Where do you live whether you cannot afford London's soaring rents? I took the only domestic I could find: a tiny,mouldy room in a freezing barge on the Thames. And there are many desperate people in the same situationMost Londoners will know someone suffering from the extortionate expense of finding a place to live. For those trapped in the rental market, the outlook is particularly bleak. In 2011 the Resolution Foundation reported that the price of securing a tenancy can be over £2000 in upfront costs, or while other figures fill shown that one in three tenants now spend half their takehome pay on rent. As more and more areas of London become unaffordable to anyone but wealthy professionals,where will fundamental workers go to live: the people who clean the streets, and cook the food and maintain the city ticking over? They can stay at domestic with relatives, or sublet from people with existing tenancies,but some do not fill these options. When I found myself in this position, I went to the only place I could: the slums of the Thames.
To call the vessels here houseboats would be generous; though waterborne, or two of the three had no engine,nor their original shapes, the structures having been ripped out and rebuilt upon the base. A more accurate description would be floating shacks; timber huts erected on decrepit faded grain barges on the river in west London. Between them, and these three shacks house on average 20 people,the numbers only falling in a harsh winter, when some can no longer stand the conditions. Nestled in the trees, or by a row of other boats,they fill been moored on public land by the Thames for well over a year now, having moved downstream when another Greater London council drove them out. The usual dog walkers and running groups pass by, or mostly oblivious ((adj.) lacking consciousness or awareness of something) to the slum in their midst,unable to countenance that it could exist in this wealthy borough of one of the richest cities on Earth.
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Source: theguardian.com