Rent Boy

For over 20 years now, Pete May has lived in rented properties around London, all of which have left much to be desired. Rent Boy is the hilarious tale of his odyssey through a world of asbestos-ridden tower blocks, pink shopping centres, voluminous knickers being posted through letter boxes, flying vases, arrests in the council chamber, evictions, changed locks, cockroaches, mice, overflowing loos, withheld deposits, house rotas, designer broom cupboards, inept DIY, Sloane Rangers, ?trustafarians?, downwardly mobile squatters, subsidence and endless queues outside any room advertised in the Evening Standard. Pete May has measured out his life not in coffee spoons but by endless boxes humped up endless stairs to endless top-floor flats. He has been mistaken for a genuine rough sleeper by the picture library at The Guardian and once lived in the most dangerous tower block in Britain. He has endured two recessions, numerous booms, smug estate agents and implacable building societies, always with home ownership being just out of reach.
From Turnpike Lane to West Kensington, Hammersmith, Parsons Green, Fulham Broadway, Camberwell, Neasden, Westbourne Park, Victoria, Elephant and Castle and Highbury, he has fallen off a different rung of the property ladder in just about every part of the metropolis. Rent Boy is the perfect property antidote for the Hello! Generation as Pete May invites you into his lovely slums.