Rent Boy

Twenty years of renting in London left Pete May with a life counted out in cardboard boxes, carried up stairs to one top-floor flat after another. He lived in Turnpike Lane, West Kensington, Hammersmith, Parsons Green, Fulham Broadway, Camberwell, Neasden, Westbourne Park, Victoria, Elephant and Castle and Highbury, and slipped off a different rung of the property ladder in nearly every one.

Along the way come asbestos-ridden tower blocks, a pink shopping centre, flying vases, arrests in the council chamber, evictions, changed locks, cockroaches, mice, overflowing loos, withheld deposits, designer broom cupboards, hapless DIY and the queues outside every room advertised in the Standard. It is a comic memoir that anyone who has ever rented in the capital will recognise with a wince and a laugh, and a cheerful corrective to glossy dreams of home ownership.