Rental Opportunity of the Week: What a Grand Gets You in North London's No Man's Land

What is it? I suppose spiritually it shares some similarities with the concept of a “pod hotel”, though it’s not a pod hotel, it’s a sort of dreary adult bunkbed inside one-eighth of a sauna.
Where is it? Archway, and from the map it is actually so “in Archway” that I’m pretty sure it’s built on top of the station. I, too, love to sleep on the top bunk of a bed that rumbles atop a near constant bombardment of trains and commuters.
What is there to do locally? Every time I’ve been to Archway it’s either to go to a not-even-shite-in-a-fun-way Old Man Pub to watch a disappointing Arsenal draw; been deposited there because my bus has terminated early and I have to wait at that big grey roundabout, slashed constantly with spiky drizzle, waiting for the next heaving 43 to amble up the hill; watched a violent scene unfold silently through the fluorescent-backed windows of the nearby McDonald’s; or watched blood seep dreadfully out of the back of an ambulance as it races to the nearby hospital. I’ve never been to Archway and thought, ‘Ah, yes: I feel a real and genuine sense of peace here.’ I’ve only been to Archway and thought, ‘This is how your nervous system will feel in the last five seconds before you die.’
Alright, how much are they asking? £955 p.c.m. 

Recently I realised, after decades of trying, that basically: I can’t actually dress. I can’t get dressed. Some people can get dressed: good for them. Some people can put a cultivated outfit together effortlessly, then swap out the parts – a jacket for a coat, a hat for a scarf – and still look chic. I wish them well. But something in the alchemy of getting dressed doesn’t click for me – my body is the wrong shape, the physical vibe I exude is wrong for the clothes I try, there is no genuine insouciance to what I do, every time I wear a chore jacket I look like someone going to a fancy dress party as a “CSM open-day first-round reject” – so I made the choice to pare things back.

I only wear oversized T-shirts in black, white and grey now. I have some navy slacks and some black ones and, if I’m feeling exceptionally spicy, I might wear some green fatigues. I have whittled down the palette of my wardrobe to the bare minimum, so that the clothes I now have all click together roughly without my having to think about them. Nobody has noticed this at all. Nobody has said, “Wow, you’re dressing less like an early 90s CBBC puppet these days.” But in their hearts they know. The easiest way for me to live my life is with the scant minimum options available for me to fuck up with.

Recently, I have been trying out this philosophy with regards to domestic life, especially facing down being trapped helpless in my flat for another few weeks of potential lockdown. How much, really, do I need to live? I need an oven, obviously, with a four-hob, and a fridge and freezer too. A washing machine is necessary, always. The PS4 and TV are non-negotiable. But there are two sofas in this flat and I only sit on one. There’s a dining table nobody ever, ever uses. How many plates are necessary? How many pans actually get used? A bed is nice, but is a towel rail a luxury? I’m in a room alone right now and I can see eight potential places to sit. Do I need eight seats? What is the interior equivalent of “five big white T-shirts and two good pairs of slacks”? What’s the bare minimum you can get by on?

Well, anyway. Here’s Archway:

Is this the worst flat we’ve seen in this column? No, and in fact it passes the “Airbnb test” quite easily (The Airbnb Test is this: if you turn up in a cheap European city after panic booking flights and getting the last available affordable Airbnb for a three to four-day stay, and you turned up and it was this, would you shrug and say, “Yeah, it’s alright”? Would you go, “We’re only going to be in the flat to sleep, anyway”? Or would you throw a mard and demand you and your group move to a proper hotel? The Airbnb Test is important because it shows us what the human soul will put up with when threatened with 14 hours a day of T-shirt warm weather and access to affordable Aperol spritzes, which is: a lot. Most people would spend one hour a day in stocks in a market square if it meant they could go and get the best pizza of their life immediately afterwards for €8 or less and get two-thirds of a tan on the walk over. We think we have standards until an Italian waiter brings us a small white bowl of complimentary olives, and then we abandon everything that makes us human).

It’s clean and all the white goods in it are new. It’s bright and modern and soulless in that way London estate agents like. If you had to sleep here for one night, knowing you were waking up early in the morning anyway to do a bus tour of a local volcano, you’d be fine with it. But now think about signing on a 12-month contract: the walls are closing in a little now, aren’t they? Imagine spending month after month here, 50 percent of your wages going into it as you do. Not so fun now, is it? Yes, it’s clean, but you sleep on a fucking shelf. Yes, the microwave is brand new, but the only leisure space you have is a small void in the centre of a room that you can do… what with, exactly? You could get a sofa in there, I guess, but you’d have to clamber over it every time you walk down your ladder out of bed. You could maybe use the space for at-home YouTube workouts, but then your entire flat would smell close and musty and salty with your sweat for the rest of the day.

The longer you stay here, the less you can escape it: you’re in bed, look, watching at a downward angle at your wall-mounted TV (the size of the TV has been dictated by the width of the wall between your kitchen and your bathroom, and I’m wondering if ever in history a TV has been bought with that information being a deciding factor); you’re eating your breakfast, look, sat at the slender eating nook that’s been carved out for you, staring directly at a load of wall-mounted planks of wood. Here’s your bathroom, which is fine, but if you have a claustrophobic moment when you step out of the shower and realise you are instantly stood on top of your toilet, then you can only emerge to the open space of the room next door, which is both your kitchen and your bedroom and your workspace.

All this, for a grand a month, in Archway? I’m all for wearing a plain T-shirt in an otherwise ungarnished room in a short-lived and doomed attempt to live a minimalist life. But also, it would be quite good to have literally anywhere that isn’t the floor put your clothes, wouldn’t it?

@joelgolby