Hacker News Reader

Since no one else has mentioned it, in the UK (and other Commonwealth countries) these are called "peppercorn" rents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppercorn_(legal)

On my previous house, we had a leasehold of just our garage, oddly, with a peppercorn rent of £1 a year. Being young and innocent, I did ask whether I actually had to pay this, but my solicitor just laughed.

View on HN

For the other side of that laugh, see Richard Feynman's "I want my dollar!" story: http://www.e-reading.mobi/chapter.php/71262/33/Feynman_-_Sur...

(Find "I want my dollar!" toward the bottom of the page)

It turns out there was technical paperwork signing over patent rights to the government at a dollar each...

I remember asking the same thing when I was a young researcher at my university too. I never got my dollar.

My grandmother lived most of her life in an enormous Edwardian apartment in Hampstead, North London. The place was worth over GBP3MM last I looked, but she paid the fixed rent of seventy pounds a year that had been negotiated in the 1930s with no termination or renegotiation possible until she left in the late '90s.

(Note: the relative value of seventy pounds in 1930 isn't a simple conversion, because economic conditions have changed. See https://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/relativevalue.php?u... for a discussion).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com