London Rental Opportunity of the Week: SLEEP, MY SWEET BABY, HERE UPON THE BLOOD FLOOR

What is it? I… I dunno, my guy! But it seems like the kind of floor literally designed to be easy to wash excess blood off of! So how you feeling about that!
Where is it? Clapham, home to every single estate agent and every single Australian in London;
What is there to do locally? You can go to Clapham Common, which every time I've been to I have seen i. men very openly pissing against trees while grunting; ii. a number of people in yoga pants doing military training where they run gruelling shuttles between said piss-trees; iii. a load of aforementioned Australians practising Australian-rules football, throwing tiny rugby balls to each other while laughing and saying "Billabong" and "Madge from Neighbours" and "it costs £6,000 every time I want to go home and see my family!"

Alright, how much are they asking? £600 a month, in a you-pay-them kind of deal that I do not fully understand;

I mean, I suppose if I were to design a room in which to very practically do a murder in, this would be that room: concrete floor slicked w/ easy-mop paint, drains and rivulets for the blood to run into, double-shutter over the doors, then a shower in the corner for getting all the gristle, blood and ligaments off me, stark hi-res lighting, big sink to wash bits off in. Other than an inferno for the corpse and some sort of special scream-suppressing waffling on the walls and floors, this is an otherwise perfect place to murder someone against their will. I might even go so far as to say this is England's Perfect Murder Room.

Have a little look:

But we're not looking for anyone to murder, not today. We are, instead, looking for somewhere to live. In Clapham! Thankfully, there are certain options now, with renting: you can, in the old style, rent a house or a single room in a house, paying a monthly fee to a landlord or letting agency for your right to be there; or, alternatively, you could sign up to a guardianship scheme, which is sort of a little like galvanised squatting: you stay in a vacant premises for a certain period of time, paying drastically lowered rent to a company who don't want their vacant property actually squatted in. You see? You see how the passing over of money somehow legitimises the business of people living in shops? You see how the only thing people dislike about squatters is that they do not pay for the vacant space they take up? Yeah.

Anyway, how about living here for £600 a month:

Now, this troubles me for a number of reasons (we may as well get into why this is a completely unliveable cage right now: there is no bed. There is not a single un-hard surface. This place, as best I can tell from deep investigative research thru Google Maps and then Zomato and comparing the tiles from one shop to another, used to be a fish and chip shop. There is absolutely no way a fish and chip shop does not have some sort of scent. Lingering fish odours. The deep, stale, wet scent of grease, hard-baked into the ceiling. Lie on the floor – here, where they used to rinse the fish guts – and cuddle up in a sleeping bag. Ignore the smell with a simple peg-nose situation. Bathe yourself in the most 'oh yeah' afterthought of a shower ever conceived. Pay £600 for the privilege.), but the gentrification of the guardianship rental market is possibly the most alarming.

A couple of years ago, a VICE intern was staying at a premises on Greek Street in Soho – centre of town, baby! aha – for £250. Now you have to pay a figure I like to call "about as much as I am happy to pay rent, to live anywhere, anything more than that is a pisstake" to live in a concrete-floored murdertorium in Clapham. And that figure is listed as being 60 percent below the market value of the flat. They are saying, there, that it should be worth £1,320 a month.

(Also, we don't always discuss this on LROTW – it's a fun franchise, for kids! – but good lord can you imagine trying to bring someone back here to shag them? "Heh, one second," you say, jangling an enormous keyring, trying to find the one that opens the shutters. "Yeah, there's a, uh, sink over there," you say, as the fluorescent lights flicker on in order. "There's, uh, probably a toilet, it's not explicitly photographed." Usher with one hand the single bed you managed to steer into this place. "Yeah, so that's… what we gon' fuck on." No. Absolutely not. There is no way in a million universes you are getting shagged in this place, unless it's a murder-shag, and I think we can all agree that's a less-than-ideal way of getting shagged. Or, indeed, murdered.)

Don't rent this place! Thanks!

@joelgolby (h/t @houseinfairview)