There was an interiors trend recently that saw people buying shower curtains printed with grand scenes of glamour and escape, and pinning them to their fence or bedroom walls. One was a lifesize picture of a manicured English garden, another of a winding cobbled path leading off into a lush green distance. Somebody hung a curtain printed with a window just above their bath, the window appearing to open on to a scene of blue and exquisite tranquillity. Someone else printed a huge photo of their childhood garden to hang opposite the sink in their kitchen.
I sifted through the various online responses to this trend, which ranged from outrage (at the laziness of not growing one’s own garden) to mockery, in order to work out why these shower curtains made me feel so terribly, doomily sad. On the surface, the trend should please me. Because, I am a person who loves all that stuff, all that fakery, all that razzmatazz, but it quickly hit me that the reason I felt odd about these trompe-l’oeil walls was because they expressed, on white hanging plastic, the impermanence of a home. Few people are willing to invest hours of time and cash in a garden they might have to leave at a few months’ notice simply because the landlord wants to increase the rent; far simpler to pin up a picture of one.
It made me think of the books and articles recently published that offered interior design ideas for those living in rented accommodation, suggesting clever ways with adhesive wall tiles for tenants to make their rented house feel like a home. And while I’m in awe of people who have the energy for a commitment like this, again the documents of such pursuits inspire in me a similar melancholy kind of love, seeing how much people are prepared to do to live a beautiful life, despite being morbidly aware of the increasing precariousness of their situation.
It is a horrible time to be a renter. Rents in the UK are at the highest rate on record. Over two-fifths of renters say they have no disposable income whatsoever, with private renters spending more than a third of their household income on rent (rising to 41% in London). Millions of people have no choice but to do so: in 2023, full-time workers in England could expect to pay around 8.3 times their annual earnings on buying a home. But once you find a suitable rental – a task made harder by a lack of homes built at a time when social housing stock has been sold off, or demolished and not replaced – and you hang a picture and make it lovely, you know there’s a risk your landlord might kick you out on a whim.
In London, where renting is something of an extreme sport, there’s been a 52% rise in “no-fault” evictions in the past year. One impact of the rise in these evictions, and of the broken rental market as a whole, is that far fewer private renters are registered to vote. Dan Wilson Craw of the organisation Generation Rent says these people are at a disadvantage in the electoral system. “Short tenancies and frequent moves mean it is easy for private renters to inadvertently drop off the electoral register between elections.” He calculates that around 70% of private renters have been forced to move home since 2019, and that more than 1 million renters are at risk of not having a vote in July.
Which led me to dig into what this election will mean for the housing crisis, and all its associated wounds. David Bogle in Inside Housing says: “Well, having had a look at what has been issued by the major parties in England, the answer is, ‘Don’t get your hopes up too much!’” Only the Green party features housing and homelessness prominently in its manifesto (promising rent controls and 150,000 new social homes every year), but Labour does pledge to “overhaul the regulation of the private rented sector” and build 1.5m homes over five years.
Labour has also promised to empower renters to “challenge unreasonable rent increases” and wants to extend “Awaab’s law” on housing standards to include the private sector – this is legislation named after two-year-old Awaab Ishak, who died in 2020 due to poor housing conditions. What they’re not pledging, despite a poll for the i paper finding a significant majority of both Conservative and Labour voters support it, are rent controls.
In Scotland, where average private rents increased by 10.9% last year, the government is proposing rent control for tenants. Its benefits are regularly debated, but I find the prospect exciting – if implemented everywhere this has the potential to make renting not just more secure, but a genuine choice for the many millions who don’t own property. It could also allow renters the chance to save to buy. Because at the moment, the closest many can get to a home of their own is a wipe-clean picture, pinned to next door’s fence.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on X @EvaWiseman
