Lowri Griffiths on the State of Things in N4, the Labour Government’s Housing Promises, and Why She Still Loves It Here

Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

By Lowri Griffiths | North London Life & Commentary

April, and the cherry trees on Stroud Green Road are doing their annual thing — those outrageous pink explosions that make you momentarily forget your council tax just went up and your landlord sent a letter last Tuesday that you haven’t opened yet because you already know what it says. This is the North London spring experience: visually magnificent, financially precarious, emotionally somewhere between defiant and resigned.

I’ve been in N4 for six years now. Long enough to remember when the flat below mine was rented by a photographer and her boyfriend who made ceramics and when the coffee shop on the corner didn’t have a waiting list on weekends. Both of those things are gone now, replaced by a tech couple who keep their bikes in the communal hallway (they leave notes about it, very politely, the notes are perfectly formatted, I’m running out of patience) and a brunch spot with a QR code menu and a twelve-pound shakshuka that arrives in a cast iron pan the size of a small shield.

The Housing Letter I Haven’t Opened

I should open it. I know what’s in it. My landlord, a perfectly pleasant man named Graham who owns this flat and two others in the building and a terraced house in Muswell Hill and whom I have met exactly twice, will have written to inform me that my rent is increasing by some percentage that is calibrated to be just below the threshold that would make me actually leave but well above the threshold that feels reasonable given the state of the boiler, which makes a sound on cold mornings like someone hitting a filing cabinet with a wrench.

The Labour government’s Renters’ Rights Bill is working its way through Parliament and will, if enacted as proposed, end no-fault evictions, improve tenants’ rights to keep pets (a minor but spiritually significant provision), and give renters more predictable lease terms. These are genuine improvements. They do not address the rent itself. A landlord who cannot evict me without cause can still raise my rent by 15 percent. The lease protection and the rent trajectory are separate things, and housing policy that addresses one without the other is addressing the experience of renting without addressing the experience of paying for it, which are related but distinct miseries.

My full archive at The London Prat includes my piece on last year’s Finsbury Park planning applications, which is relevant because two of the three were approved and one of them is now a building that I walk past daily and that I dislike in the specific way you dislike a thing that is technically fine and personally wrong.

What I Love Anyway

The park in April is genuinely beautiful. The Turkish bakeries on Green Lanes are open from seven. The pub at the end of the road has acquired a new landlord who has not yet changed anything, which means it still has the sticky table by the window where you can read the whole of the Standard without being moved on. The independent bookshop on Blackstock Road has a system where you can leave a note about what you’re looking for and come back Thursday. None of this is scalable. All of it is what makes the place itself rather than a version of somewhere else.

I’ll open the letter. Not today. The cherry trees are doing their thing and the twelve-pound shakshuka was, I’ll admit, excellent, and Graham’s letter will say what it says whether I read it now or Friday. North London in April is the specific mixture of beautiful and unaffordable that it has always been and that I will continue to write about because someone should and because I live here and paying attention to the place you live is the minimum contribution to the place you’re lucky enough to still be able to afford, just about, if you open the letter and negotiate sensibly.

For more North London life and commentary, see The Daily Mash.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/