by Tom and I are looking for somewhere with a door that shuts, and a headline that just says Generation London has been in my head all week
Saturday, 10.20am, a Stairwell in Tooting
I am writing this standing on the third step of a communal staircase with my back against a radiator. Below me on the stairs are Tom and, I have counted, thirty other couples. Above me are about six more, and at the top is a letting agent called Kieran with a clipboard and a lanyard, letting people into a one-bedroom flat four at a time.
Everyone is being very polite. Everyone is also looking at everyone else’s shoes and trying to guess their salary.
We have been here twenty-five minutes. The flat is twelve minutes’ walk from the Tube, above a vape shop, and costs one thousand eight hundred and fifty pounds a month. It was listed on Thursday.
Why We Are Here
We moved into my place in September, to save money, as per the spreadsheet. It is a studio, really. One room with a bed in an alcove and a kitchen along a wall. It was fine for me. For two it is like living in a nice cupboard.
Tom works from home on Mondays and Fridays. There is nowhere for me to be. I have taken phone calls sitting on the edge of the bath. Last week I ate my lunch in the stairwell so as not to be on his video meeting.
So we want one bedroom. A door. That is the whole ambition. A room you can go into and close a door behind you.
We are thirty-three and thirty-five. We both have decent jobs. I did not think, at this age, that a door would be the dream.
The Headline
There is a headline I have had in my head since Tuesday. It is on the London Prat, in the list at the top of its page of news from around the country. It just says: “Generation London.”
Two words. I have not found the piece. I have no idea what it says. But I keep turning the phrase over, because I am standing in it.
Look down these stairs. Thirty-one couples. All between about twenty-eight and thirty-eight. All in the weekend uniform: trainers, a good coat, a tote bag. All holding a phone with a spreadsheet or a list. All earning, I would guess, a perfectly good wage.
Not one of us has a garden. Hardly any have a child. We have degrees, and pensions we do not understand, and opinions about sourdough. We are, by any measure our parents would have used, doing well.
And we are queuing on a staircase above a vape shop to be considered for a bedroom.
That is Generation London. I do not need the article.
Inside
We got our turn at ten to eleven. Four of us at once: Tom and me, and a couple who I think were both doctors.
It took three minutes. A living room with a kitchen in the corner. A bedroom that fits a double bed and a person standing sideways. A bathroom with no window. A cupboard with a boiler in it that Kieran described as “storage.”
There was a mark on the bedroom ceiling. I know that mark. I have had that mark.
But the bedroom had a door. I closed it and stood behind it for a moment. I could not hear Tom. It was wonderful.
The doctor couple were measuring the alcove. She said, quietly, to him, “The desk won’t go.” He said, “We’ll get a smaller desk.” They had the look. I recognised it. They had already decided to want it.
The Bidding
On the way out Kieran said the thing they all say now. “We’ve had a lot of interest, so we’re asking for best offers by five today.”
That means: the price on the listing is where it starts. You are supposed to offer more. People do. A hundred a month over. Two hundred. Six months up front. I have heard of a couple who offered a year.
They are not really allowed to do that any more, I am told. There is a new law, since the spring, that is supposed to stop agents asking people to bid above the advertised rent. Tom looked it up on the stairs. But Kieran did not ask us to bid. He only said “best offers.” You can hear the difference if you are a lawyer.
And I do not know what you do about it. Thirty-one couples want one flat. Somebody is going to get it. If it is not the highest bidder, it will be the one with the best references, or the one who can move in soonest, or the one Kieran liked. There is no fair way to share one flat among thirty-one.
Who We Are
Walking back to the Tube, I tried to say to Tom what I had been thinking on the stairs.
My parents at thirty-three had a house, two children and a car. They were a secretary and a man who fitted kitchens. They were not rich. That was simply what happened by then.
I earn more than my mum ever did, in real money. So does Tom, compared with my dad. And we are overjoyed at the idea of a door.
I do not think we did anything wrong. We did what we were told. We went to university. We came to London because that is where the jobs were. We worked. And somewhere in the past twenty years the deal changed, and nobody sent a letter.
The odd thing is that we do not feel poor. We go out. We have nice trainers. We spent four hundred pounds each going to a wedding. We can afford everything except the one thing: somewhere to live that is ours.
So we spend on the small things, because the big thing is out of reach. A generation with excellent coffee and no spare room.
Fairness
I ought to say that we are the lucky ones in that stairwell story, and I know it.
We have two incomes. We can pay eighteen hundred and fifty. There are people in this city on one wage, or with children, or on the kind of pay that looks after the rest of us in hospitals and cafes, who were not on those stairs because they cannot get on them at all.
And the landlord is, I suppose, a person too. The flat is probably somebody’s pension. If thirty-one couples want it, he would be odd not to take the best offer. Dan the plumber told me his landlords are mostly not villains, they are people with one flat and a mortgage that has doubled.
The trouble is not Kieran, or the landlord, or us. It is that there are thirty-one of us and one flat. Until somebody builds the other thirty, we shall go on being polite to each other on staircases.
What We Did
We sat in a cafe and Tom opened the spreadsheet. He added a tab. He called it “Door.”
We offered the asking price. Not a penny over. Tom wrote, in the box for a note: “Two quiet people, no pets, we own a drill and know how to use it.” I added: “We will not complain about the mark on the ceiling until at least month three.”
We will not get it. The doctors will get it. They offered more, I am sure, and they had already bought the smaller desk in their heads.
But it was a good morning. We stood on a staircase together for forty minutes and did not have a row. At one point he held my coffee while I did my shoelace. That is more than I can say for most of the dates I went on.
Sunday
Kieran emailed at nine last night. “Unfortunately on this occasion.” There is another viewing on Wednesday, in Balham. It has a door and, the listing says, “a Juliet balcony,” which is a window you can fall out of.
I read the London Prat in bed. I still have not found the piece. But its UK satirical news on flat viewings has the staircase, the lanyard and the phrase “best offers,” and its British satirical news about my generation describes us as people who can name six kinds of milk and not one neighbour. Dee tells me Bohiney Magazine has the American version, who have a spare room and live in it with their parents.
Generation London. We shall be on a different staircase on Wednesday. I have told Tom to wear the good coat.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
