Journals from London: advice from my first 10 months

The plan was to move to London post-grad in order to do something with my degree, but it's not been that easy.

I was lucky enough to have my foot in the door, already. I have family in London and worked in a company that made it somewhat easy to be transferred to a different area. This meant that even if I didn't find my own place to live or find a job straight away, I had back-ups. Suffice to say I had to use my back-ups. Finding your own place in London has not only become extortionate, but it is the most saturated market at the moment. In 2001, just 15% of Londoners rented; now, 1 in 3 rent, most believing they will never own a home. Between 1996 and 2016, depending on the borough, house prices have increased by anything from 400% to 700%....My guess is that my Dad is really kicking himself for selling his flat in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea in 2000 to move to the countryside.

It really is about who you know...and your 1 hour commute is not that bad.

So, speaking of my Dad, how lucky am I that he now lives in the borough of Ealing and he and his housemate had a spare bedroom that I could stay in? Somewhere to rest my little green Londoner noggin and commute from to my new job. Working for Space NK meant I could request to be transferred to a new store, and thankfully I was successful in my application to become Supervisor in Wimbledon. A sweet little store tucked away in Wimbledon Village, my commute would take me around an hour from Ealing Broadway. To think I actually put effort into my hair and make-up every day...that didn't last long. Compared to the 20-minute drive that it used to take me to get to work back in Lincolnshire, an hour commute at first seemed awful; I now know that, for London, that's actually fine.

Living with Dad for that short period of time was great. Since I've grown up never having lived with him, some find it surprising that we have as good a relationship as we do. I thank both my parents for that luxury. We played squash, would go for fish & chips and beer at the local pub, and he would give me advice on all things London as I listened intently. Hearing about London in the 80s and 90s, before inflation and Tiktok, was a wonderful form of escapism. Kind of like watching Friends.

After just a week of being put up at Dad's, I moved in with some friends of his in Wandsworth who had a spare room. Lucky me now got to commute in just half the time, as the bus from this area took me straight down to Wimbledon. They kindly let me stay in their beautiful home for a month until I managed to find a place to go...

MatesPlace over SpareRoom any day (not sponsored)...and broaden your search criteria out of Clapham.

I'd been looking on SpareRoom since about May 2022 to see if I could get something lined up for September. I now know that this is not a thing. While it makes sense to have where you're going to live mapped out months in advance, the world of spare rooms only works when you search about a fortnight in advance, if that long. Where I can imagine it started out as a very genuine, useful platform, it has quickly become overrun with agents as opposed to it originally being intended for private homeowners and like-minded twenty-somethings looking to sub-let a room. I would get so excited to see I'd had a message, hoping someone would have replied to my room-wanted ad, only to find it was a message from an agent probably copied-and-pasted to 50 others, none of whom are even in the same demographic. What also made it tricker was my inability to let go of the idea of living in Clapham; the epicentre of attractive twenty-somethings with good jobs and/or rich parents. I dreamt of meet-cutes in Clapham beer gardens with rugby players mingling with finance bros - or if I was lucky a finance bro that plays rugby on the weekends (jackpot). Unfortunately, everyone else my age had the same idea, making Clapham the most saturated and sought-after real estate market in London. On top of that, I had no idea people had started bidding for rent (?!). So now what you see isn't really what you get. I had a two separate groups of girls approach me via SpareRoom to join them on their hunt, which got my hopes up a lot each time. So we're chatting away in our WhatsApp group chat and they say "Okay so what's everyone's absolute ceiling rent-wise?", and I say "Mine was on my room-wanted add - about £**** x", "I mean when it comes to bidding, what's your maximum limit above that? x" ...*Daisy Shippey has left the group chat*

I don't remember who got me onto MatesPlace, but it's a spin on SpareRoom. What started out as a closely-monitored Facebook page which only allowed you to join if you were friends or friends of friends with someone in there, the idea was that you'd move in with friends once, twice or third removed rather than strangers. On the Facebook page, you can post rooms available or room wanted ads, providing pictures of the room or yourself to attract offers and make contacts. On the app, you can enter your search criteria and get scrolling, adding contacts and favouriting properties. Very easy to use, and the best part is that it's yet to be infiltrated by robots (whoops I mean estate agents).

It's on here that I found the place I was going to live for the next six months in Balham. Lucky me, once again. The house was stunning - like too-good-to-be-true stunning - so I sent my message with a brief overview of who I am, what I do and what I'm like (and I actually wrote out a personalised message to every single property I applied to from May 2022 until I got this place in November 2022, as opposed to having a message to copy and paste from my notes. I must have applied to hundreds of rooms, but I felt like a fraud unless I wrote out a message each time - putting in as much effort to each room as if I was re-writing a cover letter for a job application). And for some reason, they picked me! Out of what I can only expect was hundreds of applicants to this contemporary four-bedroom, three-storey house just 7 minutes walk from Balham tube station (giving me a breezy 40-minute commute), surrounded with amenities, I really did get so lucky. I got to live with three awesome twenty-somethings for six months while their friend travelled, and I got to actually unpack my suitcase and actually feel at home for the first time since moving to London. The only catch was that it was a six month short-term let, meaning come about March, I had to get house-hunting once again...

You'll probably apply to hundreds of properties and jobs until you find one.

This was something that I naively thought wouldn't apply to me. I thought that, with getting a 1st in my degree, that I wasn't one of these people that would have to search and search and search for a job. I also thought that with my description of myself as "sociable yet tidy" would instantly get me a room. It turns out that a lot of other people also have university degrees, and a lot of people are also perfectly nice to live with. It turned out, I wasn't as precious and unique as my ego was telling me. However, determination and perseverance are key, if you don't have these, pack up and go back to Lincolnshire. Dusting myself off and starting again after rejection messages from jobs and rooms was hard a lot of the time, especially after you spend a long time writing and re-writing the most comprehensive cover-letter or introduction message, perfectly outlining why you are the perfect fit for the respective job or room.

The mindset that helped me to persevere in these ongoing circumstances was remembering that it just wasn't meant to be; every job and property that I didn't get, although at the time feeling like a step back, was actually a step toward where I was meant to be. After having little to no luck on SpareRoom, I started to use MatesPlace, which was where I found a place in Balham and got to live with some awesome people, and network with their friends on top of that. After being rejected from the jobs I was applying to internally at the job I was at, it pushed me to look elsewhere, and I now have a job at the department store Liberty's, getting to work in the most iconic part of London, meeting even more amazing people, earning more, and knowing that I have options within the company should I choose to take advantage of their opportunities for experience. The bottom line is that every rejection is something to be happy about; you applied, it wasn't the one, and now you're closer to where you want to be.

The stars WILL align...and ask your estate agent about FlatFair.

I've known Charlotte since I was about three or four years old, and I don't think anyone we know expected that we'd be living together in our twenties. We grew apart and together again when our evolving circumstances and lifestyles synchronised. I was at university in Northampton when Charlotte's work relocated her to a neighbouring town, so during my third year of university we started to catch up on old times over brunch or cocktails or at Rugby matches. Once I graduated, my goal was always to move to London, and after the above journey, I found myself living in Balham on a six-month contract that would leave me yet again trolling through websites looking for somewhere else to live come the first few months of 2023. Charlotte had since started a job in London and after a few months of commuting from Northamptonshire, began thinking it was time to move to London to make it easier to get to work. I made the suggestion that we find somewhere together, admittedly not 100% thinking it was going to come to fruition, but Charlotte was totally down and we both began the hunt. My filters changed from properties in south-west with any amount of rooms with non-smoking girls, to properties in central, east and south-east with two bedrooms just for us, but Charlotte beat me to it and found the place in which we now live in Greenwich Peninsula. I had to be out of Balham by end of April/beginning of May, and this place was available on the 4th May! Perfect. The only hiccup was being able to afford the deposit, a glitch that almost lost us this dream maisonette. Luckily, our estate agent let us know of a service called FlatFair, where you can pay a one-off, non-refundable fee for them to pay your deposit for you, instead of paying thousands of pounds for a deposit. No, you don't get your payment back when you move out, but losing a couple hundred now worked out better than forking out a few thousand and not seeing that for however many years we choose to live here. It worked for us, it might work for you.

I still can't believe how written in the stars the timing of the move was, and on top of that how well Charlotte and I get on as roommates. There's a risk of make-or-break when it comes to moving in with someone, so I'm very lucky that Charlotte and I have the communication and maturity that we do that makes it work so well.