Like all major cities, the rent prices in London are skyrocketing. In response to this, artist and architect Harrison Marshall fashioned a tiny house out of a dumpster. He named the tiny house as ‘skip house’, after large trash cans that are called skip bins in the UK.
Marshall has installed the skip house in a dumpster yard located in the London suburb of Bermondsey. Marshall was able to use the dumpster site because it has been leased by Antepavillion, an arts charity. The tiny house was made with the patronage of the Skip Gallery, which aims to promote emerging artists, and Caukin Studio, a design and construction company.
While rent for a single studio apartment in Bermondsey ranges upwards of £1,500 (approximately Rs 1,50,000), Marshall is able to live in his skip house for £50 (approximately Rs 5,000) a month. The total construction cost of the tiny home amounted to £4000 (approximately Rs 4,00,000).
A house tour video of the skip house is going viral across social media platforms. To enter the house, Marshall uses a small ladder to crawl through a hatch. Inside there is a small living space joined with a kitchenette area that has a sink and some shelves. The bed is installed on a mezzanine shelf. He has rented a Portaloo outside the cozy skip house and he showers at his gym. Marshall plans to live in the tiny home for a year.
Marshall does not see the skip house as a solution to expensive rent but as a means to highlight the unaffordable housing crisis and homelessness in London. While talking to Hyperallergic, Marshall explained the skip house as performance art and said, “I wanted to hammer home the realities of the rental situation in London by creating something that could be considered better than many of the rooms on offer around London, even though it was in a dumpster.”
