How did people leave home at 15…

I mean specifically with the landlord living in, like Leonard Rossiter's character in Rising Damp, not an HMO.

Echoing pps. I left home at 14 (almost 15) and moved in with friends in a squat type situation. I got some cash in hand cleaning jobs and then worked in a supermarket when I was 16, moved in with a boyfriend and carried on from there. Leaving home at a young age even in the 70s was rarely glamorous.

Ok wikipedia must be wrong then

I left school at 16 in 1979. I had been applying for jobs in London (about an hour's commute on the train from where I lived) for a few months beforehand. The neighbour next door would bring me Miss London and the other freebie magazine with loads of jobs - "first jobbers" and "girl Fridays" were the ones I applied for. I had a couple of interviews which my mom came to with me (not the actual interview). I got offered one quite soon, and started work a couple of days after my last O Level exam.

It was all pretty normal.

A couple of the girls in the office were renting a small flat and if I had wanted to I could have moved in too. I chose not to as my boyfriend was living and working in my home town.

So getting a job and leaving home at 16 back then was nothing out of the ordinary.

But rents were a much smaller percentage of a typical wage.

Young single people in my experience still always start in shared houses? I don't know anyone who has ever moved into a private flat alone as their first rental on leaving their family house. What maybe is more common is people not leaving home at all until they're ready to move in with a partner.

The '70s were an adventure. I left home and school at 15 because I felt trapped by small town life. Got a job as a live-in chambermaid in London, but only stuck it for 2 days before moving into a hippy squat. Occasionally lived in 1-room bedsits. Nothing was complicated. Jobs were easy to come by, so were bedsits---landlords offered them on postcards in newsagents windows. Sex was considered more as recreation than a relationship. Visiting the clap clinic was no big deal. We drank, smoked weed, took amphetamines, hitch-hiked. We felt like adults because we lived like adults, albeit ones on the wrong side of the tracks. I am also astounded by how infantilised so many of todays teenagers are. It's as if they have had all sense of freedom and adventure knocked out of them.

There’s a bbc archive 1965 of 4 young women flat sharing. It was a 2 bed. One is leaving to get married and they are interviewing a replacement. She’ll be sharing a bedroom with a stranger and I think they said enough water for 2 baths a week as a selling point.
Lots used to lodge in houses. My mum did this at teacher training college, a widow with a disabled child let room for money.
My dad left school and started working week he turned 15. It was very much the norm.

I think there's a massive gulf between this sort of age and people like me (50 ish). I've largely lived with other people since I moved out of home and went to uni; DP and I own a house now but still have a lodger. Many of our friends of similar age either have or are lodgers/housemates too.
As for the young woman mentioned earlier who has refused to accept university accommodation that doesn't have an ensuite
I don't have an ensuite

My dad started working up town in London from 15 in the 60's. I think it was just very different then, people didn't need qualifications, they learnt on the job.

She lived in Ireland from the age of 6. They had state education in Ireland then!

Because they were brought up in an era that encouraged independence

She was at school in Norway and moved out of country when parents separated so not registered under any education system

Lol
Well they were not our babied and sheltered children of today.
But they were also not protected

I think that Mariella Frostrup (63) was a bit of a fluke though, as she moved from Ireland to London aged 15. She must have told some fibs about how old she was, as in the UK in 1977 you were still legally supposed to be in school until you were 16. Her father was a journalist and her mother was an artist, so I'm thinking that there may have been some industry connections there (even though her father died) for her to get straight into the music industry and earn enough to somehow support herself.

I'm mid 50s and a significant cohort left not just my school but education at 16 in the mid 1980s. I certainly didn't know anyone that went to live in London or even the local big city and got an amazing jammy job in the music industry or anything else remotely glamorous. They went off to do YTS or start as the most lowly of the low in whatever area they were working in. None of them had enough money to live away from home.

Start to see? HMO's are everywhere, every week I see, in the local paper, that there has been another application to turn what was a 4 bedroom house into a 6 or 7 room HMO, or the report of a landlord being prosecuted for having an unlicensed HMO. The difference now is that they are occupied by young (and not so young) professionals, who can't afford anywhere else or a desperately saving to scape together a deposit for their own place.

I was still at school and home but had a weekend job at 13. I was living in a shared house in Birmingham by early 90”s. it was £50 a week between 3 of us. No central heating, we had a bath but couldn’t afford the immersion heater so used to boil a kettle, we used to have ‘a bucket’ a housemate would tip it over your head, no minimum wage, health and safety seemed to barely exist.. People could just work their way up as well. The postcode was one of the worst in the UK so we didn’t insure anything.

DS and his GF are looking to rent a house, they expect a really nice house maybe even 3 bed, drive, good area.

Very different times.

Just remembering those old Calor Gas heaters we used 🙂

Yes entirely possible I squatted at 16 and you could work quite easily. Not sure how MF left school at 15 though. Maybe she just dropped out but leaving age was 16 in 1979

Because people rented rooms rather than flats! My first rental in West London was a tiny room with meters for electricity and gas ( for some reason the room had no fridge but a full sized cooker) I shared a bathroom and toilet with three other people. The bathroom was on the landing downstairs from my room.Hot water for the bath involved putting money into another meter, a skill I never mastered since the geyser looked as though it had been in the house since Noah was a boy so I went to my friends flat for baths. There was a pay phone on the ground floor, lighting on the stairs was by push buttons so you had to be a bit nippy before the lights went out. I think the rent was the equivalent to half my wages.

My next flat was shared with 2 other girls. My “room” was an alcove off the living room, theirs was the curtained off end of a corridor . We did at least have our own bathroom. This was in Nottinghill shortly after the Rachman scandal, rented housing was pretty unregulated. But jobs were plentiful, you could walk out of one and get another the same day and we didn’t care, we lived in London when London was the envy of every young person of the world, it was our oyster and the word ensuite hadn’t been invented.

Yeah was 16 unless you aug 31st birthday like me and could leave at easter . You'd still be 15 for another few months

Well she shouldn't have been. It sounds terribly glamourous obviously - but the school leaving age was 16 at that point, so she should have still been in school. School leaving age had been 16 since she (and I) were 10. I didn't know anyone who had moved to London before their 16th birthday.

Some sort of exaggeration going on, I suspect.

These are the boomers, so despised by today's pampered entitled youngsters 😊

£30 a week (which is what I had after rent) in 1996 went quite far. Especially as I wasn’t buying food and I walked to work.

I used to go out drinking in Camden 3/4 nights a week. I would get into gigs for free as I knew all the bands and it was £1 for a bottle of hooch at most places.

I had a blast!

My parents came to London in the 1960s. My dad was a late teen, my mum early twenties. My dad had lots of jobs that don't really exist any more or have been mechanised to require fewer people: bus conductor, grave digger, switchboard operator... My mum was a newly qualified nurse.

When i was born, we were living in one room in a shared house with a landlord who scalped the electricity/gas meters and the pay phone. My parents sent me home to live with grandparents while they pulled double shifts and saved the money for a deposit on a house.

I don't think any of us thought it was a better life than my kids have now.

I always wanted to do music production.

I did it for work experience at a studio in year 11, and started calling around just after that. I started work the day after my last gcse and moved to London (an hour from home) a month later when I’d found digs.

These days people go to uni to study music production. In the mid 90s , you could still get a job as a “tape op” (general studio dogsbody) and work your way up. I ended up meeting people at the job through the bands who came in, and got offered a job at a record company in A&R by someone who could see I was a hard worker.

It was a lot easier back then.

People have often asked how my dad was okay with it (my mum died when I was small), but he was born in 1930. It was his norm that you left school early, found a job and digs. He was from a different generation to my friends parents.