#34

Living in houseshares is essentially low level war. Always assume your housemates will do anything they can to rip you off or make you do more cleaning.

#35

In the late 90s I lived in a house share in Islington. 3 story terrace with 6 bedrooms. 10 of us lived there but at the end of the first year of lease one couple dropped out when they realised their mutual addiction to heroin wasn’t the best thing to base a relationship on and went their separate ways & one other dude lost his job and moved back in with his parents.

We put an ad in Loot for prospective new flatmates and got of 50 calls within the first hour of the ad coming out.

Because it was impossible to arrange for all 7 of us to be together at the same time to interview our prospective new housemates we set up a video camera and wrote a 5 question questionnaire and taped each candidates answers - Shallow Grave style - to watch later that evening/weekend w/e. It was kind of a druggy household & so we asked about attitudes to drugs as question 1 and made the candidate toke on a spliff if they were still around at the end of the questions

Seemed hilarious at the time, real dickish in hindsight. Ended up with two German girls taking the two available rooms thinking they’d get on. One was a poor mature student from the old East Germany who was doing a fashion MA and working her arse off constantly. The other was a young west Berliner with a wealthy family who was kind of bumming around europe walking part time at Pizza Hut and getting stoned the rest of the day. They fucking hated each other, we had to physically separate their fights on more than one occasion.

Not sure what the moral of this story is but I think I still have the interview tapes in a box somewhere. We interviewed 60 people. What’s the likelihood one of them is quite famous now?

no idea why I’m posting this

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#36

Wow, this was pretty much

image

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#37

Just had a cold shiver remembering this shitshow, both as advertiser and seeker…

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#38

Generally agree with this

Although I was in a flatshare in edinburgh where my room was half the size and the same price, but it was at the back (so quieter, except in summer thanks to the fucking Air BnB next door) AND it had double glazing, which the bigger rooms didn’t. So it was marginally less freezing in the Scottish winter. 1-0 barleysugar!

#39

this definitely sounds like the premise for a terrible final year art school exhibit

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#40

Yup. Those days were wild. Do you know this track ? Sums up the Loot experience for me, 1m30 on

#41

It’s 20 years later, it was Islington & it was cheap rent. We interviewed 50/60 people. Must be a Keith Allen in there somewhere

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#42

They were basically asking if he was going to be living off chicken nuggets and fish fingers but I don’t think they realised there was a midpoint where you can be a decent housemate and eat a fish finger sandwich twice a year.

#43

This is an amazing story, I would like to see the tapes just to see the different styles of the time let alone their surprise at the questions and being filmed!

#44

Imagine your parents expecting a seven year old to pay council tax though.

#45

Says a lot about the UK housing situation that “the dream” scenario is a shabby houseshare with someone who’s not there too often.

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#46

I’m quite curious about them now that I’ve remembered it too. Wouldn’t be surprised if one of them was actually a DiSser

#47

one of my atds technically lives with a tory MP, but apparently he’s there maybe 1 night every 2 months or something. always think about smearing the MPs bed with shit or equivalent every time i’m there

#48

(London centric buuut) Seems utterly laughable now that I lived on my own in zone 2 when I was 23.

#49

One of my colleagues is planning to move out of London (Crystal Palace) to High Wycombe so we were looking at property sites. For a laugh I put in a budget of half a mil to see what was available anywhere near me (Brockley and environs). Jesus Christ… it was bleak.

Having said that, my wife’s friend is trying to sell a flat in Blackheath / Shooter’s Hill she bought maybe three years ago, and is struggling to get offers even now she’s dropped it to the price she paid for it in the first place.

#50

Too many shooters around there tho

#51

I think if you have a much bigger room you should pay a bigger slice of the rent, or if that’s not possible at least use the other shared living areas less. I’'d be happy to have a smaller room, but in return for that i’d expect people to not be slobbing all over the living room all the time, otherwise you might as well live in a bedsit.

#52

The London Overground being on the underground map has opened up a lot of SE London to BTL landlords and renters. Once you could rent a 2 bed flat in Brockley cheaper than a 1 bed in Tooting. All because the latter was on the tube map and the former wasn’t.

I remember Ken Livingstone stating the pros for the Overground. That house prices go up if a station is on the tube map.

#53

I enjoyed this

1 Like