London Rental Opportunity of the Week: A Fridge On a Cabinet in Willesden

What is it? All I'm going to say is: someone's put a fridge on top of a cabinet, and the cabinet is wrapped entirely in clingfilm. We do not have the language for this because it has never happened before. It is possibly the last original thing to ever happen in this universe before it (the universe) dies. Why is the fridge on top of the cabinet? Why is the cabinet wrapped in clingfilm? What the red fuck;
Where is it? Somewhere between Willesden and Dollis Hill, two entirely made-up London areas that don't exist, but rather were invented by American TV movie executives for some medium-to-low budget bit about a modern London prince who spends time in his Dollis Hill townhouse before commuting to his job (the prince also works in advertising: he has eschewed his princehood to instead make tube ads for modern mattress companies, until his older brother – the heir apparent – goes missing in a helicopter crash somewhere over Costa Rica, at which point the main prince, our prince, has one calendar year to marry and find love or he isn’t allowed to be king, or something) in Willesden. So that’s what Dollis Hill is;
What is there to do locally? Some of the scenes I am thinking are:

– The prince (still in his early I-don’t-wanna-be-King! emo stage) makes friends with a cheerful cabby after a bit where he gets mugged on the way home and starts crying in the rain (the prince doesn’t know what a night bus is);
– A Kate Middleton lookalike who can’t act softly holds one of his hands and says "the heart wants what the heart wants" before telling him to go Drag Queen Brunch;
– Notting Hill Carnival dance-off scene that is so inappropriate Buzzfeed starts a whole new vertical dedicated to denouncing it;
– Chasing Tamsin Egerton Down Columbia Road Market;
– Evil Chelsea-adjacent villainess who wants the prince for herself (Mischa Barton?????? She must be about) derails his nascent romance with the poor-but-fit agency intern he never knew he fancied until she took her glasses off by shopping pictures of him at a Killing Kittens party (has to yell "it was a misunderstanding!" about it in a basement Wagamama);
– Hugh Dennis plays the prime minister in a way that inexplicably makes people Jeff Goldblum-level horny for Hugh Dennis;
– The prince's normal-but-wise best friend meets him – on a weekday morning! – to play a game of tennis. Erratic B-roll edits mean they somehow stroll from Camden to Greenwich over the course of one two-minute "so what is it you want?" conversation;
— Nobody knows why but Joss Stone makes a cameo;

Netflix, it's firstname.lastname at vice dot com if you want it.
Alright, how much are they asking? The flat’s going for £715 a month, I'll let the film go for much, much less.

We’ve already talked about this, but look, there: a fridge on top of a cabinet. You’re thinking: well that’s silly, isn’t it. Simply put your fridge in your kitchen, where it belongs. But you already are in the kitchen. Your bed is in it, which leaves no room for the fridge. We don’t talk about it enough on here – London Rental Opportunity of the Week is, sadly, a place where a bed in a kitchen is actually quite normal – but a bed in a kitchen is bad. Your kitchen is for your oil smells, your hot things, your washing machine and the dull constant hum of your fridge. Your kitchen is for dropping an ice cube on the floor and kicking it underneath the freezer and hoping the problem will simply resolve itself. The kitchen is for getting a late-night glass of water from and having a cupboard just for crisps. It’s not for sleeping in, because sleeping is diametrically opposed to making and consuming a beige-pink ham sandwich.

We have to admit that we’re in Willesden, a sort of sprawling cemetery up in the vapours of NW London, somewhere beneath the shadow of Wembley. There have been a few LROTWs around there of late, and as the chronicler of that I can only assume this is some sort of blunt trend – the opposite of Whole-Foods-and-Franco-Manca London gentrification, where shithole bedrooms are repurposed into studio flats by wedging a shower into one corner and nailgunning an electric meter to a wall – and that perhaps some sort of task force should be distributed there to rip the fire doors out of share-houses and arrest all the landlords at gunpoint.

Let’s list the crimes here, shall we, before we make the streets run red with landlord's blood: the mattress is still in the plastic packaging, which suggests this place has been newly converted into a kitchen-with-a-bed-in-it, and isn’t some legacy kitchen-with-a-bed-in-it, which is somehow, weirdly, more forgiveable (the ideal number of kitchens with beds in them, for me, in London, is zero, and anyone building more of them right now is exacerbating the problem); the bathroom door has been especially fitted so it slides across rather than opens out, because the sink-counter is too close to the bathroom for a normal door that opens, and I question the purity of a human who saw that problem (kitchen counter getting in way of bathroom door opening), found the solution (made kitchen door slide instead of swing) but still didn’t address the root cause (too small room being stuffed with purpose to rent to the first desperate fool willing to spend £715 a month on renting it); single kitchen cupboard mounted on the wall somehow more depressing than a bank of three would be, especially when there is actually space for more cupboards, so presumably the lone cupboard decision was made for financial reasons, i.e. a landlord decided not to pay to have more than one cupboard fitted to a wall; the fact that the toilet seems to be, I would say, 25 percent the size of a normal toilet??? Is this a child’s toilet???; and, not to bang on about it again, but the fucking fact that the fridge is on top of a cabinet like it jumped up there to avoid stepping on lava. I have never seen a more erratically-placed fridge in my entire life. Fridges do not need that kind of height to them. The fridge is like a monkey lurking in a tree, humming and watching you sleep.

This is a room with three pieces of furniture, three white goods and one kitchen cabinet crammed into it. More than one human being has helped make the decisions that led to us being there: the owner of the property before it was chopped up and converted into a tiny studio flat; whoever fitted the cabinets, the shower, the sliding door; whichever two people hoisted a fridge on top of a cabinet; whichever estate agent was tasked with renting the place on Gumtree; the photographer who took the pictures, the moderator who approved the advert. They’re all culpable.

Imagine I am delivering these lines with the Razzie Award-winning intensity of a drama school-fresh posh kid playing a prince in a Netflix-only romcom, shirt glued to his torso with heartbroken rain: don't you fools see you’re killing Willesden one cabinet-fridge at a time! Don’t you see this city is dying because of you!

@joelgolby