London Rental Opportunity of the Week: Sleep with Your Mate in Marble Arch

What is it? A studio flat in Marble Arch, which actually sounds like quite a nice prospect if you don’t look at the photos and consume the reality of it;
Where is it? I mean it’s like a one-minute walk to Hyde Park, it truly is an astounding location;
What is there to do locally? Go to Mayfair and get yourself a sugar daddy? Go to Speaker’s Corner and go see people on boxes be very loudly wrong? Go to the Diana Memorial Fountain and just Really Think About Di? The world is your oyster, man;
Alright, how much are they asking? I keep running the maths on this and rubbing my eyes in cartoon astonishment, and while we’ll get to in deeper anon I’m pretty sure – pretty sure – they’re asking £1,680 p.c.m.

You’re a human, I’m a human, we can agree on some things. So let me run this one by you: who do you live with? Perhaps you live with parents still, a normal way of living. Perhaps you live with flatmates, old friends from uni or a ragtag bunch of pals you found on Spareroom: this, too, is normal. Perhaps you live with your boyfriend or girlfriend, two years of dating sliding down a hill of inevitability into cohabitation, and yes the spark has gone entirely – Rory! Can! You! Please! Learn! To! Wash! Your! Fucking! Forks! Up! – and you haven’t had intercourse in three to four months but at least your situation is normal, it is a normal way of living with someone.

Now let me ask you this: what if I said you could live, as a single person, with another single person, shoulder-to-shoulder in a flat-pillowed bed? Would that be normal? Would that be a normal thing to do? In Marble Arch? In this? In this flat? Would that be normal? Here? In this?

No.

Obviously this has all of the hallmarks of one of our cut-and-paste studio apartment shitholes: obscenely angled tiny bathroom; sofa crammed up against the bed; yellow-with-grease extractor fan; kitchen cupboard doors that seem to be made out of the kitchen surface MDF; inexplicable wall art of some poppies. Studio apartments in London are evolving into exactly this: what normally would be a fine enough space to rent (if it was, say, one en-suite room in a wider flat you were renting) is made over to cram in as many essentials as possible, as ostensibly new build enough to make the place seem glossy and drive the p.c.m. up, but also it is a very fundamentally tiny space in a high-rent part of town that isn’t fit enough for purpose. On one hand: ooh, what a lovely balcony. On the other hand: why is there someone else in my bed, paying half my rent.

What makes this one stand out is the ad copy that is seemingly written by someone who has never lived in a house before. Selected excerpts:

So this is… specifically advertised as being a space for two single people? Just two pals laughing it up in the big city? And sharing a bed? Pyjamas on? Lights out at 10PM, no guests? Rent-wise: is the p.c.m. calculation based on how many people are staying here? If I live here alone, do I only have to pay £200 per week (which is still £840, by my reckoning)? Or, more realistically: no?

I know that the way the human brain works, certain ironclad facts are subjective rather than objective. For instance: the way I perceive the colour blue is perhaps different to the way you do it, or the way I hear certain songs, or the way I experience taste. We’re all unique people with unique perceptions of the world, and you like olives and I don’t, and &c. &c. &c. That in mind though: what fucking the fuck is fucking wrong with you if you think this apartment is “very large”?

Is it a double bed or is it two single beds? Is it two single beds crammed together to make a double bed? Is ‘separate shower room’ really a selling point? Every house I’ve ever lived in has had a separate room for the shower. It is called ‘a bathroom’. My theory is: did the estate agent selling this place just get done with a stint in prison? A stint that started with their birth and ended today, 30 years later, where the idea of shower rooms and beds and not getting beaten every night with a bar of soap in a long sock are fantastical and obscene? Or are they just so used to flogging shithole flats that ‘separate shower room’ is worthy of attention?

I’m tired, I’m tired, I’m tired. Tired enough to go halves on rent with a single friend and sleep next to them in two single beds crammed together to make a double? No. Tired enough to pay £1,680 per month for a kitchen I can’t turn around in and a shower room (separate) that is made of intricate, Escher-esque angles? No. Tired enough to live here, in Marble Arch, in the crumbling heart of this dying city? No, no, no. Never that tired.

@joelgolby