Rental Opportunity of the Week: Landlords Want You to Shower Next to Your Bed Now

What is it? Well as ever it’s “a room with just about all the equipment needed to survive in”, which is what we’re all shooting for, aren’t we. Growing up I always thought: ‘One day, when I’m rich and famous, I’ll live in… a room that has all the component parts needed for me to exist in.’ Apart from a toilet, actually. Just realised this one doesn’t have a toilet. It’s got a shared toilet across the hall. Again: All we ever want in life is here.

Where is it? Willesden Green, subject of two songs I just actually listened to to try and gain some insight into the place: The Kinks’ “Willesden Green” (1971), and M Huncho’s “Adam From Willesden Green” (2022). You have to assume, based on the vibe of each song, that the area has changed profoundly in the last 41 years. 

What is there to do locally? [A blank static noises forms between my ears and grows so large and powerful that ominous grey clouds start to form above the entire city of London] I really think VICE needs to send me to some other parts of London that aren’t just “Hackney” or “bakeries in Hackney” because I really have absolutely no clue what is happening in other postcodes and it’s starting to affect the column.

Alright, how much are they asking? £900, though it includes bills. I am only mentioning this because: The only viable way of fucking landlords over right now is renting a place with bills included, and then absolutely rinsing the newly-expensive water, heating, and electricity on their dime.

“Won’t landlords think of some new way to charge those newly inflated bills back to you, Joel? Won’t advocating for leaving the taps running all day eventually end up with one pesky innocent being sued by a landlord with a not-even-that-effective lawyer?” Probably, yeah. I never said my advice was good. I just said it was there. You can rent this room in Willesden Green and set it up as a Bitcoin mining outpost, if you want to. Or you could use it as a growhouse, with the landlord bankrolling your lighting costs. Just an idea, just an idea.  

I often –  at the start of every potential working day, for instance, and at the end of every unsuccessful one, so let’s say five days out of every six – think about the exact conditions necessary for me to do some work. They are precise, a little intangible: I need to have had the right hot drink; I need to have watched the correct mindless YouTube video; I need to have arranged my pens in the exact right place and have them within easy reach (insanity-coded); I need to have read a good book at least some time in the last fortnight. It helps if I’m not hungover and I’ve taken some vitamins and at least gone for a run at some point in the last month.

It helps if my office is tidy, and there is nothing annoying or nagging on my mind (do I need to get a load of laundry done to get ahead of it? Do I have to go out tonight? Do I owe anyone an important e-mail or text?). I need a minimum of background environmental noise  – no drilling, no scaffolding clanking, nobody upstairs running around corridors, no fire alarms or persistent beeps  – as well as noise-cancelling earphones and an endless, droning, ambient playlist.

I need my chair to be running smoothly over the rug it’s on and not doing that irritating thing where one of the wheels scrunches up one edge of the rug and ripples the whole thing towards itself, so they both get locked together in an infuriating mess and I need to get up and fix that like two, three, four times until it’s sorted.

Desk could be clear but honestly I don’t think this thing’s been clear for months. The WhatsApp groupchats should be quietly popping – enough for me to dip in and see the banter once every 20 minutes or so! – but not so grippingly popping that I have to stay fixated on the chat so I don’t miss any good or time-dependent banter. Sitting at a desk and doing some work is never just as easy as that: There are environmental concerns, emotional concerns, temperature concerns, distraction concerns. A couple of weeks ago I kept getting waylaid by an occasional smell of old milk. I cannot work in these conditions! I cannot work in these conditions!

Also, related — I definitely can’t work in these conditions:

I always think it’s funny when they put a desk chair and a desk in a little set-up like this, which is weirdly often. I have maligned landlords’ unnecessary cramming-in of dinner tables to tiny flats before, and I do admit desks are more viable than dinner tables – a desk is more suited for eating dinner off than a dinner table is suited for doing desk things off – but it’s always just funny to imagine the person who looks at this room and thinks: ‘Could put a desk there, by the window. People could do work in there.’

Yeah, no, easy. Fairly easy to do work in one of the most depressing-vibe rooms in London, surely. Grey pallor over the whole thing. Stark raw lightbulb in the middle. You’re on Zoom to your colleagues and waving cheerfully at the camera. “Is that your… bed in your… kitchen?” they ask you. “Hold on, is that your bed in your… bathroom?” It’s both, you say. The room is the bedroom and the kitchen and has a shower in it. “You’re on mute!” they say. You cannot work like this.

We should spin around the room, shouldn’t we, we should give it a chance. Firstly: There is no photo of the mattress where it actually fits on the bed frame, which I never like. Secondly: the kitchenette is one of the most bizarrely inaccessible spaces I’ve seen in the many years since I’ve been looking at these things. I believe there is an entire cupboard that you cannot open in the corner there because it butts up against the extended desk section. The fridge-freezer very unerring, eerie dimensions to it. The third cupboard is a strange, slender little thing, and I cannot – cannot – imagine having to hang tight around your shower cubicle to cook on your two-hob.

There is a lot of raw, empty space in this flat – and, again, for some reason not one but two desks – but no comfy chairs, so the only place you have to sit is either your bed or one at one of your desks. The wardrobe is a complex, well-fitted in-built affair, which suggests this was a room that was once loved – a bedroom, maybe, with a bed that had a mattress that actually fitted on it, and good natural light and a dressing table – but then some Willesden Green landlord got their hands on it and rammed a kitchenette and a shower in there and that’s that, now, isn’t it. It costs £900, a month, to live in here. You have to exit your flat entirely to go to the toilet. 

As ever I finish each column by staring out of my window at the city beneath me and trying to calculate how many windows I can see; how many flats, are there, in front of me? How many people, how many houses? The population of London is 9.002 million, give or take, and the city likes to boast that culture-, wealth- and influence-wise, it’s one of the best in the world. How many people out there actually look around their dwellings and go: ‘This is good, actually.’ Or even: ‘This is alright.’ Or even: ‘There is nothing wrong with the place I am in, at all. And when there is my landlord happily fixes it.’

The reality of that number seems like a failing, to me. Again: As ever, I open the window and start laughing. You fools! You fools! This entire city is an extended joke played on us by the Romans! 

@joelgolby