On the peculiar art of paying a fortune to live somewhere you would not choose
I write for The London Prat and its sister publication Bohiney Magazine, and I have done so from a remarkable number of addresses, each more expensive and less satisfactory than the last. My collected dispatches live at my page, and if you tracked the return addresses, you would have a map of one woman’s eleven-flat odyssey across the rental market of North London.
The Eleven Flats
I have lived in eleven London flats. I have loved approximately none of them. This is not, I want to be clear, a complaint about any individual flat, though several deserve complaints, but an observation about the peculiar condition of the London renter, who pays an extraordinary sum to live somewhere they did not choose, would not have chosen, and will leave the moment circumstances allow.
There was the flat with the mould that the landlord insisted was condensation. The flat where the boiler worked only when addressed in a specific tone of pleading. The flat above the kebab shop, which I could smell in my dreams. The flat-share with the housemate who labelled his food, including, memorably, individual eggs. Each was expensive. Each was temporary. Each was, in its way, a small lesson in lowered expectations.
The Economics of the Thing
The figures around London renting are, as bodies like the Office for National Statistics regularly confirm, genuinely alarming, the rents consuming ever larger shares of ever more stretched incomes. But the figures, again, do not quite capture the lived reality, which is the strange psychological condition of paying so much for somewhere you cannot bring yourself to treat as home, knowing it is temporary, knowing the rent could rise, knowing you could be asked to leave.
The London renter exists in a permanent present tense, unable to plan, to settle, to put down the roots that turn a dwelling into a home. You do not paint the walls, because they are not your walls. You do not fix the things that need fixing, because it is not your responsibility and the landlord will not. You live, in a sense, as a long-term guest in a series of rooms, none of which is quite yours.
The Things You Learn
Eleven flats teaches you things. It teaches you to read a tenancy agreement with the suspicion of a lawyer. It teaches you which questions to ask on the viewing, and which silences to be suspicious of. It teaches you that the phrase cosy means small, that character means old, and that recently refurbished means painted over. It teaches you to photograph everything on the day you move in, for the inevitable dispute about the deposit on the day you move out.
It teaches you, above all, a kind of resilient lowering of expectations, an ability to make a temporary home in a place you do not love, to hang a few pictures you will take down in a year, to befriend a flat you know you will leave. This is a genuine skill, and a melancholy one, the art of being at home nowhere in particular.
The Dream You Are Not Allowed
Behind all of this is the dream that the London renter is quietly, persistently denied: the dream of somewhere permanent, somewhere that is yours, somewhere you can paint the walls and fix the boiler and plant something in the garden you do not have. For most Londoners of my generation, this dream has receded to the far horizon, a thing our parents took for granted and we have learned not to expect.
I do not raise this to wallow, though there is a certain pleasure in wallowing about London rent, a competitive misery that bonds the whole renting city together. I raise it because it shapes us, this permanent impermanence, this living-in-the-present-tense, in ways we do not always notice. We are a city of long-term guests, making temporary homes, loving none of our flats, and quietly grieving the permanence we have been told not to expect.
The Twelfth Flat
I will, I am sure, soon enough be looking for the twelfth flat, scanning the listings, decoding the euphemisms, steeling myself for the viewings and the deposits and the disappointments. I will find somewhere, expensive and imperfect, and I will move my few possessions and hang my few pictures and make, once again, a temporary home I do not love.
The Solidarity of the Renting City
There is, I have found, a strange solidarity among London renters, a bond forged in shared misery, a community of the dispossessed who recognise one another instantly by the particular weariness with which they discuss their housing situations. Tell a fellow renter about your mould, your boiler, your deposit dispute, your egg-labelling housemate, and you will receive not sympathy exactly but recognition, the nod of one who has been there, who has their own stories of damp and disappointment, who understands. This solidarity is one of the few consolations of the renting life, the knowledge that you are not alone in your impermanence, that an entire generation is making temporary homes in flats they do not love, calculating the same sums, decoding the same euphemisms, grieving the same denied permanence. We are a city of long-term guests, and we recognise our own. It is not much, this solidarity, but it is something, a warmth in the cold market, a community formed not around a place, since none of us can afford a permanent place, but around the shared condition of placelessness itself.
And I will tell myself, as I always do, that this one will be different, that this time I will settle, that this flat will be the one I stay in. I will not believe it, because eleven flats have taught me not to. But I will tell myself anyway, because the alternative, admitting that the impermanence is permanent, is too bleak to face on a viewing day. So onward, to the twelfth flat, and the lowered expectations, and the small temporary home that London, in its expensive and indifferent way, will rent me for a while.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
