Rental Opportunity of the Week: A Fun Twist on Landlord Trickery

What is it? A big stone “O” and a complete lack of foresight

Where is it? Close your eyes and imagine being the kind of person who has £1,450 a month to spend on rent. This could be you, if you get just one additional job on top of your already existing job that paid you slightly more than your current actual salary. Where, in the entire city, would you spend that grand and a half? Open your eyes. You’re in North Acton. 

What is there to do locally? Same as any given postcode in this city: a McDonald’s that a number of internet reviews across a number of internet review platforms say has a “sinister vibe”; two escape rooms; a shop that looks like Cash Converters and has similar livery to a Cash Converters and, inside, very much smells and feels like a Cash Converters, but is not, in fact, a Cash Converters. It is quite ludicrous that London professes to be not only the most cultured city in the UK but keeps making a bid to be one of the better ones in the world, because that, broadly, is what makes up most of the grey morass: a load of grey odd-angled new builds with tiny balcony apartments, the O2, Big Ben, £7 pints, then McDonald’s and unbranded Cash Converters and escape rooms. That’s it. That’s all this is.

Alright, how much are they asking? Either £1,350 PCM. or £1,450 PCM, depending.

A fun new twist on a creaking, tired, ancient, wheezing, nearly-dead old format: Here are two flats, nearly identical but different price points due to their slightly different sizes and shapes, in the same building, with the same shared space, advertised at the same time. See if you can see the fundamental fault in the planning and renovation that has been put into this grey-edged refurbished hellscape. See if you can spot the stone “O” that has been moved, from room to room, as part of the dressing:

Recently, during a profound trip into the deep interior of my soul (woke up too early so just sat on the sofa and stared into space, huddled beneath a blanket) I realised something: being as we are two years into the “Air Fryer era” [1], landlords are soon going to figure out how many of us have air fryers, and – as sure as night follows day – the city’s supply of actual ovens is going to decline as a result of it.

Landlords like to tell lies to themselves about the tenant class, because they do not truly see them as people, and one of those is, “They are just looking for somewhere to hang their hat”. Tenants, to landlords, are unpersons who do not own possessions or crave stability in any way, and actually just need to sleep and brush their teeth and make breakfast in the morning, then wheel their suitcase out of the door exactly 12 months later leaving behind a completely pristine and unworn property behind them. We are a countable number of months away from a landlord realising that replacing a broken oven in a flat will cost money, and everyone has an air fryer now anyway, so let them use that.

We are sleepwalking into a situation where we don’t have ovens any more. I might even, depending on what time I wake up and how deeply I stare into space from beneath a blanket, posit the theory that the boom in air fryers is actually a deep state psy-op funded by Big Landlord to get us off our oven obsession entirely. Every Instagram Reel you watch about a quick and easy weeknight air fryer dinner is contributing to our – society’s – decline. 

Until then, a fairly insane instance in Acton of Too Many Kitchens. Here’s your bedroom, look. It’s also your kitchen. Upstairs there is another bedroom (not yours), with another kitchen. And next to you, through a door? Another shared kitchen. This one, psychotically, outfitted with a single kitchen table holding an open record player, (?), and then two Twitch streamer gamer chairs. Siri, show me history’s worst possible dinner-eating vibe:

The big flat costs £1,450 per calendar month and is made worse by having a kitchen in it. The small flat costs £1,350 per calendar month and is made worse by having a kitchen in it. Both flats have access to the same kitchen. So, in short: Why does each flat have a kitchen in it? In fact, why is each flat a flat at all? Take the kitchens out of each flat, rename each flat “a room”, and have two people sharing the flat (as “flatmates”, an apparently insane concept), and then each flatmate has a kitchen’s worth of spare space to use far better than having a kitchen in it (the smaller flat could have a wardrobe, for instance, which is doesn’t currently have; the smaller flat now no longer needs a decorative fridge, and can have an actual bedside table instead, and not what it currently has, which is a fridge).

But then, of course, renting a shared room gets less money than renting a studio flat, so each flat doth have a kitchen. It’s barely worth detailing the other myriad flaws with the two set-ups here – in the smaller flat, the position of the bed means the curtain is trapped between the bed and the window, so you need to move the entire bed to draw and undraw the curtain; the bigger flat’s fridge doesn’t even get close to fitting inside the fridge-hole allotted for it in the kitchen, and also it appears the bedside table (in a £1,450 a month flat, remember) is actually a washing machine covered in a tablecloth – because there are three kitchens spread across two flats.

This is a newly refurbished house in North Acton owned by a property investment firm. This has been done recently and nobody has ever, by the looks of it, ever lived in this set up. A brain trust of estate agents and property developers had meetings about this, recently, within the past year. It’s possible Homes Under The Hammer showed up to film them do it. They commissioned the builders to do it and looked around it afterwards to take photos. They made up the monthly prices (£1,350 and £1,450!) based on what they saw. And at no point did anyone go: There’s three kitchens in here. And that bedside table is a washing machine. And it’s in North Acton. I don’t know if estate agentry is for me, actually. I’ve made a massive mistake here. 

I, like you, am losing faith in this city. It cannot keep slumping this way, the rents winding ever upwards, and all we have to do is go to an escape room. Look at these flats: We already live in escape rooms. The terminal disease that will finally kill London off after thousands of years has already set in to the place. Enjoy whatever short time we have left crawling over the wheezing, dying skeleton of it. Enjoy having to move a lamp and an entire tablecloth every time you want to wash your clothes. 

@joelgolby

[1] You will remember having seen some of them that every film or TV show set in the 80s has to have – it’s legally mandated in Hollywood, apparently – a passing joke where a young mother (huge hairsprayed hair! Fresh from her aerobics class!) discovers with profound, life-altering joy the wonders of a microwave.

“You just… press? … the button”, that sort of thing. The family’s eldest daughter is out rollerblading and listening to a Walkman. The youngest son is playing an arcade game and staring in awe at the Street Fighter graphics. This is what will be remembered about 2023: air fryers, the gifting of air fryers, the wonder at how rapidly air fryers can heat a basket of potato wedges through.

Your homework: What else will be remembered about this era, if, say, Adam Sandler were to make a comedy movie about it? Award yourself one point for every astute cultural reference you can make from inside the culture. Deduct one point for every meme you write down, or every mention you make of pronouns and blue hair. A score of about 25 is fairly robust, for this. Anything less than 10 is a failing grade.