Having a child

“One day I want more kids,” Penny said. “Finance holds me back. You know, money is an issue. In a two-bed flat we could have a baby here, but I wouldn't want two bigger kids.” Penny and I were seated at a table in a new café on Hackney's Pembury Estate, where she lived with her husband and toddler. Originally from northern England, she had moved to London over ten years ago. At the time of our discussions, she was 36 and worked for a prison reform charity. She had noticed and responded to one of my study advertisements online, in a Facebook group. The next time we met, Penny and I chatted at her dining table in the recently built flat that she part-rented and part-owned. The small living room where we spoke was filled with toys and playmats – the ephemera of a cosy chaos that goes hand-in-hand with living with children. Penny pointed across the playscape to a mahogany sideboard, a gift from her grandmother. It was large, imposing for the size of the room we were in. But it had found its use, displaying PlayDough sculptures and renderings of Peppa Pig. “It's worth a fortune,” Penny said, “and it looks ridiculous in this flat. But what am I meant to do with it? Who has a house big enough these days to have room for a sideboard?”

For Penny, reproductive obstruction was entangled with the spatial constraints of life as part-renter, part-leaseholder of a shared ownership new-build on the Pembury Estate. These sentiments were broadly shared by the privately renting millennials I interviewed from 2018 to 2019, regardless of whether they already had children. Of these 23– 36-year-olds, most were resigned to leaving London to have a family, bar a few who had direct or indirect access to inherited wealth. Priced out of home ownership and stuck in the private rented sector, economic obstruction and thwarted kinship were lived in synergy. It was beginning to dawn on Penny that the promise of security through shared ownership was unrealistic; she still felt like a renter, and the double payments were a struggle to meet.