LIVING ON THE EDGE

Half of UK renters now reside in a property without a living room. Olivia Petter explores how the loss of this shared area affects not just our social lives, but the way we see ourselves

- By Olivia Petter

It's a space where you can complain about your day while listless daytime TV hums in the background. A place to flop onto the sofa and idly tap through your phone in silence next to someone else doing the same. An environment built for opening a bottle of wine on a Sunday afternoon, pouring extra glasses for who decides to join in.

You can eat greasy takeaways, watch old romcoms, and be cataclysmically hungover, all with the comfort of knowing you're only ever a moment away from someone bursting in and disrupting your solitude, because the beauty and madness of this space derive from the fact that it is fundamentally shared.

Yes, I'm talking about the living room - a place that was once integral to any housing experience, but has now become a fleeting rarity. According to data compiled by SpareRoom, the UK's busiest flatsharing website, half of UK renters now live in flatshares without a living room. The survey of more than 2,000 Britons found that 80 per cent were living this way due to landlords choosing to turn what would be a living space into an extra bedroom, consequently earning rent from an additional tenant. Just 7 per cent of those surveyed said it was their own choice to live without a living room.

It shouldn't be surprising when you consider how inaccessible the rental market has become in the UK - a situation that has only been exacerbated by the country's increasingly severe housing crisis. Average room rents are now £744 a month, according to Spare Room, while in London this rises to £982. As a result, many prospective tenants have chosen to live in spaces without living rooms because of how much cheaper it is for them, not just in terms of an overall decrease in rent but also because there are more people to split bills between.