Private Rent Houses | How I learnt to love the council estate
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Welcome to my new abode. It’s a work in progress, I admit, but so far I’m rather pleased with it: minutes from Regent’s Park, five minutes from central London tube stations, 10 minutes’ walk from Soho… The approach, I grant, does not inspire much confidence: the front door gives on to what my years in Italy make me want to call a piazzetta, a little piazza, but in fact is just a nondescript patch of paving, a trap for discarded crisp packets and puddles of rain. The front door itself, with its panes of reinforced glass, is the same as its neighbours and no different from all the other front doors for hundreds of yards around. Like the very large square windows, it leaves no room for doubt: I am now the owner, or rather the leaseholder, of a maisonette in a Modernist council block. It was not a step I took lightly. Before being posted abroad for The Independent 15 years ago, first to Delhi then to Rome, my preferences in housing were the same as nearly every other middle-class Londoner of my generation: I looked forward some day to being able to buy a flat in, or better still the whole of, a Victorian terrace or a semi in one of the capital’s numerous so-called “villages”: Notting Hill if I got lucky (read “rich”), otherwise Kentish Town, Stockwell, Stoke Newington, Muswell Hill, etc, etc. That was the sort of house I was brought up in, and my first London home as an adult was a second-floor flat with a roof terrace in exactly that sort of property, in Canonbury; Betjeman country we used to tell each other, as consolation for the smashed windows of the cars parked on the street, and the long hike to the nearest station. No one questioned the superiority of suburban living; we were Metrolanders by birth but also by avocation: Habitat furniture, sanded floors, period fireplaces and candelabras spotted in architectural salvage yards, terraces and small gardens on which we would have lavished the same loving care as our parents if we were not so damn busy; a handsome front door; the tedium of a 40-minute trip to work offset by the neighbourhood park we were determined to find charming, the Italian deli, the Turkish restaurant, the greasy spoon, the cavernous Victorian pub; all the ingredients of what we liked to think of as our village.
http://bit.ly/PUqpbM
Welcome to my new abode. It’s a work in progress, I admit, but so far I’m rather pleased with it: minutes from Regent’s Park, five minutes from central London tube stations, 10 minutes’ walk from Soho… The approach, I grant, does not inspire much confidence: the front door gives on to what my years in Italy make me want to call a piazzetta, a little piazza, but in fact is just a nondescript patch of paving, a trap for discarded crisp packets and puddles of rain. The front door itself, with its panes of reinforced glass, is the same as its neighbours and no different from all the other front doors for hundreds of yards around. Like the very large square windows, it leaves no room for doubt: I am now the owner, or rather the leaseholder, of a maisonette in a Modernist council block. It was not a step I took lightly. Before being posted abroad for The Independent 15 years ago, first to Delhi then to Rome, my preferences in housing were the same as nearly every other middle-class Londoner of my generation: I looked forward some day to being able to buy a flat in, or better still the whole of, a Victorian terrace or a semi in one of the capital’s numerous so-called “villages”: Notting Hill if I got lucky (read “rich”), otherwise Kentish Town, Stockwell, Stoke Newington, Muswell Hill, etc, etc. That was the sort of house I was brought up in, and my first London home as an adult was a second-floor flat with a roof terrace in exactly that sort of property, in Canonbury; Betjeman country we used to tell each other, as consolation for the smashed windows of the cars parked on the street, and the long hike to the nearest station. No one questioned the superiority of suburban living; we were Metrolanders by birth but also by avocation: Habitat furniture, sanded floors, period fireplaces and candelabras spotted in architectural salvage yards, terraces and small gardens on which we would have lavished the same loving care as our parents if we were not so damn busy; a handsome front door; the tedium of a 40-minute trip to work offset by the neighbourhood park we were determined to find charming, the Italian deli, the Turkish restaurant, the greasy spoon, the cavernous Victorian pub; all the ingredients of what we liked to think of as our village.
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