With rising rents, restrictive tenancy agreements and the ever-present prospect of eviction, Britain’s 11 million renters face obstacles that homeowners rarely consider. Yet a defiant, creative culture of making space your own is flourishing, within the rules and sometimes beyond them.
Mariam Tahir has lived in seven rented flats in nine years. Each one arrived furnished with magnolia walls, beige carpets and the kind of pendant light that suggests no thought was given to the space below it. In each, she has done roughly the same things: hung curtains that actually reach the floor, installed removable wallpaper on at least one wall, filled shelves with plants, prints and the accumulated objects of a life that she is not willing to put in storage just because someone else owns the building she sleeps in.
‘People say: just wait until you own your own place. But I have been renting since I was twenty-two,’ says Mariam, now thirty-one and living in Sheffield. ‘I am not going to spend a decade of my life in a space that does not feel like mine. That is not living. That is waiting.’
Mariam is one of approximately 11 million people in England who rent their home; a figure that has risen sharply over the past two decades as house prices have outpaced wages, deposit requirements have grown, and the social contract around homeownership has quietly, devastatingly fractured. For many of them, renting is not a temporary arrangement but a permanent condition. And the question of how to feel at home in a space you do not own (legally constrained, financially pressured, potentially evictable) is one that is generating a remarkable culture of creative ingenuity.
The Legal Landscape
Most standard Assured Shorthold Tenancy agreements in England prohibit tenants from making alterations to the property without the landlord’s written consent; a category that has traditionally been interpreted to include painting walls, drilling holes for pictures, and any structural changes. The Tenant Fees Act 2019 improved protections in some areas, but did not fundamentally change the architecture of a system that treats the tenant as a temporary occupant rather than a person making a home.
The Renters (Reform) Bill, which has moved slowly through Parliament in various iterations, promises to abolish Section 21 ‘no-fault’ evictions, long regarded by housing campaigners as the single most destabilising feature of the private rental sector. Until and unless such protections become law and are reliably enforced, millions of renters continue to exist in a state of chronic domestic insecurity that has significant consequences for their mental health, their sense of identity and their willingness to invest, financially or emotionally, in the spaces they inhabit.
‘There is a profound psychological cost to living somewhere you know you might have to leave at two months’ notice,’ says Dr Anya Brennan, a sociologist at the University of Manchester who studies housing precarity and wellbeing. ‘People describe not wanting to get too attached. Not bothering to make something beautiful because it feels foolish, even painful, to love a place that is not yours. That is a kind of chronic grief that we do not talk about nearly enough.’
“People describe not wanting to get too attached to a space they might have to leave. That is a kind of chronic grief we do not talk about enough.”, Dr Anya Brennan, University of Manchester
The Renter’s Design Toolkit
Partly out of economic necessity and partly out of a defiant insistence on dignity, renters across the UK have developed a remarkably sophisticated toolkit for personalising spaces they do not own. Removable peel-and-stick wallpaper, developed originally for American apartments and now widely sold by UK retailers including Graham & Brown and Superfresco Easy, has transformed the renter’s relationship to blank magnolia walls. Temporary adhesive picture hooks, Command strips and their equivalents, have made gallery walls possible without leaving a mark.
Freestanding furniture that travels with the tenant (rather than the fixed, built-in storage that ownership enables) has become a design category in its own right. IKEA, whose business model has always been aligned with transient living, reports that its freestanding shelving and modular storage systems are disproportionately popular among renters. Second-hand and vintage furniture, often more characterful and more affordable than new pieces, is also rising sharply in the renter demographic.
Textiles, which require no adhesives and leave no marks, have become perhaps the most powerful tool in the renter’s repertoire. Curtains hung from freestanding poles. Rugs laid over carpets that were never chosen. Throws and cushions that shift the palette of a room without touching a single fixture. These are the means by which renters reassert the basic human need to live somewhere that looks and feels like them.
The Landlord Question
Not all landlords are unresponsive to their tenants’ needs for personalisation. Research by the Nationwide Building Society found that properties where landlords explicitly permitted reasonable decorating (fresh paint colours, picture hanging, garden planting) had significantly lower tenant turnover than comparable properties with rigid no-alteration policies. The economic logic is clear: tenants who are invested in a space look after it better and stay longer, reducing void periods and management costs.
A number of tenant and landlord advocacy organisations, including the National Residential Landlords Association, now actively encourage landlords to adopt more flexible approaches to personalisation, framing it as good business practice rather than generosity. Some forward-thinking landlords have gone further, providing a decorating allowance at the start of a tenancy or agreeing to repaint in the tenant’s chosen colour in exchange for a longer commitment.
These are, for now, exceptions rather than norms. But they point toward a different model of renting; one in which the tenant is understood not as a transient occupant but as a person making a genuine home. Until that understanding becomes the structural default, Britain’s renters will continue doing what they have always done: making beauty where they can, making do where they must, and making it theirs one removable strip at a time.