"When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life: for there is in London all that life can afford." (Samuel Johnson)
Location Location Location this week was one of their tedious catch-up shows. Each series Phil and Kirstie only make three properly new programmes, and then use up the rest of their six-week slot by basically repeating earlier shows, with a few minutes' update tacked on to the end. In these few minutes, they revisit whichever couple was sniffily rejecting all the amazing properties they were being shown before finally finding, finding and losing the property of their dreams, or admitting they were only pretending to be on a househunt so they could be on telly and nose round some fancy houses.
This week they were back in southwest London with a pair of
identical twin (refraining from rhyming slang) bankers, and a lone solicitor from the northeast who had
persuaded her daddy to buy her a London flat. The twin bankers were obsessed
with buying a tiny Victorian conversion off Clapham High Street even though
they were both about seven feet tall and the bedrooms were, as Kirstie said,
just about big enough to swing a cat in, provided you didn’t want any piece of
furniture other than a bed in them. There's no denying Clapham is a great location (apart from it being full of bankers), but there are much nicer, greener parts than the high street. The twins were shown a much bigger pad in
Pimlico, but it did have a rather terrifying view of the railway lines (in
literal spitting distance) heading into Victoria. And it was ex-local
authority, which clearly did not sit well in our city slickers’ minds. The
catch-up segment revealed that they eventually backed out of the flat purchase in Clapham and decided to buy one in Balham instead, one stop
down the Northern Line. You got the impression that they saw Balham as slumming it, which means that they definitely do not live on my London planet.
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| Clapham High Street |
The northeast solicitor eventually gave up hope of a home in
millionaire’s playground Wimbledon Village for her tiny budget (funny that) and
also ended up slumming it, this time in Tooting. Tooting is even more of a comedown
from Clapham, since it’s an extra stop down the Northern Line from Balham. And I
also lived there for a year, moving from Clapham and missing Balham out
entirely. The scene of the deal negotiation (where Kirstie and Phil get their
client drunk enough to agree to pay the necessary odds) was the Leather Bottle
pub in Earlsfield, where I had many a pint on my way to the Wimbledon Dogs, and
where, after three bottles of white rioja shared with a friend, it earned
itself a blue plaque on the wall for being the only place in the world I have
ever thrown up as a result of too much alcohol.
When Location Location
Location features property hunting
in London (which it does a lot, since that’s presumably the easiest journey to
work for Phil and Kirstie), it always makes us so glad we don’t live there any
more. Finding a room to rent in a London flatshare was stressful enough, but
buying a flat was even worse, when you couldn’t believe quite what estate
agents were having the nerve to show you for your scarily limited but still
extortionate budget. A flat above a takeaway, upwind from its ventilation hoods.
A flat with boarded-up windows (“ever since the fire”). A flat whose ground
floor was entirely derelict from a long-abandoned building project. A skull
hanging in a stairwell. A conversion where the only place to fit a kitchen was
inside a cupboard. A flat in a purpose-built block which seemed within budget
until the estate agent mentioned the £4,000 a year service charge. A flat with
sitting tenants so cross about having the roof sold above their heads that they
would leave their filthy underwear all over the floor during viewings. Oh no,
wait a minute. That was us.
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