Why Are Londoners Building Slums in Their Backyards?

Looking out over my friend Anne-Fay’s garden fence, we agreed the building work on the house opposite couldn’t possibly be for a family home. The back garden was now almost totally covered with a large brick shack, its still soft mortar beaten into streaks by the rain. The small, pitched-roofed Victorian building behind – what British people call a two-up, two-down due to its room layout – had been turned into a six-up, two down, squared off into a top-heavy, Lego-like mess with extra rooms on the upper floors. Housed in a poor neighborhood of Newham near the Olympic Park, where rents have risen 39 percent since last year despite house prices stagnating, it seems likely that my friend’s neighborhood is now succumbing to London’s latest housing scandal, a craze for quasi-legal backyard building.

All over London, so-called sheds with beds have been cropping up like toadstools, presented to planning authorities as family home extensions but then surreptitiously rented out to strangers. Many of these are poky warrens let out to the desperate, part of the growing number of Londoners who have lost hope of gaining social housing and are forced to make do with whatever they can get. The government has vowed to tear down these new shanties, with UK housing minister Grant Shapps and some press cameras even joining in a raid on one. It is unlikely that they would be such a problem, however, if the government hadn’t cut funding for social housing by 50 percent, pushing poor renters into the private sector.