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elswick
I had au pairs. My mum heard some shit stories, like one family who bought separate (and shit) food for theirs. Another naive one from some remote Austrian village who got offered money for sex in a bar. She thought it was a pretty sweet gig and turned the house into a brothel in the day hours. One of ours got radicalised at Finsbury Park mosque (before it became famous).
But generally it seemed like a pretty good gig when you're young:
✅ free food and accommodation in a good location in an amazing (and expensive) city
✅ English course fees
✅ Travel card
✅ use of a car depending on availability
✅ Cash in your pocket
In exchange for doing the school drop in the morning, ad hoc food shopping, helping clean, school pick up and bedtime. I mean a chunk of your working day is basically doing the standard life chores you have to do anyway.
Obviously it would be amazing to be able to get a highly paid job and work visa with next to no language skills and only a couple of years work experience under your belt. But that's not actually the counterfactual is it?
In a lot of ways I'm not sure it's as culturally applicable as it once was. If you were from the east bloc it was a great way to get a visa to experience living in the UK and learning English that probably wouldn't have been available. I'm dating myself here but provided a route for a lot of Yugoslavs to get out and set up lives here temporarily or permanently.