Renting in London - What to Expect

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• published: 10 Dec 2015
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What's it like to live in London? Here's what you can expect renting from a private landlord on a low salary. Get emails from Jade Joddle: http://jadejoddle.com/join/ Many people dream of living the glamorous London lifestyle, but what's it really like renting if you are young and broke? You might also like: What NOT to do in London: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_prbBNWOZFc How Expensive is London: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu_5XJyEocI How to do a South London Accent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5MtlR1I20M How to do a glottal stop - London pronunciation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUIRa0T0BV8 ------- Hey guys! Living in London: What to expect. This video is for you if you’re curious about moving to London one day. You’re a young person, you’re on a low-ish kind of income. What kind of London life would await you were you to move to London? I’m just sharing my experience. I am from London...um, but I haven’t been living there for a couple of years. And also, I didn’t go to university in London. I went to a...and then my experience of living in London in my own place, in my own shared house, was a couple of years after I finished London [University]. So I’m mainly talking about that shared housing experience of living in London in this video. And to sum it up in one word, I would have to use the word ‘depressing,’ living in London. The kind of houses I was living in were sort of Victorian, old houses. So, in our modern day, these houses are really cold to live in. And, if it’s like rented accommodation to students or young people, often the landlords don’t really care about the properties that much, to insulate them and to make them warm to live in. Maybe the windows are loose; the houses are very draughty, they get very, very cold in winter. And, because heating is very, very expensive in London, using any of the energy to heat the house with the radiators and that kind of thing is expensive. People in shared houses tend to be quite mean about putting the heating on. So you’ll be living in this cold, draughty house in the wet and dark winter for quite a few months of the year. You know, like four or five months, the house is gonna be quite cold. Possibly going to be damp. I lived in a house where...well, I lived in more than one house like this, but, you wash your clothes, you dry them in the house, but you don’t realize that even when your clothes are dry, they smell of mould! When I would go to my mum’s house, she would just be like, “No, I have to wash this, I have to wash this!” Because she could just smell the odour of mouldy house on my clothes all the time. So yeah, you wash clothes in the washing machine: maybe they don’t dry for two and a half days, ‘cause the house is so cold. And you see like people washing their clothes all over the house; and maybe in the kitchen there’s some clothes hanging up; any radiator in the hallway’s always got someone’s clothes on it, drying. You’ll just see people’s drying clothes around all the place. Probably in the bathroom you’ll see mould growing up the bathroom walls. And even if you wash it off, the mould will be back like ten days later, starting to come back. Even if you paint over the mould, the mould will start coming back! What else? In a London house, you’ll probably see loads of bikes in the hallway when you come in the door. And a typical London house is a quite a narrow hallway, corridor, when you come into the house. So you have to sort of go past five or six bikes sometimes all up the hallway, which makes it quite hard to get in and out of your house sometimes. You usually see a load of abandoned letters on the floor. Like nobody bothers to pick up letters and leaflets. I mean, I’m making it sound like every, every house is uh, is really trashy. I mean, all the places that I lived in, they did struggle a bit for...for hygiene, yeah. Because there were too many people living in the houses. There wasn’t enough space; so there were too many bikes, too many extra boyfriends and girlfriends around, and no, no...people not really washing up straight after they cook. So yeah, all the places that I lived in, they did have that student vibe, even though the people living in the houses were not themselves students anymore: they were working people. It’s just they couldn’t...they weren’t affording somewhere better than the student kind of house, even though, a lot of...some of the people I was living with were in their thirties, it was still the student kind of... muck, student kind of clutter around, and like student-y posters on the walls and things like that.