What Five Plus Years of Leasehold Uncertainty Does to a Person

I didn’t notice when the mess at home, or the absence of personal “love”, for want of a better word, began to build. Looking back, I can see it didn’t arrive all at once. It accumulated, across two distinct periods, years apart.

The first was around 2016/17, after a particularly traumatic breakup.

I'd felt devalued and quietly emasculated. At one point, I truly believed we were building a future together: choosing a dog, talking about moving to Scotland, imagining a life that felt grounded and shared. When that evaporated, it wasn’t just the relationship that went; it was my confidence in myself. A new start what what I needed, work was affecting me negatively, she offered kinship, hope and promise of a life fulfilled.

Then when the gaps between texts got longer she told me she’d met someone local, someone “grounded” and “supportive”. What the new beau had failed to mention was that he was also married, with two children. That revelation left me questioning not only my judgement, but my worth, my creative ability, and my capacity to sustain a healthy relationship at all.

My artistic ambitions, as a professional creative, specifically an art print business I cared deeply about, quietly stalled. The malaise was profound. I carried a sense that I would never quite amount to anything. That belief didn’t come from nowhere. Growing up with a narcissistic, bipolar single parent, whom I still loved, meant my emotional foundations were never exactly stable. You learn early to doubt yourself in environments like that, and still have to mentally wrangle an adult when you're only a child.

The second period crept in more slowly over the last few years and was harder to name. A heaviness. A weight. A darkness. There was a deep, persistent sadness humming in the background, and I couldn’t work out where it was coming from.

I’d think back to earlier years, how beautiful the apartment once looked. Clean surfaces. Fresh flowers. Candles lit in the evening. Galleries, meals out, a sense of care and intention - a love of living.

Then I’d look around now, the mess, the neglect, dust bunnies the size of actual bunnies, the same bedding, a sink full of dishes, and feel confused. This didn’t feel like me. What I didn’t realise was that I’d never given myself the space to think. I’d been functioning, not living.

I did the right things as things began to slip. I went to the doctor. I took medication. I paid for counselling for depression. I joined men’s mental health groups. I could see the warning signs: I wasn’t showering regularly, I was eating badly, not sleeping. On top of that sat a stressful job in a dying market with little support, being treated like a perpetual-motion machine. Like a car you never service for 100,000 miles and then act surprised when it breaks down.

But the real, constant pressure, the one that’s been quietly grinding me down, started back in 2018 with the Section 20 consultation letter.
For well over five years, I’ve lived with the knowledge that a clause in my leasehold contract, never properly explained to me, meant that major works beyond the scope of our sinking fund would leave me financially personally liable on a hulk of a building from 1897. In a listed building, that isn’t a theoretical risk; it’s existential. 

That knowledge has hung over me every single day like a sword of Damocles.

For more than four years, we’ve been mired in costly First-tier Tribunal proceedings. Did we want this fight? No. Did we feel compelled to challenge what we believed was an injustice, given the condition of the building prior to works and actions taken before key inspections? Yes. Did we win? No. And they were awarded 90% of costs too...

What troubled me most was how evidence was treated. Material relating to works carried out immediately before the November 2025 Tribunal inspection was excluded, as was a visual history of the deterioration of the building, while late submissions from the Respondent were accepted, including revised drawings and an updated schedule of items. In some instances, explanations were accepted without accompanying documentation or clear proof of cost.

The reasoning given was one of scope and proportionality. In practice, though, this meant the Tribunal was prevented from seeing the building as it actually presented at the time of inspection. A strict line was drawn around timing that didn’t fully reflect the reality on the ground.

That approach may be legally defensible. But it inevitably shaped the case in one direction, creating an imbalance in how contemporaneous evidence was allowed to be considered.

When consultants initially inspected my apartment at the commencement of the Section 20 process, they found windows that hadn’t opened in over fifteen years. Original frames were described as “rot held together with paint”. Opening transoms had been removed. Single-glazed beading was used simply to pin the glass in place. This wasn’t neglect on my part. It was long-term systemic failure, yet the financial and emotional burden landed squarely on me. It's difficult to believe the freeholder won the case.

Somewhere along the way concurrent with all the Section 20 misery, I stopped caring about the apartment, not to its detriment, but to my own. And I think I finally understand why.

It isn’t mine.

I paid for a home, but I don’t own one. I don’t own a brick. I just bought leasehold tenure. Under leasehold, with huge financial demands and an asymmetric legal system that favours the resources of large freeholders, I am effectively powerless.

The housing association chose to take on a converted listed building in their portfolio, but the onus falls on the leaseholders to pay for it's specialised maintenance, when the old fabric began to fail. We just bought a home, we weren't conservation specialists.

That powerlessness reawakened all the old echoes from the breakup.
You’re worthless. You’ve achieved nothing. You can’t even hold onto a home that's worth next to nothing. Half the rungs on my property ladder are missing. I pay a mortgage equivalent every month in service charges. Now in order for me to service 'their debt'one of their senior staff suggested foodbanks. I cannot believe it's come to this.

Despite diligently paying these service charges year after year, I now face debts of £15–20k. Not for extravagance. Not for recklessness. Simply for living where I live. I have a simple oil heater as it's too expensive to heat with a double height ceiling. I will have to raid modest pension pots and sell personal belongings. 

When I look at the prospect of a debt leaving my account every month just to stay exactly where I am, service charge and now Section 20 repayments, legal costs, I know with certainty it will break me. I do not have the mental resolve for the slow water torture of instalments that leave nothing to live on.

I am clean. I wash. But I don’t shower much these days, and that worries me, because I once did, every day. I’ve learned that this has a name: Shower Avoidance Syndrome. Anxiety and depression can make even the sensation of water feel like sensory overload. That balance is fragile.

Some days I’m upset because I don’t have the energy to recycle. Other days I find myself thinking, unfairly and cruelly to myself, that I’m worse off than the beggar I occasionally give a fiver to. At least he isn’t carrying a legal and financial weight he never knowingly agreed to. For him, life has a certainty. For me, a constant fear of forfeiture and loss.

This isn’t a plea for sympathy, nor an admission of defeat. It’s an attempt to describe what prolonged uncertainty, asymmetrical power, and financial precarity do to an ordinary person over time. When leasehold is discussed in abstract terms, clauses, consultations, compliance, this is the human cost that rarely makes it into the paperwork.