London Rental Opportunity of the Week: Hackney’s Bleakest One-Bed

What is it? Someone has crammed a bed into a room that is not built for a bed and we have to talk about that, I guess;
Where is it? *extremely "having an argument w/ your boyfriend at brunch while having a purple fringe about it" voice* Hackney, guys;
What is there to do locally? Listen, you can trawl TimeOut and cool blogs and lists and things like that, and, like, local London websites, or follow Instagram tags, or get those books about east London, and figure out, from there, precisely what the coolest things to do in the city are, all of them situated around Hackney; or you can just get real for a minute and do whatever I do when I’m in the area, which is: go Hackney Spoons, six pints then out;
Alright, how much are they asking? £1,050 p.c.m.

Mattresses are horrible things, aren’t they? When you consider them. I just moved into a place yesterday and beheld the mattress I had inherited: those swirling patterns, those odd orange sprawling stains, the fact that the entire thing is just a wad of springs and fibre teeming with the dead skin cells and errant spunk of all those who have come before you. Mattresses, alive with the ghosts of those who slept here, are truly monstrous creations, and we should burn them all in a pyre. No wonder you see them, limp and sagging and damp, discarded on the corners of streets and roads. No wonder every podcast you ever listen to wants you to buy a new one. It is deranged we sleep on the same mattresses other people have used before us. It’s like sleeping in someone else’s underwear. Sleeping in a big wet wad of someone else’s spit.

Anyway: we’re in Hackney this week, as ever.

Hackney is to the state of London gentrification what the rings embedded through a tree are when you saw it in half and ease it over: you’ve got the artist wave, still there, somehow, and on top of that you’ve got all the Yung Mums with complicated prams; you’ve got people who came up in Hackney and still cling to it like a limpet and you have those who got displaced to Hackney when the adjacent areas of London got over-developed and priced them out. You’ve got the new layer of bars and £18 pizza restaurants and vegan places with queues outside all serving the new Hackney residentia, and you have those who loathe the new onslaught, and you have those who love them because they are them. And it’s all built around a trendy central cinema complex and a mess of practical bus routes, and it’s sort of brunch places and crime tape at the same time, a real mass of contradictions, plus a number of Tescos.

Also: this place, which is a grand-a-month shitholé. Observe:

Is this the worst place ever featured on LROTW? It is not. It is a technically liveable-in space with separate rooms for the bedroom and kitchen. But the fact that context – The Fact That Other, Worse, Places Exist – softens the blow of this one doesn’t exactly excuse it. This column has moved the goalposts of what constitutes a terrible place to live in, but this place is still playing on the same pitch: a double bed, crammed into an exact double bed-width room, obscuring a good 30 percent of the window it’s rolled up against; there’s a wardrobe, crammed into the room’s only available alcove, which itself seems to be built against a 10° incline wall; that slender, bleak radiator; the fact that, instead of a mount for a television, you’re given a small inter-room window that has a bottle of Windolene balanced on it; the knackered vinyl sofa, the table that has certainly seen some things, a single, despairing CD tower; a microwave yellow with age, a big gallon-jug of water, a cupboard door I’m pretty sure won’t open fully because it clonks against the side of the washing machine.

You could live here, couldn’t you, if you had to? Gun to your head, you could live here. But it feels like any faint gasps of happiness you might have in your body any time you walk through the door to this will escape and dissipate as soon as you enter, fading into the deep blue carpet to be trodden on and fester.

(Aside: this flat is advertised as being "newly refurbished", which I scoffed at at first, but then look closer: no, the kitchen cupboards are new; the carpet is unstained; the radiators and fire doors look vaguely fresh. There is just such an overwhelming air of bleakness about the physical space that it fundamentally seems knackered and old, despite it actually not being either of those things. And, more importantly than that, what landlord in London actually does refurbish their flat, especially one as die-in-the-corner depressing as this? Work it backwards: something horrible happened in this flat. Something unspeakably bad that caused someone's dead body to leak. A blood stain that wouldn't scrub away. Nothing else kicks a landlord into action enough to refurbish a one-bed. What horrors happened here, before the previous occupant, one way or another, left?)

How much do you want to live in Hackney, really? Enough to pay a grand a month to look out of one window from your own bed, flat on your belly, haunted by the stale smell of the mattress beneath you, surrounded by the ghosts of a terror unspoken? No. Come on. Look for somewhere else.

@joelgolby (h/t @Jonny_Sanders_)