As a student in 1988, I bought a flat at 340 Allison Street, Glasgow. Bizarrely, I couldn’t afford to rent, but was able to get a 100% mortgage, guaranteed by my dad. I’d trained as an architect in Edinburgh, then did a degree in drama at the Royal Scottish Academy in Glasgow. I’d always wanted to be an actor, but thought it best to have a go at something else first.

I was looking at flats for £15,000 in terrible areas in Glasgow East. There’d be a brick on the carpet and the window stove in, but the estate agent would be pointing out the lovely cornice work. One agent said he had a flat for £20,000. As soon as I walked in, I thought it was fantastic. It was on the third floor of a tenement, the top, with stripped floor-boards, white walls and 12ft ceilings, but was in a bad state of repair. I could cover the mortgage if I had two mates living there and I slept in the living room.

It had repeatedly been broken into. The door to the street was always unlocked and you’d have six flats off the “close” (tenement stairwell) and a trap door at the top. Burglars would use it and jump through people’s ceilings into the flats. The poor lady who lived there before was always being done over.

Three of us lived there, all from the same year at drama school: Ashley, Simon and me. I was the dad figure at the ripe old age of 23. The boys covered the mortgage of £120 a month, so I was able to live there for nothing.

It was a less than salubrious part of town – with syringes and poo at the bottom of the close – but I loved it. It was tremendously eclectic. There were a lot of Asians, and a vibrant street where you could do your shopping. The fishmonger fancied my girlfriend, Olivia, so we got salmon for a fiver. He wanted to be a stuntman and showed us how to do stunts – in a slippery fish shop.

The people on the other side of the close were probably the only black family in Glasgow: Mr Collins was a dustman and his wife was always checking on us and asking us in for curry goat, which was delightful. One morning, I woke up to a huge pool of water. Mr Collins had found a rat on the stairs and boiled an enormous pot of water to throw on it. Of course, the rat scarpered and it all went under our door.

For six months, we were living in a building site. We’d come back in the evening and plaster, saw and drill. We built a new kitchen, bolting old wardrobes my sister and I had had as kids on the wall as cabinets, then putting rails between them forbatteries de cuisine.

All we could afford was a big chunk of Formica; the rest we built with bits of ply, using tools from the house-clearers downstairs. Ash spent months doing fake marbling on the tiles around the gas fire. My girlfriend had a sewing machine, so she ran up the curtains from great bolts of cloth she’d get for next to nothing. We had to get in a plumber to do the bathroom pipes, but I think the whole refurb cost £500.

It became the family house of the drama school, a home for waifs and strays – a hippie commune, really. We threw dinner parties because we’d got hold of cheap food and students were always looking for a freebie. Simon made jugged hare, and there were endless chillis and spag dishes. Ash was a vegetarian – until we got drunk one night and fed him a kebab. He’s now a meat-eater!

There was a wine shop on the corner, so we’d get £1.70 Bulgarian wine and McEwan’s ales – and that was your evening. I was in a few bands. I played acoustic guitar with a fiddle player and a wonderful girl singer – jazzy-folky stuff. We’d have jam sessions in the flat and everyone would just pick things up.

I was there until 1991, when I got picked up by an agent who said I had to come to London. A friend of a friend was moving out of her flat in a women’s commune, so I moved in – the only guy – to a sort of bedsit in wonderful art-deco flats in White City. It was a hot summer, so I’d be lying around, a scantily clad 25-year-old, getting strange looks.

Simon and Ash stayed in the Glasgow flat, and various people who’d left drama school lived there for a while. Simon went off to Australia, where, unfortunately, he drowned. Ash is now a vicar.

I sold the Glasgow flat three years ago, to mates who had lived there since that time. I’d bought it for £20,900 and sold it for the minimum for them to get a guaranteed mortgage, which was £25,000. Its whole ethos was as a place to live. I never wanted to make anything from it. I don’t think I’d go back; it was very much connected to that time. It was about the hope we all had, and the fact that nothing is beyond you. +Greg Wise is starring in Place of Execution, which concludes tomorrow at 9pm on ITV1

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