we paid £7 a week in our final year 
That really was a shithole.
We were fairly similar. You had to jump across a gaping hole in the entrance to the house where the floorboards had rotted away. When it rained, the kitchen floor ended up under water. You had to remember not to wash up (hah! we were students!) when the washing machine was turned on, because some dodgy electrics meant you could get a shock if touched that and the steel sink. Beds were mattresses on the floor. One room had "Zob", a huge mouldy growth from a leak in next door's bathroom.
Obviously no heating, except an inadequate open fire in most rooms - which did little to counter the draughts from the loosely fitting windows or raise the temperature of big rooms with very high ceilings. And this was in Upper Bangor (you actually ride very close to my old house on the Irish Mail), so for much of the academic year the climate was cold, wet and windy.
But what we saved on rent paid for an awful lot of beer, which made the place much easier to live with. When we eventually all left, we borrowed a minibus from the SU to return our empty crates of Newcastle Brown. Over the years these had been used to raise beds from the floor, act as legs for worktables (with a piece of plywood put on top), chairs, etc. We had to make more than one trip, because we couldn't fit them all in
If we'd been in a nicer place the landlord would probably have complained about all the bikes stacked in the house, or using the kitchen as a woodwork shop for making speaker cabinets for the student union PA system, or us keeping a rabbit in one of the rooms...
