London Rental Opportunity of the Week: I Don’t Know Where You’re Meant to Sleep Here, in Stratford

What is it? You know this song by now! Everybody, from the front to the back row! Let me hear you! "A studio flat in Stratford"!
Where is it? Stratford, a special district London invented for shopping and stadium sports and literally nothing else;
What is there to do locally? Wander lost and lonely through the overgrown yellow grass and thicketed remains of the Olympic Dream; try to go to Westfield for a few bits but get constantly accosted by 16-year-old boys with ponytails and YouTube accounts asking you to "bait out a sket" until you – you pathetic little pig – you whimperingly relent; spend about 25 minutes trying to switch from one line to another at Stratford's unnecessarily sprawling and complicated train terminal; die, like your hopes did, long ago, before you came to this place;
Alright, how much are they asking? I have it at £840 p.c.m., or £200 p/w

I for one find it quite curious that Facebook – the largest, glossiest, listen-to-your-conversations-thru-your-phone-est, watch-everything-you-google-and-spit-it-back-out-to-you-est mega-website in the world, a Bond villain in the form of a social network – I for one find it curious that Facebook launched last year a really crap version of Gumtree where people try to sell you knock-off Gucci bags and size 8 Nike trainers they apparently took a photo of on a brick, and, like, live rabbits. Does nobody else… think about this? How the Marketplace icon just popped up one day and we… accepted it? Has anyone, ever, made a successful trade on that place? Has Facebook ever made a silver cent from its existence? Why is it there? Why are we not talking about this?

A click on the icon right now tells me that, in my immediate area, I can use Facebook to buy Huaraches; Armani tracksuits; a used Hermes belt; a wooden play house that I can only collect from a garden in Basildon; an undoubtedly stolen iPhone; a 3.0-litre '03-plate Izusu Trooper; an especially ugly dinner set; "good as new" men's adidas T-shirts which, despite being used, are advertised close to retail; a Samsung TV without any brackets or stands and the photo being used to advertise it, as it always does with TVs being sold online, shows it propped on a squidgy beige carpet with all the wires trailing out of it; an infinite number of Beats by Dre. Who is this for? Who is this for? Who is this for?

Oh, also, this: a vile and unhappy studio flat, in Stratford:

The flat advertisement, in full:

Zoom in on this bit:

Now look at the main room where you are supposed to live and sleep:

Are you seeing a double bed? I'm not seeing a double bed. Recall: this is billed as a studio flat, which we know the contortion of by now: a studio flat is a single room, which in theory is stretched taut and open plan – like those trendy New York lofts you see on TV shows! – cleverly designed to encompass a living space, a kitchen area, a bedroom, a bathroom. And in actuality, in modern Britain 2K18, a studio flat is just a single room with all the things you need to basically live crammed tightly inside it, which is not the same thing. So we can gather from the very definition of "studio flat" that there are no offshoot rooms hiding where a bed might go. This expanse of empty space by the kitchen is… it. That’s it. This is where you do your living, and your sleeping. This is where you eat your dinner and fuck. An artist’s impression of how much room a bed would take up, in that:

So we can only gather that this is literally just a room upstairs in someone’s house, made en-suite and billed up at £840 p.c.m. In, again to reiterate, Stratford. Do you want to walk sideways like a crab down the thin expanse of corridor space your bed allows you, in Stratford? Do you want to piss and shit in a toilet crammed so close to the shower that the curtain brushes against your legs when you’re not in it, in Stratford? Do you want the only storage space in your house for a hoover to go in to be "the bit between your bed and a fridge", in Stratford? Stratford? In Stratford?

London Rental Opportunity of the Week is the only work of mine that anyone who ever meets me knows or wants to talk about. "Oh yeah," they say. "You do the… for VICE. The long ones. The slightly too long pieces." And I say: yeah. And they go: "Do you not also do the London Rental Opportunity ones, that are better?" And I say: yeah. And they say: "You know what worries me about that," people say, and I say: What. And they say: "You just know – you know – that someone desperate ends up living in those shitholes." And I go: yeah, I know. It's mad, isn't it.

That’s sort of the thing that I am numb to: someone has lived here, before, for £840 p.c.m., and they will probably live here again. People of all circumstances, desperate and otherwise, need somewhere to live in London. So much of the flat you end up in here is just pure timing. And so the market bubbles along, with nobody who controls it – the property agents, the landlords – ever really knowing anything is wrong. If you can get £840 p.c.m. for a room above a flat in Stratford, then why worry, right? But then that sort of is the problem – a middle wave of acceptance that predicates the storm. Soon, Yung London is going to have to pick a commuter town an hour away from the city, and move en masse there, and break it in our own particular way: establish cool areas, and brunch spots, and pop-up pubs; drive the property prices up through sheer demand, grind the commuting network to a halt with overuse. We’re going to have to build a city outside of this city to get back into the city when we need to work. The only way to escape this destroyed hellscape is to pick somewhere else and destroy it. This flat in Stratford might not be so bad, sure – not the worst we’ve ever seen – but it’s a symptom of an un-curable disease, and we will look back on this one day, in 15, 20 years – from the Mecha-Luton we have built for ourselves, full of high skyscrapers and displaced natives – and go: "That was the death gong, right there." We will point to this flat and go: "That is the precise turning point that we couldn’t U around from."

@joelgolby (h/t @ChrisBatesSJ)