5 Inhabitants of the London Flat Scene You’re Bound to Meet
OK, some of these are a bit harsh. But honestly, how many do you recognise?
1) The guy who lives in a warehouse in East London
How do you find a guy who lives in a warehouse in East London when you’re at a party? Don’t worry, he’ll tell you! He’ll tell everyone, twice, and make vegans seem self-deprecating in comparison! He’s a graphic designer, he’s a DJ, he’s a filmmaker; an all-round art wanker who can’t fork out for a pair of shoes even marginally less worn than the pair Moses wandered the desert in for forty years. But he will of course pay £20.99 for an artisan concrete cactus pot that doesn’t even come with a fucking cactus in it, namaste.
Independent art magazines cluster his makeshift coffee table, because he loves art, by the way, and he doesn’t fuck with Ikea. Vintage shell suits hang in the corner from an open rail, each one of them uglier, more offensive than the last. Says ‘sound’ a lot, along with things like ‘making your own soap is very important!’ and ‘I live in a warehouse in East London!’
2) Dan, the walking protein-shake who works in recruitment
Dan featured in my last blog, shitting in a Betty Boop dressing gown — again, not in it, just wearing it — and, since art imitates life, he’s reappearing in this one. After completing their Business and Marketing degrees, the Dans of the world flock to London in their thousands to pursue the age-old Fuckboy’s Dream: a life spent drinking Cîroc in Madison by St. Paul’s and Snapchatting the steering wheel of a pay-monthly Mercedes that costs them literally every penny of their 24k starting salaries. You know, the kind of guys who go on The Apprentice and say things like, ‘I love money so much that when I go to snort my nosebag in Madison by St. Paul’s I just inhale the whole damn note instead, Alan!’ Business mind, you see? Yeah, he might be renting out a shelf with a mattress on it for a bedroom, which, yeah, admittedly makes it difficult for him to wank over nudes, but Dan has a Hermès belt from Selfridges. All is well with Dan.
3) The creepy old landlord
Generally speaking, London landlords are the worst shits in existence. They are the worst shits in existence, in history even, because they look at a 10’ x 8’ box room and conjure within its mind-numbing misery some fantastical living space for an actual human: ‘if I put this spunk-stained, destitute-looking mattress on the floor, without a frame’, they think, ‘I can just about fit a stool in next to it! That’s at least another £100 a month, if the craphole has a stool!’ It gets worse, though, when they are perverts — worse still when they are live-in perverts. And there are plenty about. If you’re a flat-seeker who happens to be or look vaguely like a young woman, then believe you me: the creepy old landlord, in his shit Fleetwood Mac t-shirt and his khaki shorts in the middle of winter, he will find you. His eyes will linger on your hips as he talks at length of his ‘terrific’ Ibiza days and his model/dancer ex-girlfriend who’s moved back to LA, and when he asks if you consider yourself a ‘party girl’, that’s when you run. Back to your parents. In the West Midlands.
4) The Young Professional
The Young Professional is obviously queen of pass-agg, and if you get on her tits by doing something scandalous like cooking bacon or having a poo she will disconnect the router so you can’t send e-mails anymore.
Imagine the house Whatsapp group! So many, ‘guys, my travel mug from Oliver Bonas is wet even though I haven’t used it since Wednesday, so something’s not quite adding up’, messages. ‘Guys, can you be quiet if you’re waking up between 5am and 9am? It’s when I do my yoga, and how the fucking fuck am I supposed to master the Adho Mukha Svānāsana with all that fucking clanking, you actual morons? X’
As she sees it, whether you’re 30, 22 or 4 years old, flatsharing is not the hallmark of a sufficiently successful career, ergo what the flip the point of life? The £115 blazer she bought from Cos is at best only masking her choking sense of failure and self-loathing, which she projects, inevitably, onto the well-meaning Northern guy who’s just moved in. Of a morning, she reminds herself, ‘this was not the plan, Nicola’, because she’s called Nicola, and she weeps into her sad Cath Kidston bowl of watery porridge.
5) The white people with dreadlocks
It is high time the world recognises trustafarians for what they are: they are a millennial pandemic, and London is only the start. Take a stroll through Bristol, Thailand, Justin Bieber’s house, and open your ears, sweet child, to the palpable war cry of white privilege declaring its allegiance to the counterculture. If you do happen to be flat seeking in what has astutely been dubbed a fuckwit caliphate — Clapham — the trustafarian is unavoidable. They’re all artists, they’re all writers, and they all look a bit like they do weird stuff with their period blood (e.g. rituals praising the god of patrimonial capitalism. Or maybe animal portraits). Imagine, if you will, Gabby: born and bred in a semi-detached house in Surrey, now going by Gaia or Euphrosyne or some equally shit name pulled out of an equally shit hat. Whack a crochet top on her bought from a Spitalfields stall called ‘Gypsy Garms’, add a boar-tooth necklace and fairy lights that she literally drapes around herself and wears outside, and bish bash bosh, she’s a humungous arsehole.
