Went to see a house today. A one bedroom place. I’m thinking of trying living on my own for the first time in, well, ever I think. Always been a sharer me and it’s time to go it alone. For a bit anyway.
It’s funny, but having lived in a flat that, while it has it’s plus and minus points, is not particularly normal my expectations have shifted and I’m realizing how excruciatingly dull most of the housing is in this country. Lots of silly little boxes with silly little rooms that really don’t leave much to the imagination. So on the off chance I suddenly find myself living in country with a rather more enlightened history of house building (or a shit load of money) here’s my wants list.
- One big room. I’m not particularly good at visualising measurements but I’d guess at least 50ft in one direction should be right.
- Plumbing
- Electricty
That’ll do for the basics. I’ll then build some walls and fill it with stuff.
Other factors to be taken into consideration:
- 2nd story or about. I’d like to be able to walk around naked with the curtains open. Call me unreasonably liberated.
- Walkable distance into town. Not stuck in the middle of bloody nowhere.
Actually, I know exactly what I want, though you’ll need to be of a certain age to remember this. Back in the 1980s there was an advert that’s stuck with me ever since. It was from Halifax and was pushing the then revolutionary concept of the ATM machine, whereby you could get money at any time of the day or night. This was graphically explained by having a chap wake up on a Sunday morning (as indicated by the song Easy Like Sunday Morning) in his loft apartment, opening the shutters and being greeted by his cat. He goes to the fridge and discovers he has no milk. What to do? Poor kitty have no milk! But wait! He has a piece of plastic! All is saved. Kitty has milk and he can sit contentedly in the window of his open plan warehouse conversion and drink his presumably poncy coffee and watch the sun rise.
That’s where I want to live. Always have. Despite all my latterly acquired media literacy and cynicism I’ve always had that piece of aspirational nonsense in my head.
The Bournville Flat got close to that, not physically but in the sense that it isn’t laid out in a normal way so it doesn’t feel like another bloody box. It felt / feels (tenses are so tricky when you’re in the process of moving) like a special place. So as I’m checking out these houses and flats I really have to hide my disappointment that, like 99% of the post-war buildings in this country and a significant number from before, they’re really not what I’m looking for.
Ever onwards.
You have my empathy completely. The interior design of houses in Britain has never been for the people who may live in them but for the benefit of real estate agents – houses are not valued on the square footage (or meterage) as they are in the States but on the number of box-like bedrooms. If you can fit five box rooms in a house it is, for some inexplicable reason, more valuable than the same house with three reasonable sized bedrooms.
The open plan concept is a complete no-no in the hearts and minds of most people in the business. So they tend to be in areas that have yet to make it on the property ladder. Digbeth seems like a possibility (the Jewellery Quarter was there once but has moved on).
In our recent house search we focused on the open plan concept and, because we were only interested in country living, this meant barns. Our final choice had too many doors, so we took them out – doors get in the way. The urban equivalent would be old factories, warehouses, even chapels. I would guess there is quite a lot of choice out there, to buy or to rent. Good luck!
Damnit, the guy with the cat in the advert. He’s the bit of the yuppy dream that came into the future with us.
In Oxford, they’re knocking down the old factories and replacing them with purpose-built apartments full of tiny rooms. It’s a miserable shame.
Nice post. I think of my own aspirations for domestic buildings and agree about the sameyness of what’s on offer. It’s depressing to think about moving to a place where the houses are basically cookie-cutter copies of each other, where the neighbours are effectively characterised by the kind of street they live on. A friend made this point last night: you are typecast by the street where you live. Even if you do things differently than your neighbours, they set the tone.
Secondly, an old workshop converted is infinitely more interesting than most houses. The best place I’ve lived were big open rooms, workshops partially converted to domestic quarters but whose raw space meant the layout changed from time to time.
I am now living on my own for the first time. So far it seems like a really fantastic move. But then I am less than 24 hours in. I think the crucial factor will prove to be living close enough to friends that you can still get a decent amount of social contact with only a little effort and organisation (rather than getting a certain amount from your housemates without any effort at all). I’m reasonably well adapted to a fairly insular style of life anyway, so I should be okay I think. You seem to have plenty going on most of the time and get out and do stuff anyway, so you should be okay too. If you can find a suitable place for an affordable price then you should give it a go I reckon.