It’s New Year’s Eve. My flatmate and I are standing at the foot of Alexandra Palace in north London, waiting for the fireworks about to illuminate the capital. We are looking forward to a cheerful night, until we both receive a text from our landlord telling us our flat is being sold and we have a month to find new accommodation. I’ve had better starts to the new year.

That was only the beginning of the drama that would unfold over January. As well as being put out by the abrupt, poorly timed and not-exactly-legitimate eviction text, my flatmates and I then found out that our “landlord” was merely a tenant subletting the rooms in our Islington high-rise to the rest of us. Before we left he threatened to withhold our deposits if we didn’t remove the mould – which had been there when we moved in – from the walls. We argued this was a structural problem and presumably one of the reasons why the real owner wanted to refurbish the place before they sold it. After much wrangling – and scrubbing – we managed to leave with most of our deposits intact.

I didn’t have long to find new digs, so settled on the first room I could afford – in what might as well be the house that George Orwell built. This beige box in east London sets me back £450 a month – a steal in the capital, but if I stand in the middle of my glorified closet I can touch both sides with my fingertips. Big Brother awaits beyond my threshold, as every corner of the house is watched by surveillance cameras, surveyed by the landlord and his staff from an office adjacent to the property.

When I signed my tenancy the landlord claimed the cameras were there to end cleaning disputes. Initially, I thought it wouldn’t be possible to monitor them all the time ; how wrong I was. A couple of months after moving in, I had to dispose of my bed frame – the slats hadn’t been fitted properly and it was so uncomfortable I had bought a new one. I dismantled the frame and was going to phone the council to arrange a collection when one of the landlord’s staff arrived at my door. An interrogation of sorts ensued. The staff member instructed me to leave the frame at their office, which I dutifully did moments later. I didn’t bill the landlord, even though it is a furnished room – they strike me as the kind who would rather evict you than pay for a replacement bed.

‘It was just constant annoyance, really’ ... tenant Danny Egan, whose landlord used his garden for DIY projects. Photograph: Lorne Campbell/Guzelian

In the depths of the housing crisis, such farcical living situations are becoming the norm. Millennials are increasingly obliged to accept appalling conditions to secure affordable rent in UK cities. This problem is not exclusive to the capital, but it’s where it is most pronounced. Living in a box room is nothing new in London – an advert from 2015 listed a “bedroom” that was literally a cupboard under the stairs, available for £500 a month. It read: “We are looking for a friendly, open-minded and outgoing person to join our house share.” “Open-minded” seems to be a euphemism for being an easy mark willing to live like Harry Potter. But it is almost luxurious compared to the “toilet rooms” on the market: in March 2017, a studio flat in Kilburn with a toilet inches from the bed was placed on the market for £520 a month. Property experts branded it a “cupboard with plumbing”. In Hendon, one studio flat came complete with a toilet in the kitchen cupboard for £546 a month – and you had to share a shower with other tenants.

Jerome and Dwight, both 23, have been friends since they were children in Hertfordshire. They share a room in Plaistow, east London that would be a decent size for one person, but their combined belongings leave no room for Feng shui. Jerome’s side of the room is cluttered with fake thumbs, stacks of playing cards and padlocks – part of his repertoire as a magician, he assures me. Dwight’s side is more orderly. He sleeps on the floor and his many bottles of nutritional supplements are arranged in an orderly line on top of his side of the shared wardrobe.

Dwight insists their arrangement, though not ideal, saves them money: “That extra half of the rent you can spend on other things – you can treat yourself,” he says. Jerome and Dwight are settled in Plaistow, but they had a torrid time in a previous room-share in Seven Sisters. “We had a couple playing the piano really loudly at night. People on the other floors were smoking marijuana and probably other substances. We had the people in the room next to us banging – you know, sexual banging,” Dwight says.

Their own sex lives have been affected by bunking together – some of it intentionally: “Dwight was having a girl round one time and as a joke I bought flowers, candles and some condoms and scattered them all around his bed,” Jerome says. “I had to stay around Camden in a hostel a couple of times, to get out of his way.”

“We never saw our landlord, apart from when he wanted the rent – he was a bit of an arsehole, to be honest,” Dwight says. What happened if you were late? “His method was sending a big beastly guy to our door to get the money.”

Unscrupulous landlords are a common problem at the bottom end of the market. According to Citizens Advice, most tenants do not have a right in law to a written tenancy agreement in England and Wales – and some landlords take advantage of this lack of protection. Danny Egan, 34, has endured a string of bad tenancies in Leeds. “I moved into an apartment and it was under the proviso that all the utilities were included,” he says. But at the end of the tenancy the landlord withheld his deposit, claiming he owed money for the utilities. Having no contract, Egan could not prove the utilities were included, and lost his deposit. In another property, he and his wife were renting from a man who let himself into the flat whenever he liked. “I came home from work to find him in the flat, just pottering about,” he says. “He used our garden for his DIY projects. He was always there, hammering away; it was just constant annoyance really.”

‘Every corner of the house is watched by surveillance cameras’ ... Photograph: Suntorn Niamwhan/EyeEm

Even when there are written agreements in place, that doesn’t always guarantee protection from ludicrous living situations. Alexa, 24, did not want to provide her surname. She has also had bad luck with her tenancies. In late 2017, she left her flat-share after becoming exasperated with one of her flatmates. “The last straw was when she rented our house out to a film crew,” she says. Alexa went house-hunting with her sister and found a flat in Hackney Wick, which she says was close to a motorway, derelict and like “East Berlin before the wall came down”. “Thanks, but no thanks,” she told the woman who was showing her around. However, the woman was adamant that she wanted them there and offered to cut the price of the rent if they moved in. Alexa and her sister paid up and moved in.

“They’d completely done this place out – given it a decking balcony. It looked amazing,” she says. “But then mould started creeping up the walls - it was super damp.” Her sister was on the ground floor; the damp caused the skirtingboard to lift off the floor. “Big slugs ended up coming through the floorboards and into the room.” They contacted the company managing the flat, but it refused to help. “The place was rotting from the outside in,” Alexa says. “The floor was about to fall in. We needed to leave.” She sought advice from Citizens Advice, who told them they were still obliged to pay rent until their contract expired.

Alexa and her sister eventually found a two-bedroom flat in Hackney, after giving notice on what they now call the “mould flat”. They paid the deposit and were three days away from moving in when the letting agent told them that the flat’s occupant had not made alternative arrangements and was refusing to leave. Alexa says that all the letting agent could do was express how “gutted” he was for them. She lost her temper. “I don’t tend to really scream at people, but the word ‘gutted’ is like you failed an X Factor audition and haven’t got through to the next round. But this was: I’m ruining your life and you’ll be homeless in three days.” Alexa and her sister had to remain at the “mould flat” for another five days until they could find somewhere else. They are now relatively comfortable in Brockley, south-east London.

‘For someone to go through your stuff – I felt violated’ ... tenant Kate Sutton, whose landlord barged into her flat. Photograph: Linda Nylind/Guardian

Kate Sutton, 21, a freelance set designer, lives in Clapton in a four-story Victorian house that she says tilts like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Sutton doesn’t have a written agreement with her landlord, but accepted the property because the deposit and rent were relatively cheap. In June, she arranged to start paying her rent every four weeks, rather than weekly. But despite the agreement, her landlord started harassing her for a week’s missed payment. “He would message me every two days saying I had to pay the money, and I was like, ‘We’ve made an agreement that my rent wasn’t due for another four weeks.’”

The landlord took drastic action. “One day when I was at work, he came around with two other people. He came in and went through all my stuff, chucked all of it into the garden and changed the lock.” Sutton says important documents relating to a business she has just registered with Companies House were lost in the ransacking. A flatmate helped her break back in, but the next day the landlord came barging into her room. “I was actually naked and getting dressed for work. He said, ‘I’m going to call the police. You broke down the door.’” Sutton didn’t go to work that day and lost a day’s pay. She says the whole experience has affected her mental health: she fears going out because he has threatened to come back. “I’m a very positive person,” Sutton says, “but it literally felt like I had hit rock bottom. I had missed out on work because I was scared to leave the house. For someone to go through your stuff – apart from being robbed – it doesn’t really happen. I felt violated.”

She says she is looking for somewhere else to live, but will remain in London for her work. Before moving to another flat she will sign a written tenancy agreement and pay her deposit into a government-backed tenancy deposit scheme (TDP). “I guess I’ve been quite naive in the past,” she says. “Everything is a lesson to be learned and sometimes, unfortunately, you have to learn the hard way.”

With so many tenants in our inner cities having to accept appalling living conditions to find affordable rent, what are the solutions? In 2014, former Labour party leader Ed Miliband tabled a housing policy that included limits on rent increases and a standard three-year-tenancy. The Tories commandeered the policy recently, which is ironic, as their former chairman Grant Shapps derided it as a “short-term gimmick” with “Venezuelan-style rent controls”.

Gimmick or not, extended tenancies and rent controls are only a short-term solution. What should we be doing in the long term? For housing campaigner Glyn Robbins, “there is no solution that doesn’t begin with council housing”.

I meet Robbins outside the White Collar Factory near Old Street station, where we walk to Quaker Court, the council estate he manages. On the way he shows me a new luxury housing development opposite Quaker Court called The Featherstone, which is marketing a three-bedroom apartment for £1.6m.

In his office, Robbins says we are going to be in this “cyclical crisis” until we restore council housing to the policy mainstream. “The point about council housing – and it’s often overlooked – is it’s now effectively the only genuinely affordable rented tenure, particularly in London and other big cities … Most private tenants would have your arm off for those sorts of protections from rent hikes and eviction. We’ve got a market that even the government admits is broken and dysfunctional in all kinds of ways.”

Robbins is tentatively optimistic that Labour and the Conservatives are converging on the issue. Theresa May announced in October 2017 plans to spend £2bn on a “new generation” of council houses and affordable homes for rent. However, Robbins says that so far there have been no deeds to back-up the words.

The unlikelihood of securing a council home, coupled with the uncertainty of a freelance income, means I’ll probably stay in my box room for the foreseeable future – if I remain in the capital. Back in my home town, Oldham, there are rooms three times as big as mine for £250 a month, bills included. With Manchester just down the road from there, I’m thinking, like many others I spoke to for this piece, is London really worth it?