Chelsea Morning

Posted by L.H. Rae on March 2, 2009 · 2 Comments 

CAUTION: THIS POST IS FULL OF NUMBERS

…the flat search is over…for now.

I’m not even sure if I should call it a flat search – it was rather a “room” search, as the cheapest available option for travellers like us is to simply rent a room in someone’s house. I know, that’s a bit intrusive, you say, but if I were to tell you the average cost of an apartment here in London and surrounding area, you would likely just collapse.

So I’m going to tell you anyway.

For a 2-bedroom apartment in a decent area of town, the average price per week is £350. According to XE Conversion, that’s 634 Canadian dollars. Per week. Times that by four, you get $2536 a month. Divide that in half, and you and your roommate are looking at $1300 each.

I know. I know.

So I’ve been looking all over the city for a room that both J-Dawg and I can share, kind of – but worse, actually – like what Bret and Jemaine do in Flight of the Conchords (someday you’ll get a post that makes absolutely no reference whatsoever to the show, I promise). Shared rooms (2 beds per room) generally go between £75-100 a week per person, in which you share a bathroom, kitchen, living room, washer/dryer with about 3-5 other people. I know! For those of you who said, “London is SO EXPENSIVE!” you really, really meant it. Of course, I’ve been looking on the £75 end for rooms, as that would work out to roughly £360 a month including bills and other taxes that Britain likes to impose on its citizens. But as we know, the less you pay…the deeper into the ghetto you get.

Take the suburb of Acton for example. Home of rock legend Pete Townshend. If it’s good enough for Pete, I thought, it should be good enough for me and J-Dawg.

I was scheduled to see a room in East Acton at 4 p.m. on Sunday. I was told to exit the tube station, and make a right, then a left, then another right, cross some railway tracks, make a left, and so on.

Feeling strangely nervous (maybe Stamford Brook had put me off of suburbs…though in retrospect, the thought of running naked down a street in Stamford Brook seems a lot safer than running fully clothed through Acton), I got on the tube and rode 25 minutes west. I emerged from the tiny station not knowing what to expect. When I scanned my Oyster card and went through the gate, I stepped onto the sidewalk and was face to face with a group of very rough looking guys bantering with each other in front of a half-dead convenience store. Quickly running in the opposite direction, I quickly scanned the sides of houses to see what street I was on. I saw nothing, only more straggling people wandering the sidewalks, and where there were none, there was eerie emptiness.

Sorry, Pete. I can see how it would be fit for a guitar-smashing, potsmoking lead singer of The Who, but not for two shy, nervous, foreign novel writers who are really lacking in the whole being hardcore thing.

I turned around and got right back on the tube.

Hours of searching later, I managed to set up an appointment to see a room in the community of Bethnal Green, just outside of Bishop’s Gate (you’ll remember the mention from Sgt. Pepper’s “The Benefit of Mr. Kite” – man, this city is just teeming with classic rock references), which really is, as Eddie Izzard says in the Across the Universe version of the song, a “nice neck of the woods”. I figured Bethnal Green would be just as nice.

But not only was it a real chore to get to, as for some reason, tube service beyond Bishop’s Gate gets cancelled on Sundays, and the two bus stops that Bethnal Green buses run from were “out of service”, but by the time I finally made it there (an hour later on a random double decker – my first double decker bus ride that I didn’t even get to enjoy), looking out the window, I was terrified by what I saw. You know how in third world countries, people set up markets on the side of the street and try to sell you stuff as you walk by? Yeah. That’s Bethnal Green. Okay, maybe the entire area isn’t like that (I only saw what was near the tube station), but on a whole, it had a kind of Queen/Dufferin-ish feel that a lot of you hardcore Torontonians would say, “oh come on, I’d live at Queen and Dufferin if the price was right”, but J-Dawg and I are big on safe, clean-looking areas, so it was definitely not the one for us.

So today I looked at a place in South Kensington, for about twenty pounds more than Bethnal Green or Acton. And I took it.

The place is small, but we’ve got our own bathroom and kitchenette, and the area is just perfect. And what’s better, the lease is only monthly, so if we don’t like it, we can always leave and start this whole process again for the month of April.

But for now I’m happy that on Wednesday, I will wake up in one of the smallest possible apartments in the richest area of London. More to come…

Advertisement

Filed under in case you were wondering