Photos via Facebook
What is living in London like? Hell. Here’s proof, beyond all doubt, that renting in London is a nightmare.
Where is it? Do you know what I mean? Stoke Newington is not a large place. I have lived in a couple of share-houses there, and they are cavernous, huge places – bay windows, gravelled gardens, attics – which can keep five or six adults in them at any one time. Then you think about all the other houses – the next-door neighbours who practice strange forms of reparative reiki from their basement, for instance, or the ones who make and print flyers to put through your letterbox to tell you about an obscure by-law about car exhaust fumes that they are making the local primary school strike about, and somehow this needs your support – and you can start to tot up the sheer number of people who manage to exist in such a relatively niche locale. How they seem to live lives full of space and light and air and garden, and then there’s you, crammed into a gloomy box-room, looking at Facebook Marketplace to see if you can move out at all, ever, and you see this studio apartment going, and you realise: no.
What is there to do locally? I am circling around the drain of a point: London is a gigantic city, easily capable of housing every single person in it, many times over, in comfort and warmth and joy. But a series of choices have been made to ensure that doesn’t happen. Tiny slum-like bedsits are gleamed to a soulless grey high finish and sold as premium digs. New builds are carved out in tiny proportions – why build a tower of flats if the flats aren’t big enough! You’re making the building! Make it big! – London housing a sort of always-evolving plane cabin interior, the seats at the back inching ever closer every single year, everyone squeezed into a level of discomfort at just a low enough rate that we don’t notice, just so Business Class can have an extra few inches to laugh and drink good orange juice in.
Have you gone off the point a bit? Yes.
Just do “how much”: £1,250 pcm.
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