Non-public Hire 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 up to now I’m somewhat pleased with it: minutes from Regent’s Park, five minutes from central London tube stations, 10 minutes’ walk from Soho… The method, I grant, does not inspire much confidence: the front door offers on to what my years in Italy make me wish to call a piazzetta, somewhat piazza, but in reality is just a nondescript patch of paving, a entice for discarded crisp packets and puddles of rain. The front door itself, with its panes of bolstered glass, is similar as its neighbours and no completely different from all the other front doors for tons of of yards around. Like the very massive square windows, it leaves no room for doubt: I am now the owner, or somewhat the leaseholder, of a maisonette in a Modernist council block. It was not a step I took lightly. Before being posted abroad for The Impartial 15 years ago, first to Delhi then to Rome, my preferences in housing had been the same as practically every other middle-class Londoner of my technology: I appeared forward some day to having the ability 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-known as “villages”: Notting Hill if I obtained lucky (read “rich”), otherwise Kentish Town, Stockwell, Stoke Newington, Muswell Hill, and so forth, etc. That was the type of house I was brought up in, and my first London residence as an adult was a second-ground flat with a roof terrace in exactly that type of property, in Canonbury; Betjeman country we used to tell each other, as consolation for the smashed windows of the vehicles parked on the street, and the long hike to the nearest station. No one questioned the superiority of suburban residing; we had been Metrolanders by start but additionally by avocation: Habitat furniture, sanded floors, period fireplaces and candelabras spotted in architectural salvage yards, terraces and small gardens on which we'd have lavished the same loving care as our dad and mom 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 had been determined to search out charming, the Italian deli, the Turkish restaurant, the greasy spoon, the cavernous Victorian pub; all the elements of what we favored to consider as our village.
http://bit.ly/PUqpbM
Welcome to my new abode. It’s a work in progress, I admit, but up to now I’m somewhat pleased with it: minutes from Regent’s Park, five minutes from central London tube stations, 10 minutes’ walk from Soho… The method, I grant, does not inspire much confidence: the front door offers on to what my years in Italy make me wish to call a piazzetta, somewhat piazza, but in reality is just a nondescript patch of paving, a entice for discarded crisp packets and puddles of rain. The front door itself, with its panes of bolstered glass, is similar as its neighbours and no completely different from all the other front doors for tons of of yards around. Like the very massive square windows, it leaves no room for doubt: I am now the owner, or somewhat the leaseholder, of a maisonette in a Modernist council block. It was not a step I took lightly. Before being posted abroad for The Impartial 15 years ago, first to Delhi then to Rome, my preferences in housing had been the same as practically every other middle-class Londoner of my technology: I appeared forward some day to having the ability 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-known as “villages”: Notting Hill if I obtained lucky (read “rich”), otherwise Kentish Town, Stockwell, Stoke Newington, Muswell Hill, and so forth, etc. That was the type of house I was brought up in, and my first London residence as an adult was a second-ground flat with a roof terrace in exactly that type of property, in Canonbury; Betjeman country we used to tell each other, as consolation for the smashed windows of the vehicles parked on the street, and the long hike to the nearest station. No one questioned the superiority of suburban residing; we had been Metrolanders by start but additionally by avocation: Habitat furniture, sanded floors, period fireplaces and candelabras spotted in architectural salvage yards, terraces and small gardens on which we'd have lavished the same loving care as our dad and mom 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 had been determined to search out charming, the Italian deli, the Turkish restaurant, the greasy spoon, the cavernous Victorian pub; all the elements of what we favored to consider as our village.
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