118 ·^ COSMOPOLITAN
faded. As she scoured the internet, armed
with a calculator, pen and paper, she just
couldn’t make the sums work. Even a
shoebox-sized room in a dilapidated shared
house would set her back 60% of her salary.
With commuting and food, well... it just
couldn’t work. Her parents said she was lucky
- she’d been offered another job, much closer
to home, too. She could take that. Save up.
She knew they were right, but London had
been her dream since before university. It
was where attitudes to mental-health
treatment were changing quickest, and
where she could learn and progress faster.
This is the state of affairs in 2017. The
housing market is broken, by our own
government’s admission. Rental costs are
spiralling, not just in London but in Bristol,
Manchester and across the South East. There’s
a mammoth shortage of social housing, and
the number of affordable homes built fell to
a 24-year low in 2016. The median rent in
Mitali
“We’re all going
to skill-swap. It’s
great we’ve got
such diverse
careers”
Not far away in Surrey, Stephanie Dale was
sitting down to dinner with her parents. She
knew she was lucky to have a supportive
family, who put her up and allowed her to
come and go as she pleased while she set about
starting and growing her own video-editing
business – making the two-hour round-trip
commute to a part-time job in London three
days a week to pay the bills. Still, as she went
to bed in her old childhood room, unwanted
thoughts plagued her. Mainly: would she ever
be able to afford to move out and move on
with her life? Her friends, now 30, like her,
had started considering their exodus from the
city – just as she was trying to get in. Had she
left it too late to hit the big time in the capital?
Meanwhile, 200 miles away in Cheshire,
Charlotte Hampson sat cross-legged in front
of her laptop, doing the maths. The elation
of being offered her first permanent job
after university, as a mental-health support
worker for adolescents in east London, had
T
he bus pulled away, and Sophie Lane burst
into tears. As the last chugs of exhaust fumes
faded into the darkness, and the tail lights
grew dimmer, she wearily pulled out her
phone and called the only person who
might listen at 11 o’clock at night.
“Mum..?”
“Sophie, are you OK? What’s wrong?”
her mother asked anxiously, 190 miles
away in Shropshire.
“I missed the last bus,” she said, wearily.
She then spent the next 15 minutes listing the
frustrations of her day: working late to impress her boss at
the music-industry internship in central London she’d fought
so hard to get; train delays to Crawley because of ongoing
strikes; getting off at the wrong stop in a fog of exhaustion;
missing the last bus back to her grandparents’ house three
miles away (the closest people she knew near London); and
knowing the only option was a £20 taxi journey – taking her daily cost for
commuting to £50, which was nearly half of what she had earned that day.
“I can’t do this any more. It’s been months,” sighed Sophie, calmer after
a quick cry. “There has to be another way.”
Baskets, £40.49
for two; vintage
mirror, £52; chest of
drawers, £50, all Ebay
