As a student in London I yearned for home, until I found paradise: a vast old villa with perfect housemates | Andrew Martin

We cooked ragu and listened to records while lying on chaises longues. Then the M11 link road was built - and everything changed

• In our end of year series, writers and public figures remember the place or time when they felt most at home

In the mid-1980s, I was in my early 20s and was reading for the Bar in London. I was living in a mouldy Balham bedsit and returning regularly to the comfort zone of my native York, when a friend told me a room was going in a shared house in Leytonstone.

I wasn't expecting much of E11. I wasn't expecting trees, for example, but my walk from the attractive art deco tube station took me along roads better described as avenues. The house itself seemed almost the last one in London, an illusion created by the proximity of Wanstead Flats. It was a rangy, detached 1920s house, white with a red roof, and it had a name, but I'll just call it the villa.

Andrew Martin is an English novelist; his latest book is The Night in Venice