A Dispatch From Tufnell Park on the Maths of Living in Zone 2 When the Zone 2 Maths Stops Adding Up
The letter arrived on a Thursday, which felt appropriate, Thursday being the day of the week that is neither mid-week nor near the weekend and that therefore lacks the emotional scaffolding that might have made reading a request for an additional twelve percent on my monthly rent less immediately affecting. My landlord, who I want to describe as a villain for narrative satisfaction but who is in fact a largely absent person whose communications are conducted through a managing agent, has determined that twelve percent is in line with market conditions. The managing agent’s letter uses the phrase ‘market conditions’ three times in two paragraphs, which is either a commitment to consistency of message or evidence that whoever wrote it was not enjoying Thursday either. Market conditions are what they are. The market’s conditions are not favourable to me specifically. I have been thinking about this, as I said, very calmly.
What the twelve percent means, in practical terms: approximately one hundred and forty additional pounds per month for a flat in Tufnell Park that I share with two other people and that has a bathroom with interesting ventilation and a kitchen that was designed during a period when kitchen designers believed that proximity to the cooking surface was the primary determinant of kitchen quality. The flat is fine. The flat is good, actually. The flat is in Tufnell Park, which is the part of North London that does not appear on the list of aspirational North London postcodes but that is quiet when it needs to be quiet, has the Ethiopian restaurant on the corner that I consider one of the defining features of my quality of life, and is within walking distance of a park that I use with a frequency that suggests I am better at life than my kitchen situation implies. The flat is worth living in. Whether it is worth living in at the new price is the calculation I am now conducting.
The Arithmetic of Zone 2
The arithmetic of Zone 2 living in 2026 is specific and brutal in the way that specific things often are: rent at current levels consumes a percentage of take-home income that would have been considered alarming a decade ago and that is now simply considered the cost of the location. What remains after rent – for my flatmate Charlotte, who works in publishing at a salary that reflects publishing’s complicated relationship with the economic value it creates, approximately three hundred and forty pounds per month – is not the margin from which comfort is built. It is the margin from which everything else is negotiated: food, transport, the therapy that metropolitan life increasingly makes necessary, the occasional meal at the kind of restaurant that makes you feel the city is worth it. Charlotte makes it work with the specific cheerfulness of someone who has decided that making it work is the only available option and has adjusted her emotional relationship to the calculation accordingly. I admire her enormously. I am less far along in that adjustment. MyLondon tracks North London rents with the grim consistency of a publication that knows its readers are living the data. The data is not improving.
What the Neighbourhood Costs
I have kept a rough account. The weekend farmers market on the Holloway Road: twelve pounds for vegetables I could buy for six at the supermarket but that I tell myself taste different, which they do, slightly. The flat white at the Junction Road cafe where I do my best work: four pounds fifty, paid four times a week, representing the rent I pay for three hours of not working in the flat. The pub on the corner that has maintained its prices through force of what I can only call moral conviction: four pounds twenty for a pint, which in 2026 Zone 2 is not merely a price but a political statement. The dinner I had last week at a new place in Islington that everyone is talking about and that I could afford because I had been very careful about the previous three weeks: sixty-two pounds for two, including a glass of wine each, leaving me feeling simultaneously satisfied and financially chastened in the way that good London meals reliably do.
Why I Am Still Here
The Ethiopian restaurant on the corner does a tibs that I have been eating approximately once a week for three years, and the act of eating it represents, to me, what I am paying the rent for in a sense that the rental market does not capture and my landlord’s managing agent cannot quantify. The light on the street in April when the cherry tree at the end of the road does its annual thing. The park that is twenty minutes away and that I access with a frequency that would surprise anyone who knew me before I lived here. The friends who live within walking distance and whose proximity is worth more than any reasonable accounting could justify. I am going to respond to the letter. I am going to negotiate, calmly, about the twelve percent. And if the negotiation does not go well, I am going to stay anyway and resent it quietly, which is the standard North London approach to the situation, and which I have come to believe is the correct one.
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