Rental Opportunity of the Week: How Much Worse Can London Renting Get?

What is it? How much longer can one man lash his brain against the rocks of the rental market and scream “HOW MUCH WORSE CAN IT GET AND WHY IS THERE LITERALLY NO MECHANISM IN PLACE TO IMPROVE IT, OR EVEN A SUGGESTION OF A MECHANISM IN PLACE TO FIX IT, THERE IS LITERALLY NOTHING LITERALLY NO ONE IS IN CHARGE AND NO ONE IS WATCHING” before he goes insane? Nobody has ever done this for as long as I have done this. The experiment is no longer being monitored and cannot continue safely for long. This is inhuman, this is a torture form. It’s a studio flat in Bayswater. 

Where is it? Yeah somewhere between Bayswater and Royal Oak, sort of near Paddington too. A lot of these places are advertised for their location – this is near “trendy Notting Hill”, people! – but I do think there is, with any rental, a trade-off between the coolness of the location and the actual quality of the property itself, and everywhere you rent you are always see-sawing one against the other, and like: how much do you want to live in Notting Hill to live here in Notting Hill? How much of your quality of life are you willing to give up to be quite close to a boutique where you have to ring a doorbell to get in to it, or a gin bar? Because I do think this might be taking it to an extreme too far

What is there to do locally? Loads of boujie shit to do in Notting Hill but still my most enduring memory of the area is doing an impromptu pub quiz there one Sunday after spending a day raiding the area’s charity shops for name-brand clothing that the postcode’s extra-large men had donated without a second thought. We, a team of two, lost the grand prize by one point to the table next to us (a team of seven) without any points deduction being made from their haul for the fact that they had seven people in their team. Seven people should, by rights, know everything. Every point that seven people dropped in a pub quiz is an embarrassment to them. There is nothing that seven people should not know. Anyway, enjoy your bar tab, you scum cunts.

Alright, how much are they asking? [The voice pierces through my subconscious along a series of hospital beeps] “Joel! You do not have to be doing this anymore! Doctor, is there anything we can do?” [The man clears his throat in a solemn manner] “There’s nothing. He was exposed to studio flats on Zoopla too many times, for too long. He was tagged into too many Twitter threads of the worst flats in London. His mind has degraded beyond retrieval. The kindest thing to do is let the machines whirr down and his body die with his mind.” I’m still in here, I’m still in here. I’m still in here! I’m still in here! It’s £1,517 a month.

Of course, by now, it takes very little to move me. It is like the early days of the internet, where you would go and get a snack and let a .JPG download and come back three minutes later and find yourself looking into the gaping maw of goatse.cx again. Back then, the era of Lemonparty and Rotten.com and 2 Girls 1 Cup, the internet was teeming with the daily threat of revulsion, and only the very most extreme examples of it would unsettle you in any way. A burned out skull wouldn’t do much. A floor with old blood on it, “meh”. Grainy grey drone footage of a bombing: at least I didn’t get rickrolled again. This is broadly how I feel about the UK property market. It takes a lot for me now to go: “oh, that’s bad”.

Anyway: philosophically, emotionally, morally, and micro-geographically, I do not think it should ever be possible to take a photo of your kitchen sink and your bathroom sink at the same time:

If you’ll allow me to fixate on the sinks a moment, I would appreciate it. It is, of course, bad that two such vibrantly different sinks are so close to one another like this. But I can also say I don’t love a toilet being so directly close to a kitchen. Many years ago, in Twitter’s early “the London Olympics are good, aren’t they!” days, I read on there a fact about toilet flushing, that when you do flush a toilet, essentially an aerosol spray of piss and shit then jumps up into the atmosphere for you to inhale.

Since then I have always closed the lid of the toilet when I flush it, and feel weird when I walk into a bathroom with the lid up, knowing that whoever used it last inhaled piss and shit particles while they were washing their hands. I cannot help but feel having a tool that aerosols out piss and shit particles (a toilet) is unideal to have within one metre of a food preparation surface, but then what do I know. I’m just the guy who complains too much. 

We’re going to stay on the bathroom, because – well, I mean, there isn’t much else of the flat to look at. But there are two further faults: There is not enough space for a bathroom door that can swing open or closed in this space, so they have had to install a sliding door, and for some reason that sliding door – the door to the bathroom, remember, the room you want the most possibly privacy in in the whole house – is made out of frosted glass, which is of course deranged.

I am not advising you should ever cohabit this space with another human being, (or even habit it solo), but if you did, there is a very real threat that you would have to sit on the toilet taking a shit and, about two feet away from you – a huge fleshy shitting blur to them through the glass screen – they are, say, chopping up a pepper to make a stir-fry, or washing a big pan. I do think it is impossible for romance to sustain itself through an experience like this.

There is another door-related issue with this bathroom: I am fairly convinced the shower door swings in. So to get in to the shower you have to push the shower door in, wiggle past it into the remaining open corner of the shower, then close the door after you. You have to reverse this, while smooth and wet, once the shower is over. There is no law to stop a landlord putting a shower door on backwards in a way you have to do this to yourself once a day every day for all 12 months of the tenancy agreement, and that feels fairly insane to me, by now.

The rest of the flat we have seen before: a wardrobe stationed at the base of the kitchenette; a wall-mounted TV that you have to swing out to see (from bed only) and swing back in again whenever you want to walk past it to do any other thing in your flat; a single-and-a-half bed in a gloomy corner of the corridor-shaped flat; a two-hob with no oven; a washing machine up on a separate floor. All the classic markers that the conveniences of living are actually very optional, and you would be a fancy little boy if you were to demand something normal, like more than one window, or a way of cooking a pie, or a machine to wash your clothes in that is actually in your house.

If you really want to live in Notting Hill for some reason and have £1,517 a month to spend, here, doing that, then go wild, but I cannot help but feel that the number of people who fit those specific demands (Notting Hill liker; £1,517 a month spare to pay in rent; loves to live in a modern form of squalour) number in the single digits. I find a flat like this every single week. When all the normal people have shunned ever living in them, what happens then? Why is no one watching?

@joelgolby