A narrow flat hallway can hold one hook and one pair of shoes per person by the door, and not much else. Everything bulkier, the bike, the pushchair, the recycling, needs a home inside the flat or a proper store, because the shared corridor outside your door has to be kept clear under fire guidance and the hallway inside it is your escape route. The test I’d use is a tape measure: once the shoes and the hooks are in, the clear width should be around 900mm, and never under 750mm at any point.
I’m writing this for the common case: a hallway about a metre wide and a few metres long, shared with a partner or flatmates, opening onto a landing in a block. If you live on your own, the same rules apply, with the difference that the only person you’re negotiating with is you. Each rule below comes with the reason for it, because I wanted to know the reasons myself.
Two hallways: the one inside your door and the one outside it
Most flats have two hallways, and the rules for them are different.
The one inside your door is yours. You can put what you like in it, within reason, and the limits are practical: can you get out quickly in the dark, and can two people pass. The one outside your door, the communal corridor, landing or stairwell, is not yours at all, however close to your door it is. The rules for it are fire rules, and there’s no negotiating with them.
What the fire guidance says about the corridor and the front door
London Fire Brigade’s guidance for purpose-built flats is blunt: communal corridors and staircases must be kept free from clutter, including pushchairs, e-bikes, mobility/e-scooters or rubbish. The same page says your front door and doors on hallways or landings should be maintained as self-closing fire doors and must not be left propped open, because this allows toxic smoke and fire to spread quickly.
The government’s guide for small blocks covers the same ground from the building’s side. Modern fire doors have a fire resistance of at least 30 minutes, and new flat entrance doors opening onto common parts should be FD30S doors. On storage, it says the common parts should be kept clear of any combustible materials or storage, recommends a zero-tolerance approach in which residents are not permitted to use the common parts to store any belongings or dispose of rubbish, and says that storage of mobility scooters and similar powered mobility aids, such as e-scooters and e-bikes, should generally be prohibited.
Photo: Lisa Anna via Pexels
For a flat, that comes down to three things. Nothing of yours lives on the landing, not even the recycling for an hour. The front door closes on its own every time, and if the closer has been disconnected or the door does not latch, that goes to the landlord or the managing agent as a repair, not to you with a screwdriver. And you don’t wedge it open to carry the shopping in. You make two trips.
The tape-measure test: 900mm, and never under 750mm
I went looking for a proper figure for how much clear floor to keep inside your own hallway, and the closest thing to one is the building regulations guidance on access in new homes. Approved Document M sets, for its Category 2 dwellings, that the minimum clear width of every hall or landing is 900mm. Even for the basic Category 1 dwellings, a localised obstruction such as a radiator is allowed only if the corridor is not reduced below a minimum 750mm width at any point.
Those figures are about how new homes are built, not about what a tenant may put in a hallway, so treat them as a test rather than a rule. Put the hooks up, put the shoes down, then measure the narrowest point. Around 900mm is what a hallway is designed to have. If a shoe rack, a bag or a bike takes the clear width under 750mm anywhere along its length, it is too narrow for two people to pass and too narrow to get out fast in the dark, and the thing comes out.
Worked example: a hallway 1,000mm wide with a radiator that takes it to about 880mm. A shoe rack 250mm deep on the opposite wall takes the narrowest point to 630mm. The shoe rack goes.
Coats and shoes: one hook and one pair each
The rule is one person, one hook, one pair of shoes by the door. Everything else has a home elsewhere, usually the wardrobe.
Coats: the coat being worn this week hangs on the hook. The others go in the wardrobe, and when the season changes they swap. A hallway with eight coats on it is a hallway with 200mm of coat sticking out of the wall, and it is that depth, not the number of hooks, that eats the corridor.
Shoes: the pair taken off on the way in, side by side against the wall, not in the middle of the floor. In a shared house of four that’s four pairs, which is about the limit of what a metre-wide hallway takes before the width test fails. Every other pair lives in the bottom of the wardrobe or a box under the bed. Wet shoes are the exception: they dry on a bit of newspaper by the door and then go back to the wardrobe.
Hooks are the only fixing worth arguing about in a rented hallway, and there are ways of putting up a rail of them that do not cost the deposit; what holds and what does not is in vertical storage that does not damage rented walls.
The bike, the pushchair and the recycling
These three are what people most want to keep in the corridor, and they are what the guidance is clearest about.
The bike doesn’t live on the landing, and in a metre-wide hallway it doesn’t live inside the door either, because a bike is around 600mm wide at the handlebars and takes the corridor under the 750mm line even standing flat against the wall. It hangs on a hook in the bedroom on the wall behind the door, or it lives in the block’s bike store if there is one. If the choice is between a bike in the hallway and no bike, the answer is the bedroom.
The pushchair is the same problem the other way round: it folds, but folded it still leans, and it is exactly what the fire brigade names first in its list of corridor clutter. Folded flat against the wall inside the flat is acceptable if the width test passes. On the landing it isn’t.
The recycling is the one people forget. A bag of cardboard waiting to go down is combustible material in the common parts, and it is the sort of thing that gets propped by the front door “just for tonight”. It goes down when it is full, in the evening, as part of the last stop of the day, and never sits outside the door.
Sharing the space without a rota
The hallway is shared with whoever else lives in the flat, and if it opens onto a landing it is effectively shared with the block. There’s no need for a rota, because the rules above are per person rather than per task. Friends in shared houses tend to have a rota for everything else, and the hallway is the one place it isn’t needed. Each person has one hook and one shoe spot, and nothing of theirs goes in the hallway that is not on the hook or in the spot. There’s nothing to take turns at.
Two things make this hold. The hook rail has exactly as many hooks as there are people, plus one for a guest, so there is no spare hook for a fourth coat to creep onto. And the floor space by the door is marked, most simply by the edge of the mat: shoes on the mat side of the line are fine, shoes past it get moved to their owner’s wardrobe without comment.
A hallway that resets itself in the evening
The hallway is the last stop of the evening round. The fire brigade’s bedtime check includes making sure escape routes are clear of anything that may slow your escape down, and the hallway is the escape route, so it gets thirty seconds at the end of the 15-minute evening reset: shoes back against the wall, bag off the floor and onto its hook, recycling either down or back in the kitchen, keys on the hook by the door where they can be found without a light.
One hook, one pair of shoes, a tape measure, and nothing on the landing. That is a hallway you can get down in the dark, and the corridor outside it stays clear for everyone else. The rest of the flat is in the organisation section.
