Property guardians: Bafta-winning documentary maker says cheaper rent helps him live a creative life in London

It has been a dramatic year for Edward Watts and his wife, Olivia Scarlett. Aside from contending with the global pandemic, the couple walked the red carpet at the Baftas, where Edward picked up the award for best documentary. They then jetted to Cannes for the film festival, where he won the same prize.

In February they were at the Academy Awards where For Sama, the film he co-directed, was nominated for an Oscar. After the glitz and glamour of Hollywood the couple returned to a more prosaic London reality.

For the past two years Edward, 41, and Olivia, 36, an actress and voice-over artist, have been acting as property guardians, part of a scheme that offers homes in buildings that would otherwise be left empty.

Property guardians occupy disused public or commercial buildings. In Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Channel 4 series Crashing, currently showing on Netflix, six 20-somethings live together in a former hospital.

Edward and Olivia live in the slightly ramshackle Grade II-listed Holy Trinity Church in Islington, and say the comparatively low cost of property guardianship means the couple has been able to pursue what Edward describes as their “crazy, creative dreams”.

Their home, leased through Live-in Guardians, costs just under £1,000pcm between them.

Despite the astonishing international success of For Sama, co-directed with Waad Al-Kateab and telling the story of Al-Kateab’s family life in Aleppo during the Syrian war (watch it on All 4), they have no plans to move on.

“Both of us are invested in these crazy, creative dreams,” explained Edward. “Pay is so erratic and London is so expensive that it is the only way really.”

Before moving to the church the couple were live-in guardians at an old school building in Holloway. Before that they spent a few years couch surfing, interspersed with periods of travelling, and “formal renting”.

Holy Trinity’s address, on a leafy, lovely garden square, is rather swanky. But luxury living this is not. There is a main living space, with soaring ceilings and windows by Thomas Willement, the leading Victorian stained glass artist, and four bedrooms (two other guardians also live on site).

They share a tiny kitchen and a “rough and ready” bathroom.

But for Olivia the atmosphere and space of the early Gothic-style Holy Trinity, which was completed in 1829, makes its shortcomings more than worthwhile.

“For us it is glorious,” she said. “We certainly have had friends come in and say ‘there is scaffolding inside your house’, but I think that we are blind to the slightly odd paint work and the falling down ceilings. It is just a huge, light, stained-glass space. It is a dream.”

Sadly this particular dream won’t last forever. The church is owned by the London Diocese of the Anglican Church, although it has not held services there since the Seventies, and the building has slid into serious disrepair.

Scaffolding was erected inside and outside the church to hold it up in 2015 and it has been empty, apart from its guardians, since 2017. It is on Historic England’s Heritage at Risk register.

The most urgent repairs began earlier this year, which the guardians are having to live around, and the architect Richard Griffiths has been appointed to draw up plans for a full-scale £6.5 million renovation.

This means the guardians’ days on site are numbered.

“At some point everything ends, so you have to enjoy what you have right now because you have no idea how long it will last,” says Olivia.

In the meantime, Edward is drawing up plans to move into feature films, working hard on developing ideas while the impetus of For Sama is still behind him.

Like Olivia, he is philosophical about the fact that Holy Trinity won’t be home for much longer.

“We feel grateful to have lived in this area,” Edward said. “Nobody, at least not in our financial situation, could afford to live here.”

Not all property guardian providers are equal. Guardians don’t have the same legal rights as regular renters and living standards can be, frankly, pretty awful. Look around carefully before you commit.

Last year Camelot Guardian Management Service (also known as Camelot Europe) was prosecuted and fined for housing more than 30 people in a former rectory in Colchester, Essex. The building had a faulty fire alarm, blocked fire escapes, there was only one kitchen, and some of the bathrooms lacked hot water. The firm is now trading as Watchtower Property Management.

Property guardians often don’t have the same security of tenure as private tenants. In some cases they have been given as little as 24 hours to vacate their homes although Reuben Young, director of campaign group PricedOut, says this is not necessarily legal.

“Although the vast majority of licensees are in fact covered by the eviction ban, often the building owner may have not told them – or not known – that they are residential licensees covered by the 1977 Protection from Eviction Act,” he said.

Despite the potential pitfalls, last year more than 60,000 people applied to become property guardians, twice as many as in 2018. There are numerous firms offering property guardian homes in the UK.

The Property Guardian Providers Association (PGPA) represents about 80 per cent of these companies, runs a redress scheme and safeguards fees and payments. See propertyguardianproviders.com for a list of member organisations.

Guardians live everywhere from vacant offices to former banks, pubs, schools, police stations, monasteries and sports centres, as well as houses and flats in line for redevelopment.

Monthly fees are about half the price of private rental, according to the PGPA, and often include bills and council tax.

This doesn’t mean they are dirt cheap, of course; property guardianship has evolved slowly from a system by which property owners got free security and renters got a real bargain to one in which landlords are clearly making a profit as well as getting free security.

“Years ago the deal was living almost rent free, but once the market learned that there was scope to charge significant rent, now it’s often not even that cheap,” said Young.

Expect to pay about £400 to £500 for a double room in the burbs, and £600-plus for a double in central London.

Different firms have different criteria but at Live-in Guardians (liveinguardians.com), guardians need to be over 21 and in full-time employment.

Mature students and the self-employed will need a guarantor to cover their rent if they cannot. References will be needed, as well as proof of previous address