Tyrwhitt Road

Walking back from our first visit to St John’s Vale we saw a cluster of three small and pink balloons outside the new build block of flats at the end of our road.  On the site of a former stone masons’ yard, opposite the Talbot, we’d watched the building go up from the safety of the boozer, casting our suspicious glances over the tops of pint glasses for the previous eighteen months.  The exterior was a mildly offensive faux Victoriana that attempted to yet failed to pay homage to the buildings surrounding it.

Despite already being confused and on edge with each other by where we’d been ten minutes previously, we decide to blag our way in to their sales launch.  Since we were the only people without an appointment, buggering up their system, they show us around but only grudgingly.  Why did we even bother given that we had no real intention of buying one of the flats?  Mainly it was out of innate nosiness.  

We weren’t interested for a variety of reasons, not least the advice from our mortgage advisor who warned that the glut of new flats being thrown up in Lewisham, mainly in the massive Loampit Vale redevelopment, meant that lenders were wary.  They were worried that the market was being over saturated, that not enough of the single and young couple professionals working along the DLR at Canary Wharf who the flats are marketed at, want to live on the main road in Lewisham.   And they’re probably right.

Inside, the flats were almost as irritating as they are from the exterior.  Despite some clever storage solutions, it just grated.  Hyper modern decor:  all recessed lighting, LED bulbs at ankle height in the kitchen, electric points in the middle of the wall for your dominating TV screen giving a cinema experience in a room where you won’t get that L shaped leather corner sofa in.  All that battleship grey paint was at odds with our g-plan wooden furniture and the free sofa which, I think, originally came from Laura Ashley.  That sort of design, it was meant for someone else.

The flats themselves were narrow.  The corridors were so restrictive that we couldn’t even pass the agent easily.  She pressed her clipboard to her chest and her glasses slipped down her heavily made-up nose as I edged past.  The second bedroom felt too tight to get a double bed in.  She reassured me otherwise, but even if one did fit there’d be no room for anything else.  Outside the communal hall lighting never switched off counterbalancing its green double glazing credentials.  The garden had been sacrificed for bins and a bike rack.  There was no greenery at all, leaving it as sterile as the beige and grey bathrooms, like something from a dystopian sci-fi film.  Christ, even the plastic and steel bike shed held less than one bike per flat.

2028:  Florence padded bare foot across her living room and bounced the Google engine to her favourite gossip site.  The woman who appeared on the wall screen was dressed in the latest Chinese fashions, sharp angles to her tiny dress and lip stick that went beyond the edges of her mouth.  Florence thought that she looked mildly ridiculous, but that was part of her job.  After all, who could take someone seriously when their career was solely around recounting which of the nu-Eastern rich fell out of a nightclub that morning and in which fake-reality star’s arms we were draped?  Florence turned down the volume, the woman’s nasal voice was irritatingly high pitched, and messaged her sister on her palmtop with the pictures that told their own story filling up the room’s background.

Still, Florence thought, at least the woman (whatever her name was) had a career to be mocked.  Florence hadn’t worked in almost six months.  Two degrees, four internships and what had the last two years of paid employment given her?  Redundancy the day before the company had to actually pay her off.  Just when winter was coming too, when it was about to get cold and she couldn’t afford to run the heating after the dismal summer had meant that the panels on her roof hadn’t given their share back to the grid.  She shouldn’t really be running the Google engine; electricity was just as expensive, but she had to have some stimulus, didn’t she?  There had to be something.

She glanced out the window.  It wasn’t as though she could even go out.  Eight thirty and already deeply dark already.  They’d stopped running the street lighting earlier in the year.  The dark made her nervous.  All sorts of people roamed the streets amongst the gloom, or so MailViews told her.  People who had never paid for school, never looked for a job, the feral underclass.  Uninterested in anything other than watching PremierBall and drinking super-strong cider by the bottle, they were waiting to catch nice girls like Florence to turn into baby machines.  Even if she was brave enough to go out, there was nothing to do.  The Norwegian guy who lived downstairs was interested in the area’s history and he said the flats opposite used to a drinking house, somewhere people would go to be with their friends and enjoy their evening free time.  Imagine that!  Now it was just flats, like the run of buildings near the station which the exteriors of which looked a bit like the shops she remembered from her childhood.  Yeah, there was nothing but flats and empty offices in the city of London.

Her sister hadn’t replied.  She’d probably run out of credit again and would have to get a new palmtop from another supplier, someone who’d give her a premium contract without checking her history.  It felt like nothing worked anymore, like there was nothing to hope for, nothing to dream you could change.  They just tweeted about doing nothing and watching nothing on the Google engine.  They were nothing people living nothing lives; every day it felt like there was nothing more worthwhile to do other than go to bed.

This isn’t for us.  It’s for the girl in her early twenties going round with her Dad.  It’s a stepping stone not a home.  He’s going to buy it for her while she settles into her first job and trudges in and out of Docklands on the East London Line out of Brockley (rather than walking down to Lewisham, I mean she’s just not that sort of girl).  She’ll join the thrusting crowd, panicking to get through Canada Water fast enough to reach the Jubilee Line, gnashing their teeth at the single escalator congestion.  Eventually she’ll tire of never having space, of not having anywhere other than somewhere to put her head down alone.  Maybe she’ll meet someone, pool resources and move out to Bromley. 

We want somewhere to live in long-term.  We’re too old for one-bed tininess and too poor for what we really want.  It’s frustrating, but not as much as the split level flat on the top floor where half the second bedroom is sacrificed to a gratuitous en suite bathroom.  A room full of dark browns and more grey tiles.  It has a rainstorm showerhead and bulbs positioned to flatter around the circumference of the mirror, but no windows.  Its inclusion left the actual bedroom an unsatisfying shape.  The corners were cut out; the sloping roof limited where you could put wardrobes or book shelves or, hell, even stand up. 

‘I don’t get it,’ my girlfriend said looking out at the world passing by, at the late morning drinkers congregating in the winter morning sunshine outside the Talbot, pints in hand, cigarette trails lisping around their heads.  ‘Why are the windows so small?  One of the nice things about the houses on this street is all the tall windows bringing in the light.’

‘Ah, I dunno,’ said the agent unhelpfully and before I could interject with some hastily invented theory about the cost of glass and the greater strain it places on the supporting brickwork, or even to get an higher energy efficiency rating, she had a go at answering anyway:  ‘I think it’s ‘cos it’s a conservation zone.  Yeah, that must be it.  Conservation zone.  Strict rules.’  Which like the rest of the building - where there had been an opportunity to do something interesting, to be something unique and is instead a poor imitation of something else - doesn’t really make sense.