Photos via Rightmove
What is living in London like? Hell. Here’s proof, beyond all doubt, that renting in London is a nightmare.
Where is it? We love a rent, don’t we, renters. Love to rent things. Love to pay for the temporary loan of a fundamentally vital asset and love to be financially punished for any minor scrapes that occur to it. It’s weird, isn’t it – because we all love the process of renting so much – that we don’t rent anything else. Renting is such a rare transaction, and otherwise only used for things you need on a temporary basis. Is that weird? Feels weird. We rent cars in other countries when we want to drive away from the airport (why would you buy a car in another country! Exactly). We rent suits for proms or weddings when we know we will not need the suit again ever for the same event (I once watched Wheatus play Teenage Dirtbag followed by A Little Respect followed by Teenage Dirtbag again at my Summer Ball in Burton’s finest rented tux). And then the only other thing we rent, which we need for literally all 365 days of the year, is the roof over our head. This feels absurdly backwards—! Why are we not talking about this, all of the time—!
What is there to do locally? Anyway, this one is a property purchase, in Islington, not a rental, which is depressing for renters in its own little way, because: we live in a country that fetishises home ownership. We cruelly crush the renter for having the temerity for needing a place to live. We crunch the entire economy together so it is completely wobbling on top of the idea of people buying property, but also most people simply do not earn enough to buy property, because the margins of what is acceptable to pay people and what is acceptable to charge for a house are psychotically out of sync. We build a system where, broadly, you basically have to be one half of a domestic couple before you can think about moving into a solid place of your own. And then you spend your twenties looking at these various cards stacked against you and think: well, fuck saving then, I’m just going to spend every last free pound on Nando’s lunches and beer. And then your thirties happen, and I’m sorry about that. And then you might start to straighten up and act right and start saving, a little. So you forgo a holiday this year. You make your own lunches. You take on odd side jobs for a little extra cash. Everything is funnelling in towards this goal: The Deposit. You scrape up every spare piece of money you can make towards The Deposit. You beg your family, you turn down nights out with your friends. It’s been three years now, four years. You’ve somehow found a bank that will give you a mortgage based on your income (once you climb the mountain, by the way, banks can just look at your income and decide that, even though you have paid rent impeccably and in full for the past ten years, you are not earning enough to afford a mortgage, which has a lower monthly repayment, and so turn you down for the duration of a mortgage you are promising to literally work the next 30 years of your life for) and you have balled up The Deposit and you’ve done what they told you to do, you’ve pooled together the money needed to prop up this ailing economy and you’ve promised to join the mortgage-paying home-owning Tory-voting masses, you’ve promised to become one of them, and then you look at your budget and what you can afford, and you realise that, after all that, you can only afford this place, where you have to army-crawl through a special flat corridor to get into your bed every night.
Alright, how much are they asking? £360,000, plus your soul and your happiness in its entirety
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