a room in London has approximately doubled in the last 15 years, from £542 per month in 2010 to over £1,000 in 2023 (though the latest figures have it a little lower, at £993). But this rise, though extreme, is only part of the story. Looking at prices alone conceals the reality that what renters get for their money is growing steadily worse; and importantly, ignores the difficulty of finding a place to live when there aren’t enough to go around.
In a functioning market, supply and demand should be in equilibrium. Rising prices indicate excess demand, that consumers are willing to “bid” more for a scarce resource — in this case, accommodation in London. Suppliers are incentivised by higher prices to increase the amount of accommodation available. The demand is satisfied, and prices drop.
In recent years there has been increasing pressure on London’s rental market. There are around a million more Londoners today than there were in 2010; one and a half million migrants have arrived in the UK in the last two years alone (the “Boriswave”), all of whom need to be housed. Other demographic factors, such as the increased share of adults who are single, also contribute. But constrained by a restrictive planning system, supply has been unable to rise to balance demand. Instead, renters are left bidding higher and higher until they can no longer keep bidding.
There is reason to think rents have reached “saturation”, in that renters cannot increase their bids much further even if they wanted to. That average rent of £993 represents about half the income of the median Londoner in their twenties who is working full time (£35,000, which after deductions works out as around £2,000 per month). And remember, this is the rent for only one bedroom, sharing with flatmates who may be total strangers. Living alone, once a normal choice for an adult in work, is now out of the question for all but the very wealthiest.
Could renters increase their bids higher still to more than half their incomes? Perhaps, but surely not by much.
We can see evidence for this “saturation” in the narrow spread of rents between areas. If you want to rent a room in genteel Chiswick, Hampstead or Maida Vale, that will cost around £1,100 per month. But moving out to much less desirable parts of town saves you surprisingly little. Rooms in places such as Catford and Lewisham, both decidedly unromantic and off the Tube network in London’s South East, average almost £900.
This remarkably small discrepancy suggests that costs may be reaching a ceiling — that rents already claim as high a share of renters’ incomes as they reasonably can, and so they cannot rise much further.
With the ability to outbid others increasingly limited, competition for scarce accommodation presents itself in other ways. We see this competition in the endless viewings that one needs to attend to get an offer of tenancy, and the hundreds of comments expressing interest in desirable rooms online.
Lifelong renters will reach old age with no assets or savings
We also see that what you get for your money is being squeezed: despite increasing or remaining steady for every other group, floorspace per person has dropped substantially for private renters, particularly those in London. In 2018, private renters in the capital had less than 25 square metres of space; less than those who were socially housed and less than half the space of those who owned their homes outright.
While house-hunting, I had two main rules. First, I was prepared to spend no more than half my post-tax income on rent. Second, many places advertised have a standing-room-only kitchen, where tenants prepare food and take it to their bedrooms to eat in solitude. I view this as uncivilised, depressing and faintly unsanitary: for me, a table is a must.
Not unreasonably fussy, you’d think. But finding somewhere that met both of these criteria was difficult — not because there weren’t rooms advertised that fit the bill, but because these were the most desirable ones, and dozens of other people also wanted them.
It’s not only living space that’s constrained, but tenants’ ability to actually live in that space. Having no dining table makes hosting an impossibility. Limited storage space makes it difficult to accumulate belongings; I saw rooms with a wardrobe out on the landing, there being no space in the bedroom, advertised for £1,000 per month or more.
Landlords or existing tenants may impose further restrictions. Recently a homeowner briefly became Twitter’s main character for posting an ad for a spare room which would “ideally suit someone working longish hours during the week and leaving the city for the weekends”. The tenant must not use the living room, have any guests, or (it almost goes without saying) any pets. No noise after 11pm, and ideally the tenant would be “someone who is not home until after 8.30pm”. The price? £1,350 per month — which works out as half the income, post deductions, of a graduate earning £44,000.
In the recent past, somebody earning £44,000 might have expected to be able to afford to live alone, or at least to be fairly selective about where they chose to live. Instead, what would normally be considered a good salary is enough to struggle to afford a room where you can live like Harry Potter with the Dursleys (“I’ll be in my bedroom, making no noise and pretending I don’t exist”). The social contract is broken, in the sense that a proper, adult salary no longer gets you a proper, adult place to live.
Some like to predict this will lead to a mass youth uprising — but this is wishful thinking. Those affected by this crisis seem to respond more with depression than anger. What we will see instead is simply the normalisation, bit by bit, of worse lives: longer commutes and less discretionary income, fewer parties and more solitary meals in bedrooms.
The trend of young people living with their parents will continue, with all its attendant social ills; down the line, we are likely to see a parallel trend of lifelong renters reaching old age with no assets or savings.
The good news is that, in theory at least, this is a problem we know how to solve. Supply and demand must meet. It may not seem realistic to build our way out of the problem, given the scale of the housing deficit we are already in — but building enough for rents to fall by even a tiny fraction would be better than nothing.
Potentially, visa numbers could be linked to the meeting of housebuilding targets: it seems reasonable that the government should not be welcoming in nearly a million migrants per year on the one hand, while on the other hand knowing full well there is nowhere for them to live.
Either way, a government that cares about the welfare of its citizens must have the courage to face this issue.
