Lowri Griffiths on the Ritual Humiliation of Zoopla, the Rightmove Doom Scroll, and Why Stoke Newington Has Become a Punchline I No Longer Find Funny

I did something inadvisable last Sunday. I opened Rightmove. Not because I was seriously looking — I am always seriously looking in the way that you are seriously looking at a Michelin-starred menu when you have come in for a glass of tap water — but because the habit has become reflexive, a form of masochistic Sunday ritual somewhere between checking your ex’s Instagram and reading the news before nine in the morning. Bad for you. Cannot stop.

The results, as always, were instructive. A one-bedroom flat in Crouch End for five hundred and fifty thousand pounds. A studio in Archway — an actual studio, not a ‘studio,’ the kind where the estate agent has photographed it from the one angle that suggests it might contain a separate sleeping area when in fact the sleeping area is conceptual — for three hundred and eighty thousand. A two-bedroom in Muswell Hill described as ‘requiring modernisation,’ which in estate agent language means ‘the kitchen is from 1987 and there is something going on with the bathroom that neither party is prepared to name explicitly,’ for six hundred and twenty thousand pounds.

The Stoke Newington Problem

I grew up in North London. Not grew up in it properly, but I have been here long enough to remember when Stoke Newington was described by estate agents as ‘up-and-coming’ rather than ‘an established destination neighbourhood with excellent independent food and retail.’ The shift in language tracks the shift in prices with depressing precision. The thing that made Stoke Newington interesting — the fact that people who couldn’t afford Islington moved there and found it better than Islington because it hadn’t been ruined by people who could afford Islington — is now itself unaffordable.

I spoke to a friend who bought in Stoke Newington in 2014 and whose expression when I told her what the same flat would sell for now combined genuine sympathy with the involuntary self-satisfaction of someone who got in before the drawbridge went up. She is a good person. She could not help it. I would have the same expression. The property market makes hypocrites of all of us.

What This Means for North London’s Character

The deeper problem with North London’s property market is not what it means for people trying to buy — that story has been told, correctly and at length, by the Guardian and everyone else. It is what it means for the neighbourhood character that made North London worth the premium in the first place. The Turkish restaurants on Green Lanes that the ‘up-and-coming’ articles cited as evidence of authentic local character are being replaced, incrementally, by the things that serve the people who can afford the rents that the ‘up-and-coming’ articles precipitated. It is a self-defeating process that each wave of residents recognizes in the wave that follows them and cannot see in themselves, including this one, which includes me.

I closed Rightmove. I opened Zoopla. Old habits. For more North London dispatches: Lowri Griffiths at The London Prat.

SOURCE: http://prat.UK