Kimberley Bond

It was a happy home, but life in Mia and Rachel’s south London rental was about to be disrupted: their housemate was moving out. The usual next steps applied. Ask around, maybe post an Instagram story, then the inevitable: advertising the room online. When Mia uploaded photos of the ‘cosy’ spare room in a ‘friendly all-girls flatshare’, she expected she’d get around 10 responses back. But, after just a few days, she’d had replies from more than 300 hopefuls. The messages ranged from the standard fare – 20-something girls who worked in marketing and enjoyed exercising – to those where the desperation was palpable. One girl messaged that she’d been looking for somewhere to live for six months.  ‘I was so overwhelmed,’ Mia says. ‘You want to reply to everyone, but you physically can’t.’ Demand for rentals has surged across the country in recent years, but its effects are being felt more acutely in the capital. The 2021 census confirmed that London has a higher proportion of private renters (29 percent) compared to the rest of England (17 percent). According to the campaign group Renters Reform Coalition, an average of 25 people are competing for every available London dwelling – which makes finding a liveable room in a well-trodden location, all for a reasonable price, almost impossible. The rise of speed-flatmating After the huge demand for their room, Mia and Rachel thought that there had to be a better way of finding housemates than wading through endless DMs. They decided t

A recent Rightmove survey of more than 35,000 people found that the quaint seaside town of Woodbridge, Suffolk, is the happiest place to live in the UK – meanwhile, my hometown of Slough, in Berkshire, was deemed the most miserable. This is nothing new to me; Slough’s reputation as a hole has long preceded the results of the survey. Before it was renowned as the home place of The Office and dad-dancing David Brent, it was the topic of an infamous John Betjeman poem, which opens with the lines: ‘Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough! It isn’t fit for humans now.’ Even as I was growing up, my mother would tell me to inform people I was actually from the nearby Windsor ‘because it sounds better’. With Slough having boomed in popularity with city slickers who don’t know any better, following its inclusion on the Elizabeth line (data shows the town has seen the steepest rise in house prices in the Reading branch of the new rail line), estate agents have been quick to dismiss the results of the Rightmove poll. They say it’s still an appealing place to live and cite ‘great’ transport links, including its close proximity to both the M4 and Heathrow Airport. However, it’s not exactly a resounding endorsement that the best thing about Slough is that it’s easy to leave. It’s not exactly a resounding endorsement that the best thing about Slough is that it’s easy to leave Slough is, and always has been, the nation’s laughing stock – which is hardly surprising, given that one of its most