What is it? It is becoming nearly impossible to tell now, because estate agents – who, remember, have four primary jobs, “taking photos of listings”, “writing cogent copy about the listings”, “driving in a Mini to meet people at listings with a big set of keys” and “wringing you for every ounce of your take-home pay they can” – are so bad at the Taking Photos section of their job that it has become impossible, truly, to tell the exact layout and dimensions of any property photographed in the London and Greater London area in the last five years. That is to say, obviously: it’s a studio flat;
Where is it? [adopts that accent your dad does whenever he talks about London that sounds a little bit like a taxi driver shouting down a well] Saint Pancras!
What is there to do locally? Well, the thing is, this flat is situated in Endsleigh Court, equidistant to St Pancras International Station, Euston Square and Euston, so you’re basically in a Bermuda Triangle where, instead of spooky disappearances of boats and planes, you’re surrounded by shops that exclusively serve coffee and sandwiches to people who are late for cross-country trains, or large towering pubs where out-of-towners come because it’s the first place they see as soon as they get into London and don’t bother exploring any further, so there’s just like 900 lads in Newcastle tops, shouting; or, more crucially, there’s a McDonald’s; or you can go to France. Those are your options. The two genders: burger, or France.
Alright, how much are they asking? A cool £1,700 pcm.!
Sit down with me and stare into my eyes and let us talk unflinchingly about our finances. Listen: I am not a rich man. I am an un-wealthy boy. But I have a steady job and an income and a book deal (out! in! February! 2! K! 1! 9!), and I am the most financially secure I have ever been in my life, despite still going into my overdraft on the 20th of the month, every month, without fail. Does this mean I can afford £1,700 a month in rent? No, it absolutely does not. £1,700 per month (one thousand, seven hundred) (pounds) in rent would absolutely wipe me out, every 30 days like clockwork. £1,700 per month in rent is an absolutely astonishing amount to pay to not own something. An unthinkable, dizzying amount to pay. If I were paying £1,700 per month, I would want a palace. I would want a butler, and a maid. I’d want people to come to my house and look around, mouths agape, and actually say the word “wow”. For £1,700 per month I’d want, like, marble, and fountains, and a TV bigger than the sun. I’d want a door I could open with my fingerprint. I’d want a roof like a cathedral.
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Or, you know, this! I guess this could do the job, too!
Let us just define what we’re looking at here. It’s a studio apartment, so it’s safe to say we’re looking at a single room with a bathroom spin-off. The kitchen – as you can tell from the laminated “PLEASE REMEMBER TO WASH UP ANY ITEMS YOU USE” – is shared, so not part of your property proper, so assumedly you’re going at least halves on that with someone else paying £1,700 a month to print and laminate their own passive-aggressive notes.
The bed is not a bed; it’s a sofa fitted neatly into an alcove. The remaining space in the flat seems to be taken up by a hundred mirrors, a thousand mirrors, one billion staring mirrors, and either an additional sofa (theory one) or the same sofa you sleep on, moved around to the other side of the room to illustrate possible ways to organise your £1.7k/pcm flat (theory two). I personally vouch for theory three, which is that your studio apartment is actually basically a living room with an alcove in it, repurposed to accommodate a short single bed, and bafflingly is not reflected in the above hall of mirrors because of the acute angles of the room. You are paying £1,700 a month for two sofas, no beds and half a kitchen.
We should probably talk about this, though:
I’m… not a fan of that. And the thing is, it sort of should make sense: when I pitched this article to my editor, I said, frantically, panting and out of breath, “There’s a washing machine in the bathroom!” And before I showed him this particular photo of it he admitted he didn’t think that was super weird. It isn’t: the washing machine is a machine that is white (like many bathrooms) and sloshing with water (bathrooms) and is explicitly there to clean things (bathrooms, with their showers and their soap). I’ve often marvelled at Americans who come to Britain and find the sheer idea of a washing machine in the kitchen – where we so traditionally have them – as being totally weird, because Americans were either bought up in roaming seven-bedroom thin-walled cul-de-sac mansions where they have a separate laundry room next to their garage, or they were bought up in greying New York apartments where they have to haul down to the Laundromat to wash their clothes and pants, and if TV and film has taught me anything it’s that there is always a sinister old woman there cackling and washing something out with blood. Sense dictates that a washing machine in the bathroom is a logical decision, until you look at this, and imagine sitting there, your legs wedged out to one side while you shit, your entire body juddering with the sheer power of a washing machine on the spin section of the cycle, hammering around. Look up at the tiles above your head. You are paying one thousand seven-hundred pounds a month for this.
And so we come back to our finances again. As suggested, I cannot afford £1,700 a month in rent, and neither can you. If we could, we would very simply not rent this place, because it is not very nice. And so what I am asking is this: who, exactly, is this flat for? Anyone who can drop close to two grand a month on accommodation can afford somewhere nice, or at least somewhere with its own kitchen, or a comfortable way to piss. This isn’t even a newly outfitted house: it’s alcoves and dated wallpaper and a fussy dado rail and zebra-patterned shower frosting and too much bathroom wood and not enough space. Who is earning so much that £1,700 a month is a reasonable amount of rent to pay (it isn’t!), needs a location so central as to pay such a premium for this place (just commute in!) and is willing to sleep on a single bed-cum-sofa in a room where the only real decoration is a wall-mounted fire extinguisher? Does this person exist? Do London’s property agents simply conjure up flats and rental prices out of thin air, and hope the profile of the mad person who would agree to them will just magic their way into their hands? In what world – and what thousand, infinite, splintered paralleled realities – is this flat worth £1,700 a month, and who exists out there who would pay it?
Answers on a laminated A4 note above the sink, please!
