During the five years my friend and I lived together, our landlords were two middle-class, middle-aged men who owned a handful of flats in the city. The rent was decent and they were responsive to issues when we reported them. Every time they visited our flat, they mumbled suggestions for things they could replace or refurbish; these ideas rarely came to fruition. They winced at the damp and asked us meekly if we were airing the flat as we should be, as if airing a windowless bathroom with an emphysemic extractor fan was as easy as popping it out on the washing line to freshen it up. One of them eventually took it upon himself to deep-clean and repaint the mouldering bathroom, and in the process he knocked his drill over and punctured a hole through the bottom of the bath. This is all to say: they were bumbling and clueless, but generally amenable. When I moved out, they returned my deposit in full and wished me well.
The flat I moved into with my boyfriend was leased through a letting agency who wanted references and employment checks and sent a fifty-page inventory of the flat’s furniture and amenities. When we’d first viewed the flat, the previous tenants’ furniture had made it seem modern and comfortable; stripped bare, not so much. The sofa had gaping cracks in the faux leather with grotty sponge peeping out from inside, the blinds in every room had missing slats and came loose like a mummy unravelling when you tried to open or close them. The only chair in the house was a wonky-legged wicker monstrosity, positioned concerningly close to a decades-old electric fireplace. There were water damage stains on the kitchen walls and the cupboards stank of damp. There was a hideous framed picture in the hallway, a trio of 1970s teddy bears staring creepily down at us when we walked through the front door. In the agency’s inventory, every feature and item had been listed as ‘Condition: Good; Cleanliness: Good’. The flat wasn’t in the worst state in the world, but it was dated and shabby and felt a bit like we were moving into the stripped-down home of a deceased grandparent.
We did our best with it. We shut the wicker chair and the demon teddy portrait in a cupboard and filled the place with our cushions and books and plants and records. With the landlord’s permission, we disposed of the mutilated pleather couch and were kindly given a hand-me-down sofa by a friend who was having a clearout. We invited people round, cooked big dinners and drank nice wine and got really into making charcuterie boards. My boyfriend was (and still is) a pure hoot and a delight to live with.
Winter came, and with it came the damp, of course. The magnolia walls had been clean and freshly-painted when we moved in. After signing the rental agreement, the letting agency had sent us a six-page document with advice for reducing mould, which highlighted that ‘Two people at home (just breathing!) can produce three pints of condensation’ (I’m not sure quite what they expected us to do about this), and featured photos of black mould with the warning, ‘If areas of the property look like this, it is almost certainly not a defect with the property itself, but a result of the way you are using the property.’
As soon as the air turned chilly, the mould bled through the walls and bred like mad, splattering itself across vast stretches and settling dust-like on clothes and furniture. The foisty stench in the kitchen cupboards grew worse. We placed moisture traps around every room as if assembling a summoning circle, we left a dehumidifier whirring on the floor, we opened windows and doors when it was freezing outside. I scrubbed the damp patches until layers of paint began to flake off on the sponge; the surface spores came off, but dark shadows stayed, immovable, underneath, and within a week or two the mould had colonised the walls again. We told the letting agents during flat inspections, and they brushed it off, telling us that as long as we were airing the place and cleaning the damp where it appeared, we would be fine.
The waste pipe behind the toilet began leaking in the winter; the landlords ignored it. The carbon monoxide detector started yapping furiously one night in December, and I sat in the front yard with a friend who’d come round for drinks that evening, finishing our wine in the snow until an emergency engineer came to turn the gas off. The temperature outside was dipping below zero, and the letting agency left us without heating or hot water for days as they called in engineers for second and third and fourth opinions about whether the boiler needed replacing. In the spring, mice took up residence in the gaping hole behind the sink; they sent a builder to inspect the cavity, and no-one ever returned to fill it in.
Shortly after moving out, I got an email to advise that the letting agency had deducted a third of the deposit for cleaning the flat that we had spent hours spraying and scrubbing and hoovering before dropping the keys off. The final inspection assessed it as ‘Cleanliness: Good’, but while ‘Good’ had been deemed a good enough effort from them when we moved in, it wasn’t a good enough effort from us when we moved out. I felt like screaming, like they were telling me off for being a disgusting mucky child who couldn’t clean up after herself properly. I could not fathom how we were being charged hundreds for some dusty skirting boards by people who hadn’t been arsed when the flat had toxic damp and vermin living in the floor. I started beefing with one of the managers over email. I scrolled obsessively through one-star reviews of the letting agency, almost comforted by the fact that other people found the staff rude and patronising, slow to deal with complaints and quick to charge for petty things. The whole time, there was also a voice in my head saying that I sounded like a naive and entitled little brat, that mould and mice and malfunctioning boilers were just par for the course in the rental market, and I should get over myself. I know I’m also luckier than a lot of people; I’ve always had somewhere to live, and we’re now renting somewhere new where (touch wood) I feel much more stable, much happier, much more at home. There were times I felt at home and content in the last flat, but I also felt like the more time we spent in it, the more it resisted us and tried to drive us out.
At this point I think I may have resorted to anthropomorphising a Tyneside flat because I don’t have any groundbreaking conclusions to draw about Generation Rent and the sordid gaslighting ways of landlords and letting agents. Things are very much fucked! Before I get myself any more bitter and set about sending my former letting agent a curse in the post, I’m going to sign off here with a photo I took last year in the Ouseburn area of Newcastle:
Cover photo by Jackson Simmer on Unsplash
good strong words 