It seemed like the flat-share of my dreams. Just 30 minutes from work, only £850 a month (bills included) and in chi-chi Hampstead, north London, with its bars and restaurants and the glorious heath a stone’s throw away.
I snapped the letting agent’s hand off and moved in last summer.
It was an HMO (a house in multiple occupation for those of you lucky enough not to know), with flats on each of the three floors.
Mine was in the basement and consisted of two bedrooms sharing a single kitchen, and one self-contained studio, then occupied by two nurses I rarely saw. Yes, there were silverfish in the bathroom and the boiler kept going out, but it was blissfully quiet. While friends complained about nightmare commutes and nervous walks home in other parts of London, I really thought I’d fallen on my feet.
Then, three months later, Lila moved in. Feisty, Scottish, bubbly, twenty-something Lila. The first I knew of her arrival was when the letting agent called me up at work to ask for the wifi password.
My ‘new flatmate’ was already in the house, she said, and wanted to get online. She was a ‘content creator’, the agent told me with a laugh, adding that she hoped the new arrangement would ‘all go well’. Later, I wondered whether that chuckle and those words were trying to tell me something.
Not that the letting agent took much interest in the reality of what we did for a living. Lila had been told I was a primary school teacher, not a 22-year-old junior reporter.
Lila told me she was in ‘phone sales’ and was ‘self-employed’. I didn’t ask who had provided the letting agency with job references in that case.
When Eleanor Mann first moved in to her new flat in Hampstead, she thought it was the place of her dreams, until 'content creator' Lila moved in three months later
When I first caught sight of her in our shared kitchen, I thought how beautiful she was, in a manufactured kind of way. Her long, red hair was perfectly blow-dried. She had long, pink nails, glowing skin, fake eyelashes and pouty, filler-enhanced lips. Her voice was low with a pretty, lilting accent.
But she was also quite intense, and, once she found out about my job, was slightly shifty in my presence, too. She didn’t seem to want to chat for long or even meet my eye when we passed in the corridor.
Any fun ideas of cooking dinner together were snuffed out within hours of us meeting. No matter. I wasn’t there to make a best friend. Besides, she seemed to be out most nights.
When we were in at the same time, it was hard to ignore the noises that came from her bedroom. It was right next to mine and the walls were paper-thin. But, new to the capital after growing up in Essex, I told myself this was all part of living independently in London. I just needed to adjust.
What was unsettling, however, was the sudden appearance, in the space of a single week, of strange men in the flat.
Initially, I had assumed the dark-haired man in his early 20s was her boyfriend. He would eat noodles or cake in the kitchen and not even attempt to clean up after himself.
But then there was a fair-haired man of about 35, whom I bumped into when he was letting himself into our flat, seemingly knowing the code to our passcode-locked front door. He had pushed past me without a word, going straight to Lila’s room. Cue those bedroom noises.
Was she cheating on the dark-haired guy with the blond, or did she have an open relationship? Internally, I cringed at being an unsuspecting witness, but I also knew her ‘love life’ was none of my business. As the weeks went by, however, I began to sense there was something genuinely off about her. I couldn’t find her online at all, so perhaps her phone sales were done under a pseudonym. Or was she selling something else on platforms I didn’t want to access?
It was only when I switched to night shifts a week after Lila’s arrival that the pieces fell into place. During the day, as I tried to catch up on sleep, it became increasingly clear her ‘online sales work’ was ‘live’ and involved rather more of a ‘performance’ than I’d been led to believe.
'Bedroom noises' and 'loud phone sex' coming from Lila's room would disturb Eleanor – even in the middle of the day. (Picture posed by model)
Even in the middle of the day, I’d be woken by Lila having loud phone sex with posh-sounding middle-aged men, whom she’d put on speaker. In fact, after that first week she didn’t seem to care what I heard or saw. Sometimes she’d even be in the kitchen, entertaining callers as she clanged about making food. It was relentless. Caller after caller, man after man. The low, indistinguishable tones of different ‘clients’ at the end of the phone became the background soundtrack to what was meant to be my home.
Once I heard her bossing a man about sternly. ‘Say my name twice,’ she ordered. ‘Lila, Lila!’ a man at the other end of the phone groaned.
The flat became a madhouse. Over the course of that second week, I overheard enough of her conversations to work out she worked at a strip club in west London in the evenings, picking up clients there to make money on the side. Some she only spoke to on the phone, while for others, those calls were the precursor to a meeting.
It turned out that the dark-haired man was a regular fixture in her life – whether a boyfriend or her pimp I don’t know, but he didn’t seem to mind about the other men she saw.
His complete disrespect for our flat was frightening. A constant smell of cannabis began to waft into my room from the little patch of patio outside. Lila began to use my bathroom – she had an en-suite in her own room – and leave the kitchen sink full of dirty water.
One night, shortly after I had started back on day shifts, I was woken at 3.38am by the sound of sex being negotiated and ordered in the frankest, crudest terms on the other side of my bedroom wall.
Lying as still as I could, I listened to every vulgar, offensive word of the phone conversation Lila was having with an otherwise well-spoken man.
He told her his girlfriend was a ‘slut’ because she had gone out with her friends in Knightsbridge and hadn’t replied to his messages all night. Therefore, as a form of revenge, he was going to have sex with ‘a prostitute’.
‘You’re a legend,’ said the posh guy on the phone. ‘It’s not the same without you, Lila. Honestly, she’s being a west London slut and, I’ve got to be honest, I hate the idea of her with other guys, but I can’t be a jealous p***k. What do I do?’
‘My honest advice is you’re drunk and make the decision in the morning,’ Lila lazily advised. She moved to the kitchen. I heard the microwave ping.
‘She’s going to shag anyone who wants to spend a lot of money on her... When am I going to see you Lila? Should I come round? Should I bring condoms?’
‘Yeah, bring condoms,’ she replied lightly. ‘And don’t stress about your girlfriend. You go out with a lot of girls, too.’
The client at the end of the phone proceeded to flip-flop between calling her a liar, a whore and finally a legend again, before telling her he loved her so much and hanging up the phone.
I lay still in shock. I finally knew for certain: Lila was selling sex from our flat. The man who had let himself in and made his way to her bedroom, the men I heard through the speakers of her phone and laptop, were not her ‘friends’ and certainly weren’t her dates. They were punters – and the prostitute was Lila.
It wasn’t technically illegal, but it was surely putting me and my other flatmates in a horrible position, one that didn’t feel particularly safe.
On top of that, it broke six different terms of our tenancy agreement, which clearly stated, among other things, that we couldn’t use any of the rooms for business purposes, and were not to disturb or be a nuisance to the other flatmates.
The things I had overheard made me feel grubby, vulnerable and, most of all, scared. Surely the landlord had a moral duty, if not a legal one, to protect the tenants?
And I felt scared for Lila, too – no matter how feisty she appeared, no matter how often my more liberal friends told me that ‘sex work is work’, surely no one wants to earn a living this way?
Little did I know, as I struggled to fall asleep night after night, bedroom door firmly locked, that the letting agency would end up siding with her, not me.
Although Eleanor had no problem with challenging difficult housemates in the past, she says there was no point arguing with Lila as she obviously didn't care. (Picture posed by models)
I don’t think I’m a prude or especially sheltered. I grew up in Essex and studied history at university with the goal of becoming a journalist.
Having previously lived in Brentford, west London, in another difficult flatshare – with an overbearing French landlady – I thought I had a pretty thick skin for challenging housemates.
But this was different. This felt as though the seedier world I had only come across from the safe perspective of work was invading the place where I slept and wanted to call home. And there was no point in telling Lila I could hear every word of her performance and could she please stop – because, clearly, she already knew I could hear everything and just didn’t care.
That 3.38am call, however, was the last straw. I got up for work three hours later and decided to message my letting agent detailing the situation – from the sex work to the drugs and the strange men.
‘I’d like to make an anonymous complaint,’ I wrote. ‘This situation with the new tenant who has moved into the room opposite me is very bad. She is not a content creator, she is a sex worker . . . I feel very uncomfortable and unsafe.’
The agent’s reply? ‘Call the police if you feel scared,’ she WhatsApp-ed me, before turning our chat settings to disappearing messages – trying to ensure I’d have no evidence of sending the initial complaint.
Then she claimed she was unable to confront Lila because it would be ‘discrimination’. Thankfully, I screen-shotted everything. I was begging the agent to help me, but she simply didn’t want to know.
In desperation, I sent a message to my parents. As I sobbed tears of frustration and exhaustion on FaceTime, they offered to book me an Airbnb if I wanted to leave there and then. Instead, determined not to let the letting agent off the hook, I messaged the agency again urging them to do something.
It took them three weeks to respond but, again, there was no sympathy and certainly no action. Indeed, the person who should leave, they implied, was me – though they made it quite clear I would still have to pay that month’s rent and forfeit my deposit, since I’d be breaking my six-month contract one month early. By then I was already gone. I couldn’t live feeling forever scared in the flat, putting off going home after work, feeling my stomach drop as I entered the code to the front door in case she was on the phone. Lying there sleepless in case a strange man was paying for sex just feet away from me on the other side of my bedroom wall.
I found a place in Ealing, west London, twice as far from work, for a significantly higher rent, but took it and got out.
Now, I wonder if the relative cheapness of the flat in Hampstead had anything to do with the use of that other bedroom.
I was lucky enough to have parents who rushed to my help. They knew it was a dangerous situation to stay in, and they helped me with the new deposit (the Hampstead agent did indeed refuse to pay it back).
But for the many other young adults trapped in London in nightmarish living situations, there may be no simple way out. For young women like Lila, there may be no other way to pay the rent.
London is gripped by a housing crisis, where tenants are shoved like livestock into poorly-maintained rooms and charged through the nose by greedy landlords. The average rental for a single room in London is £985 a month, while more than a third of all HMOs are in the capital.
Those few weeks of hell summed up everything that was wrong with renting in London. All that matters to landlords of HMOs is money: you have no rights to peace or security, and if it goes wrong you’ll need generous parents who can bail you out.
I loved living in Hampstead, but not in a flat like that. For all its trendy cafes and pretty ponds, the seedy side of life felt far too close for comfort.
- Lila’s name has been changed to protect her identity.
