Hahaha, confirmed.

One of my nieces and a friend of our daughter studied in London. One of them didn't even have a window in her room and she still paid more than 400 Pounds a month.

I study in a tiny (280k) people city in northern Germany. and rent for a tiny one-room apartment without window is — if you want to get an apartment without waiting for years – also around 350€. Not cheap.

All rents anywhere in Europe worth living in 2015 are expensive - but London really is one of those cities in its own league.

Just to clarify a couple of things:

350€ is about £250

£400 won't get you a tiny one-room apartment without windows, that would be amazing! It'll get you a tiny windowless room, in a pretty grim house shared with 3 or 4 (or 5, or 6) other people, in an awful or really out-in-the-sticks location. (You can optimise by substituting some of the factors, but any way you slice it, a £400 room anywhere in Greater London is not going to be good).

Probably the baseline for a studio apartment (I've never seriously looked so could be a bit off) is £800-£900 per month for anywhere resembling a decent location.

"£400 won't get you a tiny one-room apartment without windows, that would be amazing! It'll get you a tiny windowless room,"

yes, they lived in rooms, not appartements indeed.

350 euro is £250.

£400 is 560 euro.

A London resident will need to pay council tax (about £900 per year for the property) and transport (who knows; about £200 per month for zones 1-5).

That's nothing. I have 5 windows and 2 actual bedrooms although one is debatable and that commands an extra £1100 a month on top of that.

Going back to 2002 my first flat was a place under a betting shop in Islington and had a door that we couldn't open and had no idea where it went to and that was £600/month. Oh and it smelled of piss and shit.

Fairly standard for such a low rent, she's lucky she didn't have mice skittering over her feet in her kitchen...

I think the live ones cost more.

400 pounds a month in london, that is bloody cheap !

Though not having a window is illegal

From what I've heard and read from others, getting a decent place at an affordable rent mostly is a problem limited to the inner-city boroughs. Croydon for example is quite affordable and well-connected in terms of public transport (20 minutes to Victoria or Waterloo).

Croydon is unusual, since those trains (actually to Victoria or London Bridge) run all night. A monthly pass is £210 though (zones 1-5), compared to £123 (zones 1-2) for nearer the centre [1].

In most other outer boroughs, getting home after midnight is either very expensive (taxi/minicab, including Uber) or very slow (two or more night buses). Most people I know -- in their 20s -- prefer a shared house closer to the centre.

All this will change in September, when (if?) the night tube starts running on Friday and Saturday nights.

[1] https://tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/documents/tube-dlr-lo-adul...

Night bus coverage out to the limits of the tube is pretty good (e.g. I used to live on the Harringay ladder and the N29 runs direct from central London; honestly I'm not sure the night tube would make getting there at night any quicker, since it's right where St Ann's Road (Green Lanes) station on the Picadilly line isn't. The night bus to where I currently live goes all the way out to Enfield.

It's often not too bad if you're leaving from Soho, but redevelopment has pushed lots of entertainment out of Soho, so I'm likely to be starting my journey home from Camden, Islington, Shoreditch or Waterloo.

If the tube ran at night, I could reasonably stay out late in Zone 4+! I can't remember the last time I did that. (Why might I want to? Because people live there, and have BBQs etc.)

yes, but then you're in croydon

Indeed, and you hear these kinds of suggestions all the time.

It sums up the absurdity of the situation when it's genuinely and routinely proposed that a solution to ridiculous cost of living in a city is to live.. not in the city.

I travelled to Croydon a couple of times recently and it was never just 20 minutes. The trains are hardly ever on time. Also, "quite affordable" still means around £900 for a 1 bed flat + another £110 or so for council tax.

The impression I've gotten from various maps is that Croydon is fairly high-crime. To what degree is this really true?

Unless you are rich, this applies to most "alpha world cities" to varying degrees.