Life As We Know it: Tabitha’s attic, all-girl flatshare

Tabitha first turned up at 33f seven years ago, took over the lease two years later and swiftly set about recreating the place in her own image

Illustration by Mark Long

No one is quite sure who gave its nickname to 33f Eccleston Square, London SW1, where Tabitha Pendragon and her flatmates sit in lofty seclusion looking out over the Pimlico squares, but the phrase stuck, to the point where postcards from knowing friends are sometimes merely addressed to "the attic".There is even a sign up now on the front door, beneath a caricature, skilfully executed by a cartoonist on a national newspaper, of four young women eating cereal out of a communal bowl and the caption, "Abandon hope all ye who enter here".

Tabitha, who works in the Treasury, first turned up at 33f seven years ago, took over the lease two years later and swiftly set about recreating the place in her own image. Her sub-tenants – the current team extends to Jo, Hermione and Camilla – tend to be bright, beautiful, purposeful girls she knew at Cambridge. Jo, for example, is just finishing her PhD at Birkbeck and, as Tabitha puts it, "writing an incredibly brainy book about Victorian poetry", while Camilla is about to be appointed the youngest-ever female partner at the accountancy firm Tender & Mainprice.

As for the atmosphere at 33f, it is not that members of the opposite sex are never introduced there – Tabitha is going out with a Conservative MP and Hermione has a reputation for "eating men for breakfast" – merely that the studiousness of the place tends to drive them away. The occasional tables are piled with intellectual magazines, and a boyfriend of Camilla's, who arrived at breakfast one Saturday morning to find the other three discussing just how authentically War and Peace had been dramatised in the recent BBC adaptation, was so terrified that he never came again.

Somewhat ashamed of their habit of watching transatlantic TV series in which apartment-sharing girls appear to lead lives of complete abandon, the inhabitants of 33f are, nevertheless, fascinated by the contrast between these existences and their own. Tabitha and Hermione, should they meet by chance in the kitchen at 2am, are far likelier to discuss what they think of Wittgenstein than whether Hermione's new man is sexier than the previous one. Not, of course, that the attic is averse to letting its hair down. Why, only last autumn they held a toga party – although it has to be said that the guests were expected to come as figures from Roman history and speak to each other in Latin.