Neighbourhood and local area reviews for renting in United Kingdom

Amenities close by. Neighbours well behaved

Transport links are great but the street is always dirty when its bin day.

Me gusta mucho el area, es bastante centrico y nunca he tenido problemas de ningun tipo.

Great neighbourhood though, very green and location is nice.

The area is quite and comfortable.

I don’t think bad about the neighbourhood but the house and the landlord is horrible

Not applicable.

Neighbours were nice. When there was a power outage, they helped us out, more than could be said of teh landlady.

I could write even more about how bad of a landlord Oliver Brocklehurst was and am sure still is, but to end the review on a positive note, the area of the neighbourhood is wonderful. It is in the perfect location for healthcare workers, and the local amenities are great. Right across a bus stop as well. If you're going to rent a room, do it from another landlord in Horwood Close.

The area looks somewhat scruffy, but there is a big Sainsbury’s and a train station close to it, and a gym right next to it. About the people living in the area, the only ones to cause trouble were within the house.

The tenants with which I shared the kitchen and the bathroom and me were renting with SSL Properties. All the other tenants were managed by Denhan International, and I believe they all had those properties allocated to them by the town council because they were on temporary accommodation. So, I’ll talk about them because I assume they are still there and they make a big part of the experience. Everyone living in the floors above the ground were saints and not only did I have no problems with them, but they also did me a couple of favors. On the other hand, the people living in room 1 and room A on the lower floor are a bigger pest than the ants.

After the main door was fixed and people had to get key copies, there was a couple in room A who did not bother getting theirs. Making a copy of the keys took me just two hours, but they spent weeks knocking the door every time they wanted to enter. When people got fed up with looking after them, they started causing trouble.

First, the guy twisted a part of the door to prevent the door from closing. He said it was only for one night because his girlfriend was coming back home with their baby late after midnight and he would not be at the house at that time. He also asked me to lend him the main door key the next morning to make a copy, which I agreed to. The next morning he didn’t come for the key and the door stayed unable to close for at least a week, when we had to make the company bring someone to fix it yet again.

Then, after the door was fixed again, the couple got keys but they started to leave the door open every time they went out or they came in. Later, the woman that lived in room 1 started doing the same. For the last months of the tenancy, every day several times per day, they would leave the door open for entire hours. Sometimes even late in the night. Some days I woke up very early in the morning and the door had been open for who knows how long. Anyone could have entered, including stray animals. But they didn’t care. Not even for themselves nor for their children, less so for the other people.

I asked the agency to please speak to them and get involved in the problem, but they did nothing. I asked them to at least install an automatic closing device for the main door like there was for the inner doors, but they said they could not do that without telling me why.

This is a house from which you could hear the emergency vehicle sirens very often. It’s not exactly a place where you feel comfortable with having the door open all the time. By the way, a housemate told me the reason the door had been broken before I moved in was that one of the tenants in temporary accommodation was a junkie who broke into the house after he was expelled from it. Said junkie also stole from the room I was renting when it was occupied by the previous guy. It gives you another idea of what you might find if you live in this place.

Back to the other tenants, some time after the couple from room A started to leave the door open, I heard someone knocking the door. It was the guy of that couple. I let him in and came back to my room. Then, I heard him banging a door downstairs. Apparently, his girlfriend owned room A and she had kicked him out. Now he was trying to get in by force. The woman managed to hold him in a struggle, and the police came after he had left. You would think the woman would start shutting down the door after that. But not even being a literal victim of domestic assault and crying for it in front of the police put some sense in her head.

The other woman in room 1, before she started leaving the door open too, let her child roam around the house with no supervision. Many times I found him in the kitchen, getting inside my room when I had the door open or just in the middle of the stairs. I often went to the kitchen and back carrying kitchen utensils like knives and forks and very hot food that I could have poured by accident on top of the child while he was in the stairs. Or he could have started playing with the oven or other electrical appliances. But none of these thoughts seemed to bother his mother or even occur to her. The kid was also pretty noisy, and if you wanted to sleep with the window open, you could hear him stuttering until late in the night.

Finally, on the last weekend after I had already moved out, I came to the house on both days to pick my things and clean. These people had a smoke detector beeping low on battery on both days. It was clearly audible from within my room with everything closed. Good luck trying to sleep with these people if this happens while you live here.

As I have said, I bet they are still there at the time I’m publishing this review, and I assume they’ll be there for a long time. They are a threat to the house’s safety and I discourage everyone from living with them.