London Rental Opportunity of the Week: A 'Luxury’ Apartment Filled with Shit Coffee Tables for You to Try and Afford

(All photos via Zoopla)

What is it? It is a flat, mate;
Where is it? Judd Street, near King's Cross – I mean, as slap bang in the middle of London as you can get, truly;
What is there to do locally? Literally anything. You can walk to Oxford Street in, like, seven seconds. There's a big hospital up the road. You can get a train to fucking France. Hit up the British Library. Go to the British Museum. Go to the new Granary Square complex, that kind of new-build-with-old-bricks place where pop-ups happen. Like: imagine a thing. You can do it in this area of London. No, I'm— no, I'm not going to say it. I'm not going to say it. I'm not saying it. Fine: it being King's Cross, you can go and have dark guilty intercourse with a sex worker. Fine. I said it.
Alright, how much are they asking? £1,387 a month, a figure so precise I am convinced estate agents are making up market rent these days by turning a calculator on and slapping it on their desk and just quoting whatever number got mashed into the pad.

To Judd Street this week, in central-est central London, a place everyone on earth would be happy to live. Because that's the great con about London: yes, there is everything here, and more – earthly delights and great horrors, all slashed through with a river like a garbage pile. But also it's spread and sprawled out, stretched thin like dough, and essentially it takes an hour to get to anywhere from anywhere and a lot of the time you spend living what you think is the high life is actually spent wasting the last of your iPhone battery listening to a single song, alone, on the top deck of a bus. London is a city, yes, but it's also a collection of very distinct places roughly glued together with a thousand different public transport systems, and the only running theme throughout it are all the Prets. Living in London is actually about living in a place that is technically part of London, and is very very close to London, but London proper – i.e., where M&M's World is – is still a very long way away from you. Living in London is actually "Living in Brockley", which is different. And so anyway yes: that's London.

Not Judd Street, though, off the back of King's Cross, which is the perfect location for your London life, only if it didn't look like this – this being, of course, the answer to the question: "What if the people who designed those bleak little single-serving microwave dinners that men whose wives have left them eat in front of late-night television before blowing their heads off, alone, shotgun not a pistol, their body undiscovered for days afterward because nobody ever really cared about them in the first place – and: what if the people who designed those also designed flats?"

And lo:

I honestly spend my life putting photos in frames because estate agents – despite it being one of the key tenets of their job – cannot take a single decently sized photo of fucking anything

And a description:

The great humour here comes from whoever has been tasked to describe this flat on Zoopla, because they've rolled the estate agent Describe-U-Like™ wheel of fortune and come up with "this flat has recently been refurbished to the highest standard", which is quite a rich description for what appears very much to be the cheapest coffee table Argos possibly sells; an old-looking IKEA desk which I'm pretty sure is one of those ones you always get, don't you, in houses furnished by landlords, desks that are entirely structurally dependent on one single piece of rough-textured MDF, which, for whatever reason, is always designed to rub up against your leg, however which way you sit at it, and in this instance has been lovingly refurbished with a £1 plastic tablecloth; and also for a microwave that looks like it's been yellow since that time someone exploded a Pot Noodle in it in actual 1998.

Ah, yes: nothing quite says "refurbished to the highest standard" like a fucking plug socket slap bang in the middle of a fucking wall. Nothing says "exxxxxxxtremely primo luxxxxxe shit" like having to walk sideways like a crab to get around your bed, because your bedroom is the exact size – to the centimetre – of what can be defined as a "room" rather than "an ambitious cupboard". Mm. I like especially how they put a corner shower in the middle of the bathroom, the mad, mad, mad, mad cunts.

Listen, I look at a lot more London rental opportunities than you do, and I can see this as indicative of where this is going: this city – this doomed, doomed city, ever more carved out in flats that specify how one sad, wrecked human could live a life in them if they hand over all of the money they earn in a month and be really careful about how much they have the lights on in case their electricity bill summons the bailiffs. Essentially: this wretched, horrid, white deathly London flat is what all of London will look like soon, when landlords take all the large buildings and divide them into gruel-like portions, Just Enough To Live In If You Had To, and that's how we will live, in our distant little London satellites, commuting for hours just to go and take our picture with an M&M, then back again, with all those people, the tubes creaking and sighing with the weight of it, back in the darkness, the pitch pitch darkness, back to our tiny suburbs and quiet streets, up through stairs and staid corridors to our flats, which have one microwave in them and the cheapest possible desk on the planet, and we will flop on the bed and go: I am living the life, here, the best my life could possibly ever be, in London.

Might have to stop doing this column for a bit lads, tbqhwy, as it's really starting to bum me out.

@joelgolby

More from this series, if you can bear it:

Shall We Just Sack Off London and Live in a £15k Flat in Glasgow?

A Fucking Shed in Cheam! CHEAM!

What Happened in the Dread House?