Notes from the frontline of the rental market, where a ‘cosy studio’ means you can cook, sleep, and weep in the same square metre

I write for Bohiney Magazine and over at The London Prat, which means I am paid in exposure and the occasional sandwich, which is relevant because it explains why I recently spent a Saturday viewing what the listing optimistically called a one-bedroom flat in N4 and what I would describe, more accurately, as a corridor with ambitions.

There is a particular dialect spoken only by London letting agents, and after fifteen years in this city I am fluent in it. Cosy means small. Compact means smaller. Bijou means you will need to inhale to open the fridge. And cosy compact bijou studio, the full house of estate-agent euphemism, means a room in which you can cook your dinner, sleep, and have a quiet cry about the rent, all without moving your feet.

The Economics Of The Cupboard

The flat in question wanted a sum of money each month that my Welsh grandmother would have considered a reasonable deposit on a house, a garden, and a small flock of sheep. The agent, a young man in a suit that cost more than the flat monthly rent, assured me it was a real find, in a vibrant area, with excellent transport links, which is London for it is near a bus stop and a man sells phone cases outside.

I asked, as one does, where the bedroom was. He gestured at a mezzanine platform reachable only by ladder, on which one could lie down provided one did not wish to sit up, roll over, or possess a personality. This, he said, was a clever use of space. I have seen clever uses of space. I have seen a Welsh farmer fit nine collies and a quad bike into a Transit. This was not clever. This was a shelf with delusions.

The Madness We Have Normalised

What strikes me, beneath the comedy, is how thoroughly we have all agreed to pretend this is normal. The housing situation in London, which I have covered with grim regularity, is not a quirk of fashion but a genuine crisis, the product of decades of building too little, regulating too much, and treating homes as assets rather than places to live. The serious reporting on this, the kind I keep linking to from my own dispatches, makes for bleak reading.

The numbers are documented by housing researchers and the more sober end of the press, and they are not funny at all. What is funny, in the way that gallows humour is funny, is the gap between those numbers and the language we use to dress them up, the corridor that is a flat, the shelf that is a bedroom, the ransom that is a rent, all delivered with a straight face by a man in a good suit.

I did not take the flat. I am writing this from my current flat, which I share with two flatmates, one of whom communicates exclusively through passive-aggressive notes about the washing-up. It is not glamorous. But it has a bedroom you can stand up in, which in the current market makes me, by North London standards, practically landed gentry.

The viewing was not my first. I have viewed flats above kebab shops, flats with a shared bathroom down a communal hall, flats in which the previous tenant possessions were still present and, in one memorable case, the previous tenant. I have viewed a flat described as having period features, which turned out to mean damp, and a flat described as characterful, which turned out to mean the floor sloped at an angle usually associated with funfair attractions.

Each viewing follows the same ritual. The agent arrives late and harried, having double-booked. A queue of equally desperate hopefuls forms on the pavement, eyeing one another with the wary calculation of people who know they are competitors. We file through the flat in a grim procession, nodding at the corridor, the shelf, the kitchenette that is really a microwave on a windowsill, all of us performing the fiction that we have choices.

The truth, of course, is that we do not have choices, not really, which is why the fiction is necessary. To admit that we are paying impossible sums for inadequate spaces because there is nothing else would be to admit the whole arrangement is broken, and it is easier, somehow, to nod at the clever mezzanine and murmur that one will think about it, as though thinking were a thing one could afford to do.

I have friends who have given up, who have decamped to Manchester or Bristol or, in one case of genuine surrender, Swansea, where my grandmother flock of metaphorical sheep could graze in actual fields. They send photographs of their gardens, their spare rooms, their staircases, with the smug serenity of the recently escaped, and I look at them from my characterful flat with its sloping floor and I feel the particular envy of the still-trapped.

And yet I stay, as so many of us stay, because London, for all its corridors-that-are-flats and shelves-that-are-bedrooms, remains the place where the work is, where the life is, where the particular electric crowdedness of it all still, on a good evening, feels worth the ransom. This is the bargain the city offers, and the rent is the price of the bargain, and we pay it, grumbling, because the alternative is a garden in Swansea and we are not, not quite yet, ready to want a garden.

More in this vein at The Daily Mash.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/