Kitchen With A Bed In It

TIRED of walking from one room to the next? London has you covered! For just £1350 per month you could live in a Kitchen With A Bed In It, also known as a studio apartment. Save literally seconds out of your day, and avoid the awkwardness of wondering – which room am I in? There’s only one room! Crippled with indecision about which of your basic needs to fulfil? Watch those doubts melt away as eating and sleeping merge into one futile drawn out excuse for an existence. And if things get too much, know that you won’t even have to leave the bed to stick your head in the oven. That’s assuming there is an oven. I know what you’re thinking. This has to be a one time offer, I’ll never get a chance like this again. Fear not! London has hundreds of similar opportunities to live in a Kitchen With A Bed In It, and some of them are really pushing the envelope on the meaning of the words “kitchen,” “bed” – and indeed “living!” Take a look at some of the photos below. All of them could be yours for upwards of £1300 per month! I know. Sounds too good to be true. But don’t worry – bills are on top.

Renting in London: an Artist’s Guide

Looking for a place to live in the Capital can be daunting and bewildering – especially during a rental crisis. Plenty of apartments but most of them completely off limits to anyone working in the arts. For the remaining properties, agents have become adept at making places animals would go to die sound vaguely habitable to humans. Over time I’ve learned to decipher this language and I’ve produced a glossary of terms to help fellow flat-hunters navigate this confusing world where words mean different things to reality.

Good size – small

Cosy – absolutely tiny

Stunning – small

Spacious – you can walk around the bed

Petite – if you’re in the flat, you’re in bed

Bright – has a window

Airy – has a window that opens

Sunny – a dubious claim anywhere in the UK

Lovely – probably not awful, but small

Well-proportioned – we built a wall down the middle so we could charge more

Beautiful – has been redecorated since 1975

Charming – *hasn’t been redecorated since 1975

Lively area – don’t even think about sleeping

Luxury – expensive

Quirky – nothing works

Well-presented – we cleaned the stains off the walls, but*

Professional – not a self-employed artist

Professional couple – the mind boggles

Above average size – we are having trouble renting this

Studio – not that kind of studio

Part-furnished – there are rodents

No pets – apart from the rodents

Contemporary – it exists now

Impressive – the claim that two taps and a toaster equals a kitchen

Incredible – you won’t believe what we are charging

Spectacular – we really need to get out more

Self-contained – the things in the flat are inside it as opposed to outside

Open plan – you can smell chips in bed

Ensuite – there is a bathroom

All bills included except council tax, gas and electricity – free wifi

No WFH – we’ve been asleep for the last three years

No overnight guests – we’ve been asleep since 1950

Patio garden – a sliver of concrete between you and the road

Private communal garden – private for you… and everybody else

…

Chill.

This is where I rant about the struggle to find a place to live in London post/during pandemic times.

If you are also homeless and scouring Spareroom.com daily in the offchance of scoring a viewing then this may be a place where you can get some catharsis.

Everyone is so chilled out! It’s great to see that while the world is burning, so many young professionals find the time to be so deeply relaxed about everything. It’s odd, because the last I looked, there was an epidemic of anxiety and depression, but apparently not amongst those renting out rooms.

We are chilled, sociable and relaxed. It’s a relaxed house. I wonder what they are doing to achieve such perpetual relaxation. I’m guessing that they don’t watch the news. Or engage in relationships with other people. Or have families. Or jobs.

But of course they have jobs! Everyone is a full time professional! Full time professionals only please! People who go out of the house and don’t come back for a very long time preferred! And don’t forget to reappear relaxed after fighting your way home through a London commute.

We are easy going people. Looking for someone easy going. So that when I say, hey dude – do you mind washing your pubic hair out of the bath after you’ve had a shower, thank you very much good day, he can say – OMG chill babe. This is a chilled out relaxed easy-going house. Pubes are like whatever.

Or maybe I say – isn’t it awful that the police think that the onus is on women to protect themselves from mad rapist serial killers rather than say, the society that creates and enables them – he can say <roll eyes> here she goes again angry woman alert! We are a relaxed house? We don’t get upset about stuff like injustice, inequality, climate change, racism, transphobia – all that rage is a total vibe killer. Let’s be chill.

I can be chill. But as the popular bible passage goes, there’s a time for everything. A time to relax, and a time to get really fucking angry. Like for example every time you accidentally hear Boris Johnson say something. Or when you think about Brexit. Or the fact that the majority of emissions destroying the planet are created by a tiny proportion of its inhabitants. And that the highest concentration of wealth is owned by the tiniest group of individuals. Or that a full time minimum wage does not cover the price of renting a flat in London.

It’s kind of hard to be permanently relaxed when you don’t have a home. It’s kind of hard to be super chill when you are in competition against hundreds of people for the chance to spend £800 a month on a bedroom. To be easy going about one’s own security would be counter to the human survival instinct. But apart from all of that, it’s kind of inhuman to occupy any one emotional state indefinitely. Things happen and we feel stuff. It’s how we know we exist. Human beings are complex and unpredictable. Sharing a house with them is a mixed experience, but unfortunately most cats cannot pay rent.

Single People Can Now Get Screwed

As I progress through life I become more aware of the costs of living a lifestyle that is considered to be unconventional. I have been documenting my recent trials with renting, but this week I have encountered a new hurdle: the HMO licence.

Let’s back up. As a freelance self-employed artist, music and media producer, mid/post-pandemic depending how you look at it, I cannot afford to rent a place by myself in London. It might have been just about doable with the help of Universal Credit, but the government in their infinite wisdom have now lifted the suspension on the Minimum Income Floor, (clearly post-pandemic is the way they look at it.)

The Minimum Income Floor means that as a self-employed person if you don’t manage to find enough work in one month or another, they will assume that you earned a full time minimum wage, even though you didn’t. They will then only give you the amount of benefits that you’d be due if you had earned that amount. Which you didn’t. So in a bad month you could be left unable to pay your rent. Essentially this means you’re better off unemployed than self-employed.

During Covid they suspended this MIF because they rightly assumed that self-employed people would be royally screwed by the pandemic – I’m not suggesting that other groups were not screwed as well – so they gave us a bit of leeway. But come Freedom Day that leeway is over. Nevermind that the budgets of those who employ us have not nearly recovered yet, and that many of us will never get back the regular jobs we lost that used to keep things ticking over.

So the dream of the solitary creative attic is suspended too, for now. At least until the producers of Outlander finally pick up my recent Scottish-inspired track ‘Coming Home,” and I become a household name. Ideally in time for me to have my own household…

Speaking of households… So now I managed to team up with a couple of other wandering musicians looking for homes in one of the most expensive cities in the world. And we found this gorgeous house. A family house you could say – tastefully decorated, spacious, nice garden.

Excitedly I pick up the phone to request a viewing. “Are you related?” says the agent? “No,” I say, “we are friends who wish to share.” “This house is only available to family.” “Well, we are all part of one human family aren’t we?” That’s not how it works though.

HMO is a house of multiple occupancy. This means it contains more than one household – wait, I hear you say. How can you have more than one household in a house? Yes! It doesn’t make grammatical sense – or any other kind of sense.

So one household could constitute a single person, or a couple, or a family. Three single people who have chosen to live together and share space, as a family might – and in some cases a whole lot more than a family might, especially one with teenagers – are considered to be three households.

In order to rent to two or more “households”, a landlord needs to purchase an expensive licence, and change every door to a fire door and install industrial fire alarms. So naturally some landlords are not keen to do this, and therefore we find ourselves in this situation where landlords and tenants alike are worse off.

But why?? Well let’s refer to everyone’s favourite brash high street letting agency. According to Foxtons:

“The purpose of licensing, especially for HMOs, is to ensure that residential accommodation within the Private Rented Sector (PRS) is safe, well managed and of good quality with a particular focus on safety.”

Ah safety. That word again. Stay safe! Stay at home. Stay safe. Except when you don’t have a home. Or you’re a victim of domestic violence. Or your home is the site of a trauma that you are forced to revisit daily. No safety then.

So it’s for our own good. Because as intelligent free-thinking adults we are incapable of making a decision about what we will or will not put up with in terms of living conditions. And it’s fine obviously if you’re all members of the same family, for the standards to be lower.

And somehow these so-called standards did not extend to the flammable cladding that caused the horrific deaths at Grenfell. Something is broken. The system is failing.

In reality what happens is that everyone suffers. As an agent I spoke to said, “the landlords suffer too because a lot of the time a family is not able to afford a house that three professional sharers can. It’s ruining my business.”

This morning it happened again – the second nicest house we had seen – called up excitedly – nope, families only.

I suddenly had a recollection of the 1990’s movie Greencard. That film was sold to me as a romantic comedy, and it never occurred to me at the time I watched it to question the disturbing premise that a solvent single professional woman was not allowed to rent an apartment because she didn’t have a husband.

What is happening here is not entirely different. As in many areas of life, those who do not follow the traditional heteronormative path are penalised. Remember in lockdown when single people basically weren’t allowed to have sex. No one talked about that at the time. Those of us with physical needs had to sneak around feeling ashamed by the intense messaging that we were basically killing old people by seeking out a completely necessary human intimacy.

Not in Holland though incidentally – and other countries, where single people were encouraged to take lovers. But here in the uptight UK single people just didn’t get a mention.

And here it is again. Had I got married and had a child I could rent the apartment of my dreams, like Andie MacDowell’s character in Greencard. But since I chose to pursue an artistic career and stay single, I can’t. Why can’t three single people opt to create a household, or a family together? Why in 2021 is a romantic or sexual relationship the only legal basis for partnership?

It’s hard enough to live in this city as an artist. Like many of my friends in this position I occasionally drool over the rents in other cities and ask myself why I don’t move to Aberdeen or Liverpool or Leeds. And I could, I could. But London is my home. I made it so and I’ve built a life for myself here. Not in the way that some of my friends have, by owning property and having kids. But by the networks I have created, the connections I have formed, the many communities I am part of. I love this city. I love the multiplicity of nationalities, ethnicities, genders, I love that it is a place people from all over the world can come and feel at home.

I love that when things are open, as is starting to happen again, I can find all manner of obscure and delightful art forms, performances, galleries, things I could not have imagined, but somehow exist. This variety feeds me, inspires me to keep creating myself.

Do I want to become an expert on Houses of Multiple Occupancy regulations? You’re damn right I don’t. I want to find a place where I can sleep relatively undisturbed and get cracking on my 4th album. But life deals us these cards and that dictates the game we have to play. So here I am, playing it, once again, not giving up because for me there’s no option.

The Ideal Tenant

Docile Females Wanted For Social Isolation

The ideal tenant is a single non-smoking female. She may well be white, but we are not allowed to discriminate openly about such things nowadays. She may also be heterosexual but we are not allowed to discriminate about such things either, plus she is single so it doesn’t really matter since ideally she will not be having any sex anyway. She will be young, but not too young – late twenties, early thirties, max. The younger ones are generally easier to intimidate than the older ones, but too young and they cannot be trusted. Besides not having a partner she will not have any pets. She will desire the company of no one, human nor animal. She will be very easily pleased by the indoor entertainment system we have installed. She will live mostly on convenience food that can be prepared with minimum mess using the microwave that we have provided in the kitchenette in place of a proper oven. She will be in full time employment, with a boss who can vouch for her good manners and lack of problematic behaviour which would be unwelcome. She will not be self-employed. Self-employment suggests a worryingly anarchic tendency that could lead to rebellion of some kind, which would be unwelcome. She will not work from home. This is because despite paying an arm and a leg to rent the apartment it is much preferred that she spend as little time in it as possible, in order to minimise wear and tear. When she is in it, she will preferably be sleeping, showering, watching television, or eating food that was prepared with minimum mess or delivered by someone on a bike. The shower-room is ensuite. She will be sufficiently impressed by the Frenchness of this word not to notice that in actual fact all it means is that any guests will have to walk through her bedroom to use the toilet. But, ideally she will not have any guests. She will not sing, play musical instruments, DJ or produce music. Musicians are great! We love musicians. We just don’t want one living in our house. We absolutely enjoy consuming their work for free or at a fraction of a penny, however we do not wish to be a part of making their existence possible. We prefer to imagine that artists emerge from the womb fully formed, already able to perform at a high standard without having to spend hours perfecting their discipline. They live on fresh air and creative ideas, and in any case, it is not our problem. We do not seek a woman with ideas that need to be expressed. She will be too busy working, sleeping and showering to have ideas of any kind. She will not be in receipt of benefits to help cover the rent that we know is extortionate and cannot really be justified. Our sympathies go out to those on low incomes whose livelihoods have been destroyed by the pandemic, but we don’t want them living in our house. Similarly we appreciate that artists sometimes struggle to find enough work, and might need to top up their income with Universal Credit. But we don’t want the government’s money. We want the crisp, clean, well-ironed, privately earned cash of a woman who is in full time permanent employment, with no desire to have sex, children, or animals, no family, no music, very clean, surrounded by devices that will keep her occupied, quiet and docile. If this is you, fill in the application form, telling us why you think you deserve to have a roof over your head, and send it back to us along with copies of your bank statements, letters from your employer, photos of your underwear drawer, and a statement signed in your own blood, acknowledging that art is dead.