This disturbing new rental trend shows just how broken Britain’s housing market really is
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It only takes a quick skim through London’s depressingly exploitative ‘room for rent’ adverts to realise that live-in landlords are inflicting increasingly unreasonable conditions on their tenants. Helen Coffey investigates the creeping practice that restricts a lodger’s access to their own room and asks the experts whether there is any legal pushback.
![[Some lodgers are told they can’t use the communal living spaces and are confined to the room they rent]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/17/15/iStock-1731348834.jpg)
If you’ve ever tried to find a place to live in London, you’ll already be all too familiar with the absolute bin-fire that is the capital’s rental market. In fact, perhaps even reading the words “find a place to live” have triggered a fight or flight response, spiking your cortisol levels as you relive some of the most harrowing experiences of your adult life.
I still remember the time, 15 years ago, that I attended a group viewing for a grimy, tiny ex-council flat in Bermondsey, before being told by the cartoonishly evil estate agent that whoever made it back to the agency first to sign the agreement would get the tenancy. Cue me participating in a humiliating Wacky Races-style dash across town against six other women in their twenties. I may have won the flat that day, but I also lost my dignity.
This demand can range from asking people to spend some weekends away or stay out late most evenings to refraining from ever working from home or using the communal areas. The latest example to be named and shamed was a room in Hampstead with a single bed, wardrobe, desk and chair. Despite paying the princely sum of £1,350 a month, the future lodger was expected to scarcely ever be there.
