London Rental Opportunity of the Week: A Dirt Hole in Clapton

What is it? Well, it’s technically very hard to tell because, due to the sheer ineptness of the landlord taking photographs of their own property, we only have four acute and insane angles of the place, but it’s not too hard to surmise that we’re looking at an especially shitty studio flat here;
Where is it? Clapton, the place where on a sunny day last week someone parked their car outside my flat and just played an entire Cardi B album, start-to-finish, while geared up in a bus stop, so much so that all the buses that came through honked at them – so imagine a Cardi B album remixed with just every possible airhorn sound effect Charlie Sloth has available to him and you have a vague approximation of my Saturday afternoon;
What is there to do locally? Extremely piss me off while I’m trying to get some work done, apparently;
Alright, how much are they asking? Eight hundred of your finest pounds, good sire!

They are closing in on me. I have been writing about London’s rental market for 3+ years now and living in it for nine, and the flats are getting closer. It happened last month: Clapton, weeks after I moved to the area. Hackney, a ten-minute walk away. Slowly the flats get nearer. Sometimes at night I wake without dreaming, and walk to the window and pull the curtain near, and out there in the dark of the night I see them glowing, green-black in the darkness, thrumming, buh–bum, buh–bum, growing nearer, closing in on me. They are a postcode away, now. They are just down the street. They are on top of me. I am inside them.

Anyway, here’s a… I dunno, kind of prison? Kind of underground prison thing? Here’s a prison thing that is startlingly, aggressively close to where I now live:

There is a certain vibe of "bad crimes having been enacted here", not exactly helped by the fact that the property agent and/or landlord responsible for listing this flat apparently took just four random shots of the place from four increasingly insane angles, so to get any sort of idea of it you sort of have to re-construct it all together like it were a crime scene, like just out of shot there are blood arcs and chalk outlines, a hammer in a cellophane bag waiting to be itemised as evidence, a sobbing widow who knows more than she seems just outside the door. Look: I’ve sort of approximated the vague shape of the flat, as best I can see it, artist’s impression:

Looking at that again it very much looks like I am the serial killer the police are after, and not the occupant of this-flat-which-very-much-has-had-at-least-one-person-slaughtered-in-it, but you get what I am saying: for £800 p.c.m., you’re not getting a whole lot of room, you’re getting even less furniture, and the vibe in here is what I can only describe as "dreadful".

Today, a (it says here) "leading" and (again, just reading from other news sources) "acclaimed" architect Patrik Schumacher said in a briefing paper that millennials, those vile youths, don’t need living rooms in their flats, really, and that central London-based "hotel-style" rooms would better suit their needs and allow them to pump money back into the precious economy by having nights out in the West End. Before we write off living rooms altogether, I would like to pose one question to Patrik: when did you last have a hangover, my guy? Because those things require absolute silence and a room with a sofa in it.

"Those who are now making the hard choice between paying 80 percent of their income on a central flat versus commuting from afar will, in the liberalised future, appreciate new options and perhaps choose to pay only 60 percent for a smaller but more central flat," he wrote ("only" 60 percent, yeah?). "For many young professionals who are out and about networking 24/7, a small, clean, private hotel room-sized central patch serves their needs perfectly well." Patrik Schumacher might be envisioning a fantasy-like future society where we all live in immaculate downlit hotel rooms w/ exquisite linen on the beds and high rise views of London, and we all fuck each other raw in a sort of central atrium, but I fear the reality of the generation one or two stops ahead of us telling us living rooms are unnecessary is actually closer to this shit hole in Clapton and further away from a modern hotel that costs a mere 60 percent of our income every month.

Consider: the listing says this flat is "newly renovated", which frankly makes me wonder what fucking state it was in before (was it just a single dark clot of damp? Was there literal wet blood seeping from the walls? Did a horse live in there and shit directly on the floor and all around it?) and that it contains "minimal furnishing to make it your own space, neutral décor", which is a very roundabout way of saying "the landlord is cheap". There’s a "big window to private rear outside space", although I’m unsure whether you can actually… go to that space, and if you were worried about how to wash your clothes, don’t worry: for £800 p.c.m. the landlord will allow "shared use of washing machine". Where you’re meant to keep your clothes, with no visible shelving or wardrobe, is your own problem. What, you entitled millennials want me to solve every tiny problem you have? Grow up.

It’s getting harder and harder to write a conclusion to these. Point #1: £800 p.c.m. is an astounding amount of monthly money, and for someone to try and charge it for a single room where the walls of the bathroom aren’t even sealed is just laughable. Point #2: I can feel my arms itching from that grey–black carpet from here, truly this is the most ominous carpet anyone can buy. And Point #3: it would be nice, wouldn’t it, to go like literally just one week without being told we’re an entitled and diva-like generation and that we should just get over our fancy selves and bin off the concept of living rooms (what, you want a living room? Come on. No. Living rooms are for do-ers) when the housing market is now so irrevocably fucked up that this – this! – is what is on offer to us right now. Let’s just pick another city and move there. I’ll do a poll and we can all decide on it. All of our jobs are just scheduling tweets, anyway. I can do most of my work from a 4G-enabled phone and I feel like you can, too. Let’s leave London behind to the landlords, the 45-year-olds and the stockbrokers. Leave this broken place to the ones who broke it.

@joelgolby