Last month, The London Prat conducted an experiment. We took £500,000 — a sum that, in most parts of the English-speaking world, would buy you a house. A real house. With rooms. Possibly more than one bathroom. Possibly even a garden, though in London the word "garden" has been stretched so thin by estate agents that it now refers to any outdoor space larger than a dinner plate, including fire escapes, bin cupboards, and, in one memorable listing, "a south-facing ventilation shaft." We took this £500,000 and we looked at what it could buy you in London. The results were not surprising. They were, however, deeply, magnificently, spectacularly absurd, and it is the absurdity — not the outrage, because outrage about London property prices has long since exhausted itself — that this article is concerned with.
The exercise was conducted by Philippa Wentworth-Small, our property correspondent, who has covered London real estate for The London Prat since its founding and who has, over the course of her career, developed a relationship with the housing market that can only be described as "horrified fascination," in much the same way that one might watch a nature documentary about a species of animal that is clearly doomed but is, in the meantime, doing something extraordinarily entertaining.
Philippa spent two weeks browsing property listings across London, focusing on the sort of areas where £500,000 might, theoretically, get you somewhere to live. She found the following. Each listing below is real. Each description has been lightly edited only to protect the identities of the estates agents involved, though it must be said that their identities probably deserve protecting, given what they have done to the English language.
Studio Flat, "Cosy Urban Retreat"
Bermondsey, SE1
£485,000
A studio flat of 210 square feet, described by the estate agent as "a cosy urban retreat perfect for the modern professional." 210 square feet is smaller than most garden sheds. It is, in fact, smaller than the broom cupboard in which The London Prat's editorial office is located, and we are not paying £485,000 for that broom cupboard. The listing photographs show a room in which the bed, the kitchen, and the bathroom are all visible simultaneously from any point in the flat, because there is no other point from which to stand. The estate agent has described this as "an open-plan layout." It is not an open-plan layout. It is simply a very small room.
One-Bedroom Flat, "Character Property"
Peckham, SE5
£510,000
A one-bedroom flat described as having "character." In estate agent parlance, "character" means one of three things: it is old, it is crooked, or it has a problem that the agent does not want to mention directly. In this case, the character in question appears to be a ceiling that is not entirely level, a kitchen that was last updated during the Thatcher era, and a bathroom so small that the toilet and the shower are, according to the photographs, essentially the same fixture. The listing also mentions "original features," which turns out to mean a single exposed brick wall and a door that does not quite close.
Two-Bedroom Flat, "Desirable Location"
Lewisham, SE13
£495,000
The only two-bedroom flat in the entire survey that falls under £500,000, and therefore the closest thing to a bargain that London property currently offers. The "desirable location" is located above a chicken shop, next to a betting shop, and opposite a car park that appears, from the photographs, to be used primarily for activities that one would not wish to encourage. The flat itself is, admittedly, not bad. It has two bedrooms. It has a kitchen. It has a living room that could, with optimism, accommodate a sofa and a television at the same time. It is, by London standards, genuinely quite nice. The fact that this is the ceiling of what £500,000 achieves tells you everything you need to know about the London housing market in 2025.
"The London housing market is the only market in the world in which paying half a million pounds for a place to live is considered, by the people who sell places to live, to be entirely reasonable. It is also the only market in which the phrase 'investment opportunity' is used to describe the act of buying somewhere to sleep."
— Philippa Wentworth-Small, Property Correspondent
One of the most fascinating aspects of London property listings is the language. Estate agents have, over decades of practice, developed a vocabulary that is so thoroughly divorced from reality that it has become, in effect, a code. Every word means something different from what it appears to mean. The London Prat has, over the course of this investigation, compiled a partial glossary.
"Cosy" means small. "Character" means broken. "Desirable location" means near something loud. "Original features" means it hasn't been updated since the previous century. "Period property" means it is old in a way that makes it expensive rather than cheap, which is the opposite of how age usually affects the value of things. "Needs some updating" means it is a disaster. "Stunning views" means you can see other buildings from the window. "Quiet street" means it is quiet now, at 2pm on a Wednesday, but the agent has not visited at 11pm on a Friday, when it will not be quiet at all. "Close to excellent transport links" means there is a bus stop within walking distance. "Sought-after area" means that other people, for reasons that remain unclear, want to live here too, which has driven up the price to a level that makes the area significantly less desirable than it was before everyone decided they wanted to live there.
Philippa interviewed twelve people who had recently bought or attempted to buy a flat in London. The emotional arc of their experiences was, without exception, identical. It began with optimism ("We've saved so much! We can definitely find something lovely!"), progressed through confusion ("Wait, that's how much for THAT?"), moved into denial ("There must be something better. Let's keep looking."), slid into bargaining ("What if we go further out? What about the North?"), and eventually settled into a grim, defeated acceptance that manifested differently in each person but always involved, at some point, the phrase "at least it's ours."
One couple — both in their mid-thirties, both in professional jobs, both earning salaries that would, in most of the country, be considered comfortable — spent eighteen months looking for a two-bedroom flat in South London. They viewed 47 properties. They made offers on 11. They were outbid on 9. They bought the 10th, a flat that was, by their own admission, "not what we imagined." It had one bedroom and a "study," which was, in fact, a cupboard that had been given a desk and a lamp. The study had no window. The couple had painted it a cheerful yellow, which helped. The mortgage payments consumed 45% of their combined income, which did not help.
"People ask us if we regret buying," the man in the couple told Philippa. "We don't. Because the alternative was renting, and renting was costing us more, and we'd have nothing to show for it. So we bought this cupboard-with-a-bedroom, and we pay a mortgage on it, and every month we pay a tiny bit less of it off, and in about thirty years we will own it outright, and by then we'll be 67, and we won't need two bedrooms any more anyway, because our children will have long since moved out and will be paying their own mortgages on their own cupboards, somewhere even further out of London than we are."
The London Prat attempted to interview several estate agents for their perspective on the housing market. Most declined. One agreed, on the condition that he not be named, and spent the interview making increasingly unconvincing arguments for why London property prices were "justified by fundamentals." When asked what the fundamentals were, he said: "Supply and demand." When asked how demand could justify a price of £500,000 for a flat the size of a large cupboard, he said: "People want to live in London." When asked why people want to live in a city where they can barely afford to house themselves, he paused for a long time and then said: "That's... not really my department."
Derek Whitmore, who rents a flat in Bermondsey that costs him £1,400 a month and which has a damp problem that the landlord has been "looking into" for approximately three years, summarised the situation with characteristic brevity: "The housing market in London is broken. Everyone knows it's broken. Nobody who could fix it wants to fix it, because the broken version makes them money. It is, in this sense, working exactly as intended. It's just that the intention is terrible."
Read more property coverage and housing satire at prat.uk.