London Calling
September 15th, 2008 at 01:51
On Saturday I’ll be moving to London – initially the plan was to study for an Masters degree and seek my fortune, but after a feasibility study, I’ve had to reign in my aspirations and merely study for Masters degree, and instead accept that certainty of living in crippling debt for at least the next decade.
This has meant that I’ve spent a large slice of my time in London looking for somewhere to live. I got over the first hurdle of actually having people to live with with ease – I found some lovely flatmates through a university matching thing (I said I had a “GSOH” and liked “long walks on the beach”). The slightly trickier part has been finding an actual flat to be mates in.
Things started well – we found a lovely flat in the trendy bit of East London on Brick Lane, which seems to style itself as “Camden for the pragmatic” – there’s still a distinctly “independent” “vibe” given off by the lack of chain stores in the immediate vicinity, but it’s helpfully marginally more affordable. We put down a holding deposit and departed London on Friday thinking we’d got it all sorted – and in the nick of time too, as my course starts next week.
Then on Saturday morning, the landlord decided that he was going to be a twat, and move his extended family in instead of us. I know what you’re thinking, because I was thinking it too: “What a wanker, putting his family ahead of strangers”.
So a string of expletives later, and it was Monday (it was a long string), and we were back in London back on square 2. We organised a few viewings and hoped for the best. “Hoped” being perhaps the key word in that sentence.
We headed to Edgware Road to an estate agents. It wasn’t a lovely area, but then compared to a rural market town, anywhere short of South Kensington is pretty poor in comparison, so I decided to give it a chance. It turned out that the estate agents was on the first floor of a row of shops, up a dishevelled staircase. This immediately set off my middle-class alarm bells as usually I’ve found estate agents to be a rather posh affair where they offer you free drinks and stuff (making their money back by selling you a house). Instead, this estate agent’s sign was a printed A4 sheet sellotaped to an internal window and their phone number was a mobile. But no, maybe it’d be fine – what sort of self-styled punk after all would complain about a “DIY”attitude? Who says you need licensing and accreditation in order to legally let property? The Man, that’s who.
After waiting for a few minutes, an old woman led us and some other prospective tenants down the road to a tower block. A brutalist 60s “who cares about aestetics?” sort of structure – the type of place you’d go to murder Damilola Taylor. After having a cursory look around, we all collectively said “Noooooo”.
So we left London on Monday on a low, feeling deflated, not knowing where we’d live. But decided to head back in on Tuesday to start the search again.
By contrast, Tuesday was much more successful. By which I mean, we found a lovely house in Kilburn. It’s pretty damn swish – not only do I have a massive room, but I’ve got a balcony. There’s no furniture in there yet, but I’m assured I’ll have a bed to sleep on by Saturday.
Kilburn is lovely to. It doesn’t seem too murderous, even if a decapitated corpse was found scarily near to my house. Thanks to the wonders of globalisation, the high street has all of the chain stores you could ask for, and better still, seems to have plenty of places to go for live music.
Kilburn is apparently a big area of Irish immigration too, so hopefully I’ll fit in pretty well, given that I’ve got a name with apostrophy in, and something like my grandad’s grandad was Irish, so if discussion of the irish potato famine comes up, I can probably claim to be vaguely related some Irish people who were around at the time maybe. (BBC: If you want a low-rent celebrity for Who Do You Think You?, get me on as I can’t be arsed to research this sort of thing on my own).
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be blogging my experiences in moving to London, and moving out beyond my parent’s tyrannical authoritarian regime for the first time, as well as the start of my Masters degree – so it’ll be an exciting new experience for both you the reader, and me. Expect a video of me failing to use a washing machine soon.
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