Good news: we done you an oven. Bad news: you now sleep on the floor. Photos via Gumtree
What is it? From a sheer logistical point of view, it is this: an oven in the exact centre of a bedroom, more details to follow; Where is it? Willesden Green, which – here’s a fun fact – is home to the Cambodian Embassy. One day, a thousand-million years in the future, this fact will win you a solitary point at a pub quiz and you will thank me for it; What is there to do locally? Beyond getting a Visa approved for an extended stay in the country of Cambodia – or, assuming you are a Cambodian national whose passport has been lost, stolen or destroyed over the course of your stay in London, and you are in need of emergency assistance – I don’t really fucking know. There’s a Sainsbury’s Local and a three-star rated library, go there; Alright, how much are they asking? £1,125 pcm, or around 5.9 million Cambodian riel. Really wish I hadn’t stumbled upon that Cambodian Embassy information at the top of this page, it’s really coloured the intro;
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I am ever more convinced that the landlords of London belong to some sort of monstered sub-species – that, when they remove their clothes at the end of the day, when they take off quarter-zip grey fleeces and bootcut jeans, when they remove the various leather-cased mobile phones they have clipped to their waists, prise the seamed Chelsea boots off their spiked feet and check the BBC Sport Rugby Union page on their BlackBerry, their bodies exude monstrous bumps and inhuman hard knots, horn-like protrusions and large bark-brown moles that taper down to something nearer to a patch of scales than a spread of human skin – and let me tell you, after coming across this week's LROTW, I do really feel now, for certain, that the landlords of London belong to some sort of monstered sub-species.Consider this: what do you, a human, need to make it through the day? A place to clean yourself, obviously. A little food and drink to keep you going. Somewhere to sit now and again, and access to a natural source of sunlight. Then, at the end, somewhere to lie down and sleep, in a centuries-old device we still use today called "a bed".This flat does not have a bed in it. A landlord willed it so.
This is not new. We have seen properties without beds in them before. There is a simple logistical rationale to this: it is harder to make a small flat look good in an online listing when you have levered a double-bed into it, taking up the scant available floorspace, filling out all the edges like you did in that suit at your cousin’s wedding, so it’s easier to take the bed out entirely.
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I have to say: humans are actually quite resistant to noticing the presence or non-presence of a property rental bed. A little like throwing a stick for a dog and pulling it back behind you when they sprint off into the horizon (a cruel, simple trick), so landlords take a bed out of a flat and hope you don't ask about it. "Any questions?" they say, showing you around, and there’s something on the tip of your tongue, isn’t there – there’s definitely something you want to ask, but it’s gone, so overwhelmed are you by cupboards, by thinking about how your commute might change if you move here, what broadband suppliers do and don’t operate here – and you end up saying, like you always, always do: "Yeah… what's the, ah, what’s the council tax rate?"So there’s no bed. Not to fixate on the bed, but: personally, I like to sleep in a bed and I guess you do too. So to imagine where a bed would actually go in here, I’ve drawn a crude bed diagram. Please be aware I got a D at GCSE art ("Disappointing, but understandable" — Mr. Duncan, 2003), so the perspective in this will be warped to the point of losing about 20 points off your coursework, but here’s the flat with a bed. Bear this in mind as we take the rest of this tour:
Below is the kitchen. If you flick back to the bed photo (above: marked "bed"), you will notice a small white angular corner of something in the bottom-right corner, and that is in fact the oven you see in front of you. So, to reiterate, as this is a newly-converted, newly-decorated studio flat: a landlord has taken a bed out of your room and put an oven in the exact centre of it instead. They’ve also installed the oven as part of an extended right-angled kitchen island instead of building around (or moving) the original radiator by the door, and also, as a treat, you have six kitchen plugs, which I’m afraid is too many.
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Here, in the bathroom, you have a couple more insanely angled clues as to what this room was before it was crudely converted into a studio flat, and that is: a room with an under-stairs cupboard in it.I personally prefer – and, again, I'm being a diva! – not to have my shower segmented by a sort of castrated bannister from the staircase above, the rest of the shower crammed into the leftover space and that ominous creaking sound going off over your head whenever anyone goes up the (now less-supported) stairs above you – but again, that’s just me. Natural light in bathrooms is over-rated, anyway. Close the door and spend the first few moments of your vital morning routine showering beneath electric strip-light and someone else's stairs. Never really have any idea what you look like because the only mirror you have is bathed in neon blue.
Back to the room with the bed, which is… which is basically your only room for anything, really. Sometimes it’s interesting to see the clues and track-marks that have led to a room being repurposed into something single-serving and designed for one – the way investigators can unshatter a bullet and assign it to a gun, I can see where a normal bedroom with a cupboard has been converted, by way of an oven and too many electrical sockets and a chainsaw through a staircase and a bolted-on lock on the door, into something that could feasibly be marketed for £1,125 (!) in Willesden (!!).This was just a normal bedroom until an oven happened to it. By the sick non-human logic of the landlord, putting an oven in a bedroom and making it demonstrably worse in every possible way as a living situation actually made it worth more on the broken property market. I can only assume the other rooms in this house have been similarly butchered up into single-serving living spaces, so you share corridors and hallways and a staircase with a number of people who are similarly crammed in around their bed, and a miasma of misery leaks in on you from them, through floorboards and cracks under doors or through old refuse pipes that riddle the house.No moral to this one! Just don't rent here!@joelgolby
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