I’ve owned my homes since I was 26. For nearly two decades, I climbed the property ladder, and then, very quickly, I fell off it.
After years of owning, renovating, leveraging and slightly romanticising bricks and mortar, I had to sell everything to pay off a terrifying amount of debt. Businesses failed. Money vanished. The whole structure collapsed in on itself.
I’ve now been renting for more than a year and know that I have never been happier. It’s made examine how we’ve been institutionalised as a nation to strive for homeownership.
I didn’t grow up with the idea that property was the goal. My parents rented, and not in a romantic, Parisian, intellectual way. It was in the very real “we need to make rent this month” way.
Money wasn’t abstract in our house. It was discussed openly and sometimes anxiously. There was no illusion of safety. No sense that a mortgage was the ultimate marker of adulthood. Stability always felt temporary.
When I was two weeks old, we moved from London to Scotland. For years, I believed we’d always rented, only to discover later that my parents had owned a home there, but when things didn’t work out we had to come back to London. They couldn’t afford to get back on the ladder so we started renting.
I began earning my own money young. First as a body piercer, then picking up modelling jobs. I left home at around 18 and rented my first place. By 20, I was earning a lot. Not because I was particularly brilliant, but because London, at the time, still allowed for that kind of scrappy upward movement.
My first proper flat was in north-west London, near the piercing studio in Camden. I split it with my boyfriend at the time. In those days rent felt manageable. I then went on to rent two other flats before I gave up earning much money to learn how to be a chef at catering school. During that time I was offered a place in Tower Bridge for £400 a month. A lifeline. It turned out I was essentially acting as a human barricade to stop bailiffs repossessing it.
At the time, I didn’t fully clock this as I was too busy trying to survive a schedule of nine to five schoolwork, followed by unpaid restaurant work at night. Money dried up quickly. One day I came home to four men trying to kick down the door. I managed to keep them away for a bit longer from the inevitable eviction that was snapping at my heels.
My boyfriend at the time, Dean, arrived as a knight in shining armour and we rented in Wapping for a few years. There I got my first real editorial bits as a chef and then TV came knocking and my income improved.
It was Dean who taught me how to buy. He came from a “working-class done good” family. They’d bought, invested and maximised their finances. They understood the system. Then through a combination of his inheritance and my savings, we bought our first place together: a two-bedroom maisonette in Clapton.
This was long before Clapton became the fashionable, natural wine and small plates-restaurant hotspot it is now. Back then, it was called “Murder Mile” and was an edgy place to live. This meant we were some of the first to gentrify the area and of course that makes me cringe and feel shit, but then, I’m not stupid enough to not own this privilege.
We bought our house for around £150,000, which was a steal. We bought it from a white witch called Beryl, who was moving up the road with her six cats. She sold it to us because we wanted to bring back its charm. We poured about £35,000 into it. New roof, new floors, ceilings and doors; we carefully restored the property as we had promised.
For the first time, I understood what people meant by “putting down roots”, emotionally and practically. We built something and I still feel sentimental about those years.
Five years later, we sold our Clapton property for roughly £650,000. We’d accidentally flipped a property and made a killing. I think that was some of the last of those heydays. With that money we bought an industrial mews warehouse off Dalston Lane. A live-work property we turned into a two-bedroom house with a large living area.
Sadly, our relationship ended, but the business partnership didn’t. We became landlords briefly, but loathed it, and so then I moved back in.
I lived at the mews house for almost 10 years and built an extremely successful life for myself there, but then it all went tits up. I made a stupid decision to remortgage to save my businesses, and had to sell my home to pay off hundreds of thousands of pounds in debt.
I had a crippling couple of years while I waited for the property to sell, and when it did, the majority went to the taxman and bank, I was bankrupt and I had to start again. My only choice was to rent.
I was in such a state I barely remember choosing my house, but, boy, am I glad I did. I now rent a house in Walthamstow, with Matt, the man I’m going to marry and my four cats (I’ve still got you – Beryl). A gorgeous and stylish cottage in the village with a garden and a studio at the end of it. It’s decorated in a very me way and I have very proactive landlords.
The day I walked into this house was the day I paid back my debt, which should have been bleak, but I felt like I’d won the lottery. The sun shone on us and it’s not stopped since.
Owning property in Britain isn’t just about bricks and mortar. It’s about timing, luck, relationships, health, the economy, your job not collapsing overnight, and your ability to keep playing the game long enough to win it.
I played it for 18 years. And then, very quickly, I couldn’t anymore, so now I rent, with no assets or ladder or illusion of upward trajectory, and instead of feeling like I’ve failed, I feel… lighter.
There’s a strange freedom in stepping outside of a system that constantly tells you you’re either winning or losing. Renting, for me, has removed the low-level anxiety I didn’t even realise I was carrying. For the first time in a long time, my home is just my home.
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