Need someone to paint miniatures for a small project.

honestly i'd hit up the model making students at central saint martins or one of the other art unis around kings cross. theyre always looking for cash work and a lot of them are really good at finishing resin prints. just put up a note on their physical noticeboard near the main entrance or find the student union facebook group. you'll prob get someone whos excited about the project rather than just treating it like a chore.

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fwiw theres a guy in peckham who runs a tiny resin casting and painting workshop out of his flat, i found him through a local craft market stall. he does really specific skin tone matching and his prices are fair, like 20-30 quid per piece depending on detail. if you message me i can dig up his instagram, he took on a similar doll restoration job for someone in my building last summer and it came out great

also worth checking if any of the maker spaces in hackney wick have a painter on their noticeboard, theres a few shared studios near the canal that get foot traffic from people doing this kind of work. they usually have a cork board by the entrance with business cards

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Check with some of the board game cafes or hobby shops around London. Dark Sphere near Waterloo has a board in the back where people post commission work like this. Also the London Wargaming Guild on Facebook is fairly active and full of painters who do quick turnaround jobs for cash. Just make sure you show them the 3D print material first, some paints don't stick well to certain resins without a primer.

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SpareRoom's "rooms wanted" ads are underrated for this. people post what they're currently paying alongside what they want next, so you can scrape a rough sense of going rates by postcode without anyone knowing you looked. it skews young and flatshare heavy tho, so not much use if you're after 2-beds in zone 2.

Another one is just the depozit or tenancy deposit scheme data. not public-facing, but your council's housing officer can tell you median rents from deposit registrations if you email them under FOI. takes weeks, but its proper anon and nobody clocks u.

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Rightmove and Zoopla only show asking rents, which are often 10 to 15 percent above what a place actually goes for, so they're a poor benchmark. The trick I've used is the ONS Price Index of Private Rents, which breaks things down to borough level and is genuinely anonymous since it's aggregate data, no listing or account needed. For something more granular, the London Renters Union runs a rent reporting tool where you submit what you're paying with your postcode and it maps it against others nearby, though the coverage is patchy outside the inner boroughs.

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the openrent "rent check" thing is decent for zones 3-4 where the unions tool barely reaches. also worth checking the london.gov.uk planning portal for new build applications, they list "affordable" and market rent figures per unit in the viability assessments, which is basically the developer telling the council what they expect to charge. bit of a faff to dig through but its public, anonymous & nobody knows ur looking

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