My life in London's houseboat slums
Most Londoners will know someone suffering from the extortionate expense of finding a place to live. For those trapped in the rental market, the outlook is particularly bleak. In 2011 the Resolution Foundation reported that the price of securing a tenancy can be over £2,000 in upfront costs, while other figures have shown that one in three tenants now spend half their takehome pay on rent. As more and more areas of London become unaffordable to anyone but wealthy professionals, where will essential workers go to live: the people who clean the streets, and cook the food and keep the city ticking over? They can stay at home with relatives, or sublet from people with existing tenancies, but some do not have these options. When I found myself in this position, I went to the only place I could: the slums of the Thames.
To call the vessels here houseboats would be generous; though waterborne, two of the three had no engine, nor their original shapes, the structures having been ripped out and rebuilt upon the base. A more accurate description would be floating shacks; timber huts erected on decrepit old grain barges on the river in west London. Between them, these three shacks house on average 20 people, the numbers only falling in a harsh winter, when some can no longer stand the conditions. Nestled in the trees, by a row of other boats, they have been moored on public land by the Thames for well over a year now, having moved downstream when another Greater London council drove them out. The usual dog walkers and running groups pass by, mostly oblivious to the slum in their midst, unable to countenance that it could exist in this wealthy borough of one of the richest cities on Earth.
A report last year for the London Assembly said the city's waterways are the permanent or winter home of at least 4,000 to 5,000 residential boats, and 10,000 people. Some of the boats offer luxury short-term stays. Comfortable rooms appear on flatshare websites from time to time, at typical rents of £600 a month in areas such as Richmond. Other renting is likely to be entirely informal and reliant on word of mouth. It's impossible to say how many people are living in conditions as desperate as those I experienced.
Many of this group were the last people you would imagine finding there: a teenage girl who worked at John Lewis; an 18-year-old Essex boy who was an apprentice chef in Chessington World of Adventures. In an ideal world they would want an en-suite, with enough sockets for a hairdryer, straighteners, dryer and a flat-screen TV. Instead they found themselves in a damp, tiny room with electricity for three hours a day. There was only one reason these people were there: money. For their rooms they paid up to £360 a month, but mostly in the mid-£200s. There were no bills, but there were no services either; it was all off-grid.
How can someone charge £360 a month in a dwelling without running water, central heating or adequate sanitation facilities? Because the crippling costs of renting in London mean many people simply cannot raise enough money to secure decent accommodation.
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/feb/23/london-houseboat-slum-rents-barge
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