Before she decided to move there Maxine had never even heard of – let alone visited – the Kent town of Chatham.
Luckily this meant that she also didn’t have any preconceptions about the rundown former dockyards on the River Medway.
Chatham was recently named Britain’s “slobbiest” town in a travel guide by Forbes Advisor, which warned that locals’ main form of exercise was lifting a pint.
Maxine, 27, was born and bred in Lewisham and lived with her family as she carved out a career as a freelance writer.
By 2021 she was ready to fly the nest. “I wanted my own space and financially I was able to move out,” she explained.
Her Plan A was to find a room to rent in a flat share locally but, even with a healthy budget of around £750pcm to play with she struggled to find anywhere she could afford, where the division of bills seemed fair, and where she would be permitted to work from home.
The fact she is freelance made her flat hunt even harder – many agents wouldn’t even allow her to register with them.
“I didn’t even try to find somewhere to rent on my own – the rents were extortionate,” said Maxine, who had the misfortune to be attempting to find a home in the midst of the worst rental crisis in living memory.
According to Rightmove rent in the capital hit a record £2,501 pcm in the first three months of this year.
And so Maxine began to look for homes further away, honing in in Kent for its good train links to central London and proximity to her family.
She found her budget stretched a lot further outside the capital and began looking on flat rental site OpenRent because it allowed her to leapfrog agents and communicate directly with landlords.
She went to see her flat in Chatham in May last year, and moved in in July. Her rent for the one bedroom purpose built flat is £740pcm – less than the rooms in shared flats she was looking at in London had cost.
Maxine is delighted with her smart, peaceful flat, and rates Chatham for its plentiful open space. The town centre is not, she admits, the prettiest.
“But Lewisham shopping centre is not necessarily the greatest,” she said. “I was not looking for somewhere which was posh or luxury.
I wanted to find a flat I would enjoy living in, in a place with some diversity, which Chatham has got, and ideally close to a river.”
