Rental Opportunity of the Week: What £1,200 Gets You in One of London's Poshest Areas

What is it? A health and safety disaster-in-waiting, if I'm honest with you.
Where is it? Primrose Hill, weirdly. This happens semi-regularly now: once every six weeks, like clockwork, a shithole turns up in a rich part of town (*1). You don't blink so much when a shithole turns up in a shithole part of town – but literally four roads over from Primrose Hill is Chalk Farm, and if you told me, "Hey. Hey, Joel: found a shithole," and I asked, "Where is it?" and you said, "Chalk Farm," I don't think I’d be surprised. I’d probably roll over and go back to sleep. I probably should’ve mentioned that at the start of this fantasy I was asleep. You woke me up to have this conversation. Chalk Farm being a shithole does not move me. Primrose Hill being one does.
What is there to do locally? Primrose Hill is a special area of London where, in the 1800s, forward-thinking Victorian architects built a cloistered enclave around a spectacular sloping park, to house all of Oasis' and Jude Law's future ex-wives
Alright, what are they asking? £1,200 pcm.

What's the "misguided practical project for which you are not qualified" that you have been thinking about in quarantine? Come on, we all have one. Quarantine has forced us to experience every excruciating second of the 24 hours in the day, and slowly segment them into bits, and try to find something to do within each of those bits, so our bodies and minds don't seize up with inactivity.

You have the hours you do your job in: sure, normal. Then the hours before work, which you previously took up with commuting, and in lockdown you started doing the PE With Joe training in, but then you woke up late that one day and skipped it, then didn’t bother the next day and a load of Nike outlet stuff you ordered three weeks ago has just turned up but you won’t ever put it on, will you? The exercise part of you that lived in a thrill for eight days has already died. There's that bit. You have the hour-and-a-half you spend taking too long to make your dinner. But there are still approximately six hours left in the day before you can reasonably go to bed.

What are you going to do with that time? Aborted manuscript? Children’s book? Podcast series? Or, to avoid the doomed curse of a creative project, maybe something with your hands: sourdough, gardening? I've been looking at my bike and thinking I am qualified to change the handlebars on it when I'm not. But similarly I spent about an hour thinking, 'Could I actually get heroin?' yesterday, so. It's fair to say that sensible decisions are not being made. What's your shit? What’s your shit?

Here's a project you could, apparently, do: choose a room in your house (small.), draw a rough floor plan with the text all different ways round on the back of an envelope, and then bafflingly decide to turn that room in your house (small.) into a studio flat, with a bathroom hidden behind a flap of MDF and a home-brew mezzanine level, which I, very sincerely, do not trust to last the night. That is something that, maybe, you could do. Someone in Primrose Hill has already done it:

What, exactly, is going on here? The space is so tight and the photographs taken from such obtuse angles that it's actually quite hard to figure out. To make sense of it, we need to go through each fragment of the flat, one-by-one:

#1. Here is a fairly normal grey-sofa-in-a-small-front-room set-up. It's not a good set-up – all of the surrounding furniture is too high, so if you sit in the sofa, even alone in the flat, you will feel oddly intimidated, as if you are being loomed upon from all sides – but broadly, fine. It’s a grey sofa in a room. What are you going to get mad about?

#2. Only, here's the same room, with even more tall furniture, and a curious quirk of light: there are two full windows in this room, each of them distantly enough away from the surrounding properties to let a good portion of light into the room, but look in the centre, there, away from the windows, where the light just… dies. I have never seen a photo of light giving up halfway from a window to a sofa up until now. That particle of energy zipped out of the sun eight minutes ago and travelled at a speed that would destroy a human, and then it got to this bedsit near Camden and immediately just gave up. I have never seen a lightwave go "fuck it" before. Now I have. Such is the depressing power of this room.

#3. Same room, always the same, though now you get a wider view of the space. In that little crevice is your kitchen area, a two-hob and an oven, though quite how you fully open the oven door and stand in front of it to put something in it I don't know, because there is not space for both of those things. You can either be in front of the oven or the oven can be open. You can’t have both. Once you put a mac and cheese in there to cook, it is stuck there. Important to note here that the ceiling beam that supports the mezzanine level above you is claustrophobically low and the ladder you take to go upstairs to your bedroom is seemingly made out of the side of a shed and also doubles up as your tea towel holder. "How'd he die?" "Slipped on a tea towel on a ladder and crashed through his own window." "He always had that energy. I always thought he'd do something like that."

#4. This is your bathroom and I genuinely don’t know what that diagonal line that intersects the bathroom doorjamb actually is, but. I could tell you the bathroom has a depressing aura and is too small to really be taken seriously, but you have eyes, you don’t need me to tell you that.

#5. Here is an alternate view of the same bathroom (same bizarre two-moods-of-lighting-in-the-same-room effect in here: this house is where the energy of the sun comes to die) and you can see it has a shower and a toilet, and is also behind a thin home-made cupboard door and you have to hang your dressing gown up in the hallway outside it because there’s no actual room for a dressing gown. I’m not saying "dressing gown storage" is an essential feature of all properties, but if I’m paying £1,200 a month for something I want more than a hook in a hallway outside a bathroom hidden behind what is essentially a lean-to.

#6. This is your bedroom. It's a mezzanine level above your own sitting room that you have to access via a ladder and crawl into via a hatch, and I do always think that if your dressing table touches the ceiling, that is a bad sign. Yes: your bed is just a mattress on a roughly carpeted floor. Yes: the property listing for this does suggest that this space could be suitable for couples, i.e. two entire human beings, and also student friendly. I don’t know what world landlords live in anymore.

#7. I am embarrassed to even look at this drawing someone did of a toilet.

So, I mean, that's the property. Is it good? No. Is it baffling? Yes. Does it flout planning and safety laws? I'm not read up on those, but I get the overriding feeling that if you sent an inspector there it would be condemned. I genuinely feel like this room was once just a toilet, and someone realised it was too big to be a toilet, so turned it into something else, badly, and now it costs £1,200 a month to live in and you can split the cost with someone else, as long as they don’t mind living in a toilet and never being able to stand up in their bedroom. You take it for granted, standing up in your bedroom, don't you? No matter how bad your place is right now, at least you can stand up in your bedroom.

Shitholes in Primrose Hill have ascended to a level of shitholery never seen before. They’re making me cherish times I slept in shitholes just because I could stand up in them. What an appalling, dying city this is.

@joelgolby