Websites for finding a room/flat to rent in London? ?

In my experience Gumtree is always the best.

I have tried easyroommate.com, moveflat.com, and thelondonroom.com, and I always end up back at Gumtree. It’s the best known and it’s free both to advertise and to respond to ads, so it figures that more people use it.

However, I wonder if you are perhaps not very familiar with London.

For starters, it’s very, very difficult to find somewhere to rent for such a short period of time. Really, your only option is to find a room in a share house which operates on the principle of not having any contracts but you find someone to take your room when you want to move out. That’s fine if you want to spend a whole month getting home at 6:00 every evening so you can do viewings.

Second, I doubt that you’d find a room in Zone 1 anyway – in general there aren’t that many shared properties. You may find a room in Zone 2 but it will be expensive – is it worth paying £100 in rent more per month just to save yourself five minutes on the tube?

Now, with regard to “I heard the north is quite rough” … well, I really don’t know where to start here. Do you know how big North London is? Like in any large area, there are good parts and bad parts. Have you heard of Hampstead, Belsize Park … you might have because they are really posh and there are loads of rich and famous people there … well, they’re all in North London.

There is nowhere that I really would avoid. I have lived in many different parts of London and some of them are not so nice as others. But none of them are really dangerous provided that you take reasonable precautions. If you plan to be out late at night then I would advise that you look for a place with a bus stop nearby so that you don’t have to walk too far alone in the dark, but this applies as much in a posh area as it does in a poor one.

Statistically South East London is the most dangerous part, but statistics are a great thing … they might tell you how many people have been stabbed, but they don’t tell you how many of those people were asking for it by getting involved with gangs or drug dealing or something. I currently live in South East London and I really like it.