Dinner is served: a fresh recipe for surviving city life

Rosie Kellett built a life - and a cookbook - around late plates, communal meals and a £25 budget. Could sharing food, costs and tables be the future? Hannah Twiggs digs in

- Hannah Twiggs

On any given evening in Rosie Kellett's east London warehouse, you might find 10 housemates clustered around a battered kitchen table, passing plates of chickpea stew, candles flickering in jam jars, a record playing somewhere in the background. If you're lucky, there'll be a "late plate" in the fridge - a silent promise that whatever the night holds, a hot dinner with your name on it will be waiting when you get home.

It sounds like the sort of communal living that might briefly flourish in a university flatshare. But here, it’s different. The house runs on a shared kitty, a cooking rota and an unspoken philosophy of looking after each other – a model that has quietly become a blueprint for how young adults can still carve out an affordable, joyful life in a city that seems increasingly hostile to both.

“I moved into the warehouse at a really chaotic time in my life,” Kellett says. “I was fresh out of a pretty bad break-up and had been looking for somewhere to live for months. I was close to giving up and felt like a room in a warehouse was a last resort.”

She didn’t expect to find a home. Then she met her housemates – 10 strangers who, instead of exchanging awkward pleasantries, grilled her around the communal table about her cooking skills. “It was intimidating to say the least, but as they explained their communal way of living, cooking for each other, sharing responsibilities and food, my ears pricked up,” she recalls. “To know that my living expenses for the month would be just £100, with all my food, toiletries, cleaning materials taken care of, was a deep comfort and relief.”

It wasn’t just the financial balm she needed. Living communally, Kellett says, “has been the single most positive decision I’ve made in the last decade, and without it, I don’t know if I would still be living in the city.”

Today, Kellett is a food writer, supper club host and the author of