London Rental Opportunity of the Week: An Extremely Puzzling Shower Layout in Catford

What is it? I am like 70 percent sure this is a utility room with a bed in it. To be clear: I feel like someone put a bed in their utility room, and thought that was a good idea. Every ten times I think about this, three of the times I think: 'Nah. No. Nobody would do that… would they?' and then the other seven times I think, Yes, they absolutely would.' That is where I am, with this. That is where we are.
Where is it? It's somewhere between the Catford Overground station and the Lewisham DLR, which – if, say, you're looking the journey to Catford up on Citymapper – is the exact point you just close the app down and text whoever you were meant to be meeting there with some excuse about how you're actually feeling ill. You want me to get a Southeastern train from London Bridge? Grow up.
What is there to do locally? You know when you start a new game of GTA and the unexplored area of the map is greyed out, and slowly – through mission-specific drives and cut scenes that fly you out across the digital world – the map reveals itself to you, the clouds slowly parting, until the entire world is revealed to you, except for one awkward grey little triangular space up near the heliport where nothing really is, so you've never really been there, even during an off-the-scale six-star police chase? That's Catford.
Alright, how much are they asking? £750 p.c.m.

The main agony I run up against when I sit to write these – formerly beloved, increasingly less beloved, now something close to hated – London Rental Opportunity columns is this: the fact that London is contorting at the seams, and that so many rooms here are filled to bulging, that London is made of slenderly-constructed million-dollar new-build apartment blocks and then just old, formerly double or not-quite-double bedrooms that have been repurposed in the vague shape of a studio apartment or self-contained flat. As in, what I am saying is: London is a number of square pegs forced by the dozen into round holes. A lot of the flats we see on this page are repurposed to fit, rather than built to be used. They are a blank space that has the ambition of being somewhere people can live without the actual nuts to be it. If you put a fold-down bed in a kitchen, it doesn’t make it a studio flat, is what I am getting at. It makes it a fold-down bed in a kitchen.

And so now to Catford, where the opposite has happened, almost: a newly refurbished flat that is specifically built within its own limitations, to allow someone to live there despite itself. Note how the curved shape bitten out of the kitchen work surface allows the door next to it to open. Consider the impossible Penrose Stair-angles of this shower-cum-alcove, the wild angle of the adjacent curtain rail. This was formerly a real room, in a real house, and now it is one flat in a block of four of them. I am trying to weigh up whether this is better or worse than usual.

No, it's worse. It's way worse. Here's your bedroom, where you can do anything from… waking up in a single bed and immediately microwaving an egg? To… ironing the clothes that juddered in the washing machine for hours overnight just inches from your sleeping head? To… I mean, your fridge is there as well, maybe you can reach it from bed and eat some Babybel out of it? To… there is no way that door opens fully, with the position of the bed being where it is. The direction of the hinges suggests it opens inwards. It clunks into the bed and will not open any more. So maybe you could… slide your front door open and just sort of… wiggle your way into your flat?

You know when sometimes you go to the supermarket and bring your shopping in and the width of the bags makes it difficult-to-impossible to elegantly navigate a normal ordinary front door? You cannot do that in this flat. You have to start unpacking your toothpaste and your big cartons of orange juice outside in the hallway, and, via a series of tightly scheduled shuttle runs, work the shopping through the door, round the closed door and through the slender bed gap, then down into the fridge, which is directly next to the microwave. Seven hundred and fifty pounds, per month. In Catford.

Have this city's landlords ever, like, lived anywhere before? The bathroom alone suggests it was designed by an alien locked in the body of a sociopath: a bath placed under a wild structural slash of alcove, a dick-height window next to it, a creaking line of sealant along the floor, a shower rail that is embedded in the exact centre of one wall and in the corner of another, a rail that (curtainless!) crosses the room at an un-viably acute angle. The kitchen is a separate sub-kitchen that has surface space and the spare plug socket necessary to have the microwave in it, but for some reason the microwave is balanced on a plinth next to the bed anyway.

"THIS IS A SMALL FLAT," the advert says, withholding the more pertinent information: "that was designed by a maniac". "SO PLEASE TAKE INTO CONSIDERATION IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR AMPLE SPACE." It feels like in the next five years or so people will just stop flagging this up as a warning anymore. Behold, the new normal. It is five minutes from both Catford overground stations and you can't even open the door to it. You can reheat a lukewarm Rustlers from the comfort of your own bed, though, so. Comme ci comme ça.

@joelgolby (h/t @JPLongland)