Property guardianship grows in England as rents push more people in

Property guardianship has moved from edgy experiment to a practical response to a housing market that is leaving more people with few affordable options. Across London and England, residents are moving into otherwise vacant buildings, from former pubs and offices to schools, hospitals, cathedrals and even old police stations, paying discounted occupation or licence fees in return for living in places that are often due for redevelopment. The trade-off is stark: lower costs, but fewer legal protections than a standard tenancy.

Official estimates cited by the Greater London Authority and central government put the number of property guardians in the UK at roughly 5,000 to 7,000, with London holding the lion’s share. That scale is hard to pin down because the sector has no national statistics and local authorities do not collect data across the market, according to a 2022 government study. The same review found that poor conditions often prevailed and that many guardians accepted compromises on standards in exchange for lower-cost space.

The pressure pushing people toward these arrangements is not hard to see. The English Housing Survey 2024-25 said rent payments rose substantially and that a higher proportion of renters were struggling to pay for housing, with private renters spending about 40% of income on rent. ONS data on the London private-rental market, covering April 2024 to March 2025 and then July 2024 to June 2025, showed how fast costs were moving. Average monthly private rent in London reached £2,250 in July 2025, up 6.3% year on year. Rightmove said advertised rents for new properties in the capital hit £2,712 a month in the second quarter of 2025, a record high.

That squeeze helps explain why guardianship is spreading beyond the stereotype of young artists and into a broader group of working renters. The 2022 government study found many guardians entered the sector because they could not access affordable private rented housing, and some were facing homelessness. The practice itself began in the Netherlands in the 1980s as an anti-squatting measure, arrived in the UK in 2001, and later gained wider attention through Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s comedy Crashing, which set young residents inside a disused hospital.

The market is still contested. A 2023 court-related report noted property guardian companies had been taken to court over standards and regulation, and a 2022 Upper Tribunal case upheld fines and rent repayment orders against companies in Hounslow for operating an unlicensed HMO. The Property Guardian Providers Association says its members account for more than 60% of UK guardians accommodation and is pushing to professionalise the sector, but the larger message is unchanged: as rents outpace wages, more people are accepting insecurity as the price of staying in the city.