The slicing and dicing of housing is redefining the idea of home. Those forced to live in ever smaller spaces describe how this changes their lives

Jenny had run out of choices when she first walked into her basement studio flat last spring. The charity worker had been kicked out of her shared home in Bristol when her landlord sold it. She was on benefits, having been signed off sick with post-traumatic stress and anxiety after giving evidence as a victim of crime.

While being put up on a friend’s sofa, Jenny, who is 35 but does not want to use her real name for fear of jeopardising her tenancy, scoured online sites for rooms within her budget. Housing benefit claimants in the city can generally receive up to £300 a month for shared accommodation. “Rooms here were going for anywhere from £400, but even if I had that money, I could be rejected because I’m on benefits,” Jenny says.

Desperate and confined to private rented accommodation (Bristol has more than 11,000 families on the waiting list for social housing), Jenny learned that she just about qualified for the higher allowance for a one-bedroom flat, as a single occupant aged 35 or over. This pushed her budget above £500 a month. After finding her landlord on a Facebook community group, Jenny had a home. The payoff would be space. “What I didn’t know is how isolated and trapped it would make me feel,” she says.

Jenny pays £475 a month, excluding bills, for one of the smallest of nine flats carved out of a Victorian terraced house on a busy road. One of them is not more than a glorified shed crammed into the garden. She doesn’t know the floor area, but planning documents show that her room, which includes a double bed, kitchen sink, hob, oven, washing machine and a clothes rail, covers 15 sq metres. The tiny, windowless bathroom adds 3 sq m. Her whole home is barely bigger than the average living room and would fit 14 times on to a tennis court.

“When I come home I feel this sense of doom,” Jenny says. “I can’t have the window open because I’m on a noisy, polluted road, and I can’t have the blinds open because there’s a bus stop right there. I’ve had people weeing on my doorstep, doing crack outside my front door.” There are practical challenges. Jenny eats on her bed, which, like her clothes and everything else she owns, smells of whatever she cooks. Without proper storage, anything out of place can make the flat feel chaotic. The hum of the fridge keeps her awake at night.

“I think that even if someone didn’t suffer from anxiety or depression, living in this flat would affect them mentally,” she says, wondering how she might start to recover in a house like this. “You feel it – oh my God, the air is so … heavy.”

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Britain’s housing crisis is pushing more of us into shoebox homes. Houses are shrinking, too. In 2014, the average new-build in the UK was 76 sq m, the smallest in Europe (Danish homes were almost double the size, research by the University of Cambridge showed). The average living room in a house built in the 1970s, meanwhile, was 25 sq m, compared to 17 today, according to LABC Warranty, which provides warranties for new-builds.

But it is the slicing and dicing of houses – and, increasingly, office buildings – that is redefining the whole idea of home, recalling a dark era of tenements and rookeries. For some residents, it is a money-saving endurance test of the sort many of us consider a rite of passage. For others, it can feel like the walls are closing in and there is no way out. “I’m lucky I have a roof over my head but that’s about as far as it goes,” Jenny says.

There have been attempts for more than a century to promote space standards for homes. In 1912, Raymond Unwin, the architect and planner best known for the garden city movement, wrote: Nothing Gained by Overcrowding!, a pamphlet on the subject. In the same year, the Local Government Board recommended that no house should be smaller than 79.4 sq m. Flats appeared in space guidelines in a 1961 report of the Parker Morris committee. One-person, single-storey flats should be at least 29.7 sq m, it said, with 2.6 sq m of storage – double the size of Jenny’s home.

But standards and ideals can get blurred in a vicious economic cycle. Ministers relax planning rules to enable more building and development. Developers and landlords find profitable loopholes in those changes. Local authorities, desperate for alternatives to their own dwindling housing stock, direct residents to those landlords, fuelling further exploitation at a time when councils also lack resources for planning and building control. Residents, often faced with homelessness, endure the cramped results, until society notices and someone writes another report.

“My concern is that people are becoming inured to something that they shouldn’t have to put up with,” says Julia Park, the head of housing research at architectural firm Levitt Bernstein. She has written a history of space standards and is surprised by how little we consider the effects of domestic confinement. “When you’re living in smaller and smaller flats, you reach a point where it makes sense to take out the walls because one big room feels nicer, but I think that implies a lot of compromise we’re not examining,” she says. “Some of these flats pose threats to physical health, but, in small spaces, it’s going to be mental health that is most affected.”

Elsewhere in Bristol, Chris, 24, shares a tiny flat with his girlfriend. The couple have a separate bedroom, but there is barely space to move between the bed and walls. The kitchen and living area is equally small, and there is no chance of spending any time apart when they are both at home. Chris also suffers from anxiety, while his girlfriend has an eating disorder.

“When I’m feeling stressed and anxious in the outside world, it’s important for me to have a base where I feel comfortable,” says Chris, who has just quit a job handling complaints for a train company. “If I come home to an uncomfortable sofa that has stuff on it so I have to walk around it, and navigate wires everywhere, it makes me more irritable and it’s harder to decompress.” Kitchen clutter can affect his girlfriend’s eating disorder: “She can end up avoiding eating or not eating at all for hours because, if it doesn’t feel right, there will be a reaction,” Chris says.

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Park, who advises local authorities, laments the way sleeping, cooking and washing are increasingly viewed as the only functions of a dwelling in a housing market where a living room is becoming a luxury. She is especially worried about the types of homes that have emerged in the gaps in policy. This summer she noticed a seven-floor former office block in Ilford, east London, which had been divided into flats. Planning records showed that each of the six upper floors in the building had been converted into 10 studios, including single flats of just 13 sq m.

By current standards, these flats are barely a third of the recommended size. Park was instrumental in drawing up the “nationally described space standard”, a nationwide metric implemented by the government in 2015. It recommends 37 sq m for a one-person, one-bedroom flat; a two-person, one-bedroom flat should be 50 sq m.

Park was surprised that the government had agreed to the recommendations, given its austerity policies. “The compromise was that it is optional,” she adds, estimating that fewer than half of councils have adopted it. Even when they do, it only applies to new buildings or developments that go through the planning system, but not to a range of “permitted developments”. So, for a relatively small investment, the owner of an office building, for example, can convert it into self-contained flats with only “prior notification”.

Ben Clifford led a team that visited more than 500 converted office buildings for a report published last May by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. “We were shocked by how many of these flats were of a very poor quality,” says Clifford, a senior lecturer in spatial planning and government at University College London’s Bartlett school of planning. In one, Clifford called the fire brigade after spotting walls dividing flats made only of plywood. “We spoke to one resident who was in a tiny one-bed flat with two children and no balconies or open space,” he says. “Another woman, in an 80s office building, said it just wasn’t very nice to live in a flat with big tinted windows that don’t open.”

In the so-called “lockdown” model, meanwhile, rogue landlords are converting family homes into tiny studio flats specifically to attract tenants aged 35 or over who, like Jenny, claim the higher housing allowance for a self-contained dwelling. By including a token shared facility, such as a tiny kitchen – or by ignoring rules altogether – these landlords also bypass planning permission by treating such developments as flat-shares (another permitted development). The rental income from six cheaply built studios is multiples of that for a three-bed flat share in the same house – and it is the taxpayer who lines the landlord’s pockets. “It’s basically the warehousing of homelessness,” says Jon Knowles, a computer analyst and campaigner who has recorded hundreds of such developments.

Park accepts that homes smaller than 37 sq m can be a useful, short-term base for people in need, as part of the response to the housing crisis; and high-quality “micro” apartments are increasingly marketed as aspirational. Park’s own son, Jack, this summer moved into a flat about the same size as Jenny’s. But, in his case, downsizing was a choice. The primary school teacher, who is 28, was paying £600 a month for a small room in a flat-share in south-east London. He wanted to work less as a supply teacher to free up time for his art and a possible masters degree and now pays £350 for a 13-15 sq m studio in Liverpool. His metal sink has a draining board that incorporates two electric hobs. There is no oven.

“I’m not that fussy about where I live and if I wanted to work a bit less and save money, it was only possible in a place like this,” Jack says. “But if it was forced on me, I might resent all sorts of things about it.” He says he could not tolerate the space if he had a partner.

Chris, who pays £625 a month for his flat in an old house, says enforced proximity makes arguments tough. “If you’re feeling distant from one another it’s blown out of proportion hugely because you’re in the same room because you have to be,” he says. A social life is challenging, too; the couple have a small blow-up mattress for guests, but the only bathroom is accessed through the bedroom, around the bed. Hosting dinners is out of the question.

For Jenny, this also fuels a sense of isolation. “I can’t even have someone for a cup of tea,” she says. “When people do come over I feel shame because of how small it is, and everything feels dirty because as soon as people come in they are instantly in my bedroom with their shoes.”

Few housing campaigners have much hope that conditions might soon improve for the occupants of our shrinking homes. Clifford says there is a minor backlash against abuses of the permitted development rules, and several local authorities are moving against them. “We have to be much tougher on landlords and on standards,” Park says. “There are going to be compromises because we are desperately short of housing, but we cannot give people a free pass.”

For Jenny, the future – near and far – feels uncertain. “I know I’ll never be able to afford to buy anywhere, or even to rent this place without help with benefits at the moment,” she says. “But I don’t want to be on benefits.” She has started doing volunteer work with a learning disabilities charity while she considers applying for jobs. She goes to the library and takes regular walks. “Or I’ll go to a friend’s place and instantly, when I’m out of the house or in a larger space, I’ll feel a hundred times better,” she adds. “But then I’ll have to go home.”

• This article was amended on 10 October 2018 to change a reference to an “office block in Croydon” to Ilford.