Hello, bonjour and guten tag!
Settle in for a story. Old-timers will remember these letters started as a travel series from my misadventures in Marrakesh last autumn, and today we return to that tradition with this tale on the travails of moving flat in London. I hope I can channel some of that Mediterranean story-telling as I write this from a Mediterraneanly hot London this Saturday morning.
So tldr, I had to move flat. I always knew that my housemates would be moving out around now, with one moving in with a long-term partner and the other going back to Bath after his placement year (which in of itself feels very full circle). Now my plan had always been to replace them with new people, maybe friends, maybe not, and be done with it. It was a nice enough flat, and even if it was geographically miles away from everything, it was, like everything in London, well connected enough to be about half an hour away from pretty much everything.
Perhaps that was naive, but as I was to learn, the London flatmate market is absolute chaos. It’s wild out there.
Getting people round to view actually wasn’t a problem, I had a fair few come to have a look (and a fair few agree a time and then never show up…) and I met a real spectrum of characters along the way.
The most memorable was one guy who showed up about half an hour later than he’d said he would. But it’s far away, so okay fine, perhaps he underestimated the journey. These things happen, you say sorry and you get on with it. He didn’t say sorry, but that’s okay, there’s a lot going on here - that ends up being a minor point.
He had a quick look round and seemed pleasant enough. I didn’t think we’d be best mates, but I figured I could live with him and it wouldn’t be terrible. He left, said he was interested and then we asked him for a standard set of documents that our landlord asks for (copy of your passport, employment contract etc). We had to chase him a couple of times, and to be honest, at this point, alarm bells really should have been ringing.
Eventually, I get an email giving me access to his work SharePoint, where he’s uploaded some of the files we needed and set it so that I could neither download the files or share the link with anyone else. That wasn’t really going to work, as the landlord needed to see them, not me. I said as much, and got a flurry of voice notes (I hadn’t sent him any voice notes, to be clear) telling me about his rights under GDPR and how I was being terribly unreasonable by expecting him to share such personal information.
Safe to say, we dropped him out of the process at that point.
Anyway, after a few weeks of this, I found a couple of people, all sorted, sounds great. The landlord had put the rent up a bit, but we could make it work, so we sent out papers off to the landlord, who… just didn’t reply for a week. Now, in fairness to him, he is in the Royal Navy and so sometimes is on a ship in the middle of the ocean and can’t get onto his emails. I was fine with that, I knew he’d get round to it eventually. And he did, a week later, he said he was happy and asked that we send across a holding deposit and everything was soundo.
It was, of course, at that point that one of the people that had agreed to sign with us (a friend of a friend, no less) decided it might be useful for us to know that he’d actually signed somewhere else in the intervening week, and so wasn’t going to be living with us. Cue facepalm and a mad scramble to find a replacement before another group made an offer, which they of course did and was then accepted. Sitrep: no flat.
Excellent. Now at this point, I had five weeks before I had to be out of the flat. How fucking fabulous.
And so began a series of viewings across the capital. There were some real disasters, with an honourable mention to the live-in landlady, who said I was such a stereotype (I think she meant City worker, but tbc), that no one could ever come to visit and that I couldn’t use the living room in the flat I’d have been paying well over £1,000 a month for. The living room was reserved for her dog to get a good sleep, and I couldn’t possibly risk disturbing it.
I also went to one flat where they were just wrapping up the previous viewing, a seemingly lovely chap who wrapped up his conversation with them by saying he really liked it but would have to really think deep and hard about the fire risk from the Card Factory three doors down. Now I get it, paper catches fire, but is that really that much of a risk? I don’t know.
And then once you find one you actually like, the chaos continues with trying to actually get it signed. I’d seen one flat in Hampstead that was really nice, and got on quite well with the lady. We’d had a nice chat and she’d said she’d send across a contract the next morning. I sent her the documentation she’d asked for and then… nada. I messaged a couple more times and my calls were forwarded to voicemail, so I figured she’d changed her mind. Which is fine, but then how difficult is it to just say as much? Strange.
There was one brilliant flat that I’d viewed in Islington at about the same time as the flat I ended up in. It was very lovely, except when I got there for the viewing, there were four other people also there for the viewing. At the same time. So he took us on a little group tour of the flat, which was certainly a first for all of us. In the end, he decided to give it to someone who offered double the rent. Now technically you can’t do that anymore, but how do you enforce that? Excuse me, you can’t do that, I insist you take less money and live with me. Bonkers. For what it’s worth, he did message me a week later (once I’d already signed somewhere else) to say the person had dropped out and whether I was still interested. L.
Now just before I ended up with this flat, I went on a series of viewings in a building in Old Street. At this point, I had two weeks left to move, and I was starting to feel the pressure. Accordingly, my standards had really fallen off a cliff…
The guy showing me round was Canadian, and really, really enthusiastic about the building. He took me to see their “state of the art” gym, which was a cellar with a bench, some dumbbells and a sign on the wall telling whoever kept weeing into plastic bottles and leaving them lying around to stop… bad start. The rooms, somehow, were even worse, with barely any space for anything aside from the bed and every single room that wasn’t a bedroom having no window and basically being pitch black. Bad flat. He then really wanted to show me three others that were exactly the same. That felt like rock bottom.
But alas, all’s well that ends well. I ended up with a very lovely flat that I’m very grateful for in Elephant and Castle.
Moving is (and was) such a faff, and I didn’t do much to make it easier. I ended up being out until 0430 the night before I was moving, but then had to be up at 0900 to get breakfast with my friend, who was staying after having been to see Harry Styles. Saturday morning debrief over, I then sealed all my boxes because a man with a van was coming at 1100. He was a cool Lithuanian guy who had moved to Northern Ireland in the 90s and then London after that. My new flat is on the third floor, which made carrying everything up a real pain, but alas we got it all in, he left me £120 lighter, and I then spent the rest of that day unpacking.
The next morning, I was back on the Piccadilly line to the old flat to give it a good old clean. That took most of the day (not because we were filthy, but because the landlord wanted very specific things done like the skirting boards wiped) and then I went home and finished off most of my unpacking.
The one thing left was my books and I really needed a bookcase to put them on and so, the next morning I got myself up to Ikea! The bookcase was 2m long, but that’s not thaaat long I figured. Besides, Ikea delivery would effectively have doubled the cost of the bookcase so I thought no no, I’ll just go and get it myself.
Jeez this thing was heavy. I had to stop every few hundred feet, which is a real pain when you’re going from Hammersmith to Elephant and Castle. The tube wasn’t too busy (given it was around midday on a Monday), and whilst I got some strange looks, I got a knowing smile from one older gentleman which really got me through that journey. I eventually learnt that balancing it on my shoulder was most effective, although I did have to switch shoulders every so often - but less often than I’d have to pause carrying it.
My shoulders and arms hurt for the rest of the week. But now I have a bookcase!! I spent Thursday evening putting up pictures and now that I think we’re there, it’s very satisfying. I’m glad to be done and I’m glad to be here.
And with any luck, that’s it for house moves for a good while.
Anyway, have a lovely weekend - I’m off to the Serpentine Gallery to see the David Hockney exhibition.
Cheerio,
RH