The dreaded WhatsApp message from the landlady arrived, as welcome as a bout of gastroenteritis and almost as pleasant. She wanted to move back in. We had to move out once the lease was up.
I heaved a big sigh and looked at my wife. We both knew the pain that lay ahead. Once more, dear. Once more unto the breach of the rapacious vipers’ nest that is the property market in London, where they close the walls up with their rental dead.
As difficult as the Dublin market is, it sometimes seems quaint compared to London where sky-high rents and chronic lack of availability can make house hunting a truly dire experience.
Rent inflation in London fell from more than 12 per cent 18 months ago to barely 2 per cent this year, according to property website Zoopla. But that was half the story. The real pain was the lack of supply – the stock of houses for rent was 25 per cent smaller than 2019 yet demand had doubled.
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It was a little easier first time round when moving here. We had only to find a suitable house in an acceptable area – it didn’t matter hugely where it was in London. After we found the house then we found the schools, the children found their friends and we found the rhythm of daily family life.
We knew it would be harder the second time round. The schools, the schoolfriends, the now-entrenched daily rhythm of life – all these were perimeters around the areas we could search. We couldn’t uproot again. We had to find something in the same enclave, near the same schools. The area had its own microclimate of suitable and available homes – there were none.
We were forced to switch from renting a furnished house to an unfurnished one – most homes suitable for families in London come unfurnished. Furnished ones are usually kept for “professional sharers”, younger workers who gang up to split exorbitant rents together. Families usually have accumulated their own furniture along the way. Ours was back in Dublin and in use.
So began our odyssey – still ongoing – of trying to furnish an entire family home in our spare time for next to nothing. There was no sense in accruing the huge expense of buying it all only to have to get rid of it in a couple of short years upon our return.
[ Making home in the museum: how Irish arrivals to London lived in the 1950sOpens in new window ]
Instead, Facebook Marketplace and furniture exchange sites grew to be our weekend kink. The rhythm goes like this. You line up several “deals” for collection on the same day with online strangers, some of whom could be axe murderers. A table here, a couch there, and so on. Then hire a van from a vehicle-sharing club such as Zipcar, plot a route on Google Maps, and drive out on to the mean streets of London hunting success.
Driving from one stranger’s home to another in a foreign city gives a completely different view of how the other half lives. Sometimes you want to be that other half and,sometimes you really don’t.
Last weekend we picked up items from people living on local versions of millionaires’ row. We pulled up outside, often blocking a narrow street of period homes with cars backed up behind. We’d dash into a stranger’s house to lug a mirror or a chair to the van, and then take off again like we had done a bank job, as the hooting of cars behind grew too much to bear.
Another house in a much more modest area was having a clearout. Vans and cars lined up to take items away. The family weren’t asking for much; they didn’t seem to have much themselves. We picked up a television table for the price of a pub lunch. It was heavy. An impeccably-polite teenager emerged from the front room to help lug it into the van.
One of our final stops was for a lovely blue chair, but the online vendor was shady about directions. No, she couldn’t give the exact address. Too many scammers, she said. She directed us to an out-of-the-way cul de sac and told us to wait there, just as it got dark.
I thought she sounded like a scammer: “A hundred quid says we are about to be mugged.”
A young woman gestured from a window, high above the cul de sac. “Number 89,” she shouted. We trudged to the top floor. The door opened and a little face peered out – a toddler. Mum appeared from behind. She looked nothing like her heavily filtered Facebook pictures. She seemed depressed.
The tiny flat was filled with junk and dead air. There were more children inside, hiding beyond the junk. We assumed she was a single mother, perhaps struggling with life. She was happy to sell us her blue chair for little. We gave her a bit more than she had asked and hauled it down to the van.
Our life could be much worse, we reasoned, as we drove off. Life for some people is always worse.