(Photos via The Collective)
What is it? The Collective, a sort of all-in halls-of-residence-for-grown-ups situation where they do your laundry and deliver your sheets and pay for your WiFi but you live in a small bleak white room to justify it all;
Where is it? Old Oak Common, which is vaguely in the direction of Acton;
What is there to do locally? You could visit damaged men at Wormwood Scrubs prison, or go to the nearby Hammersmith hospital when they assault you furiously with a biro;
Alright, how much are they asking? £1,083 pcm,
Remember halls of residence? There was always a guy with a didgeridoo, wasn’t there. There was always a fire alarm. And yet you were never ready for the fire alarm: 3am, and the nightly fire alarm went off, and you never thought to get a dressing gown, you never though to sleep in pyjamas, so here’s you shivering in the only clothes you could possibly find, which at the time was exactly 1 x yoghurt-stained HIM T-shirt, hopping from one foot to another to fend off the hypothermia. There was the rugby lads’ beer can collection, the passive aggressive notes about the hob. The way the cheese always went missing! The best days of your lives! That time the halls-organised cleaner came onto your floor and just started crying at the mess, a halls-hardened cleaner, if you imagine such a thing, if you can imagine what such a woman has seen, how many condoms hooked over running taps, how many maggots and worms, how many hungover nude boys stuck in baths with their scrotum coloured in blue-black in Sharpie ink, and yet she started crying, right there in your kitchen, hysterically, until the university administrators called you all in for a telling off and a £20 fine. The best days of your life! The days that never felt like they ended! Gilded sunlight dappled over the vista of your own extreme poverty! All the fag ends. Fag ends in the windows and the crevices of the door. Flattened fag ends between your pillows and in your laundry basket. A suspect, bled-on plaster that someone had stuck to the tiles in the shared shower room. THE BEST DAYS! OF YOUR LIFE!
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Anyway thanks to capitalism you can now relive your halls of residence days at The Collective in London. The Collective, in short: it’s a place where you spend £1,083 a month (which, as the Guardian points out, is exactly half of the average Londoner’s take-home pay) to rent a small, sparsely furnished room in a massive building with 550 other rich baby-adults, and you share a two-hob kitchen with one other person, and you share all your lounge areas – which are all hanging lightbulbs and bookcases of things you don’t want to read, Shoreditch House by way of IKEA – with whoever is on your floor, and yeah: it’s halls. It’s just halls. It’s halls that costs £1,083 a month and is dressed up as “co-living”. They are opening an in-house restaurant soon, which they may as well call a ‘canteen’. It’s halls.
So the tricky thing, of course, is that, although you can see the appeal of adult halls life – that we, millennials, can talk to an interact with our neighbours, and think as a result that we invented it, people in The Collective going around thinking they literally created society and the idea of community, giving the concept a slightly more trendy name like ‘habinetworking’ or ‘proximity interfacing’; that we can focus on careers and life without the petty distraction of washing our own bedding or paying a gas bill; uhhh… young people, together? – but also the flipside of all that is that The Collective is being painted as a legitimate solution to a housing crisis that’s threatening to squeeze an entire generation out of the capital, that once again caters to people with excessive disposable income when poor families and those on or around the poverty line need housing the most, when landlords are still by far the only winners of the entire housing system. So, yes, it’s cute that your room comes with a terrarium and a 549 age-appropriate friends, but also, truly, is an overpriced halls of residence complex in the arse end of nowhere really helping the city as a whole? Or is it killing it like a shotgun wound to the stomach?
Still, halls, right! Heady days, heady days. Remember that time you hotboxed that guy’s room and he spent eight weeks and eight separate bottles of Febreze trying to get the smell out but still lost his entire deposit? Remember that time someone threw a piece of pizza at a fire door and it stuck and didn’t come off for several weeks, until it was solid, until it was green? Remember the crying cleaner, again, she’s back this week even though she said she wouldn’t, stoically and silently tidying your kitchen up, not one of the six of you really knowing what to say? Remember when you stole all that cheese? Wasn’t… wasn’t it the best day of your life?
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