Where is it? Brixton, where young media types, new money gentrification and 3am McDonald's knifefights live in perfect harmony;
What is there to do locally? Go to the David Bowie memorial and see some miserable thin lad with a candle and an acoustic guitar whisper "he taught us it was okay to be weird" to no one;
Alright, how much are they asking? I don't normally tinge the price bit with any sort of value judgement but I have to make an exception here because they are asking £1,625! Per calendar month! Bills not included! Windows not included!
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Haha, yeah: a £1,600+ per month flat in Brixton is literally worse than prison is as according to the UN. So yes: I am pretty sure it has some sort of round-the-edges-of-the-kitchen-ceiling skylight thing. But it also has absolutely no windows. So it's tricky, even looking at photos of the flat, not to escape that claustrophobic feeling, that feeling that maybe you are not even on Earth – maybe you are on the moon, or some distant cruel planet, where no glass can withstand the force of the darkness outside, and that you have to be here in your little halogen-lit confines, slowly growing crazier and crazier, slowly finding it more and more normal to smear your shit up the wall, turning jumpily at the skittering sounds beyond the walls. Are you alone in here? Or is there something Other crawling the corridors with you?There's been a trend recently in London Rental Opportunities of the Week to add some essential component of a flat on as a sort of afterthought – a toilet with a shower tray in it, for instance, or a weird toilet cupboard tacked on to the kitchen – and if you pace yourself backwards through the mental steps that took place before each of these happened you can conjure from the depths the ghost of a landlord, in the detritus of what was yet to come, a landlord with a phone clipped to his belt and a polo shirt tucked into his jeans, and his hands on his hips, gesturing towards the wreckage of a kitchen, going, "Well, yes, legally to be habitable this flat does have to have a toilet… but does it really need a hob?" or "Can we build some sort of dark small box for the shower to go in, instead of a legitimate bathroom? Same rent, half the space." But the windowless Brixton prison suggests something deeper, darker: a flat built for purpose with the specific remit of no windows, that a space buried in the middle of a warehouse conversion will be fine lit with little more than lamps and an obscured skylight, that people can adjust to a fundamental lack of vitamin D, that they can always take supplements. And if we skim the walls smooth enough and do it up with a nice kitchen, we can still rinse £1,600+ per month out of someone for it. What next, London? A flat without a door, just a small sewage duct you crawl into it through? Ceilingless 'back to nature' £550 per week shitholes in Tottenham? Maybe just brick me into a room and leave me to slowly suffocate there, and ask me for a monthly direct debit and three months' deposit up front for the pleasure? Why not that? Why not that? Ah? Can you hear me? The walls are closing in! Can you hear me? CAN YOU—The windows shall be large enough to enable the prisoners to read or work by natural light, and shall be so constructed that they can allow the entrance of fresh air whether or not there is artificial ventilation;
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