Tag: London housing crisis

Business

Luxury Basement Builder Still Can’t Afford a Flat

Lotte Heidenreich

The Construction Worker’s Perspective: Rich Man Builds Bigger Barns While the People Building Them Take the Night Bus Home CHELSEA, LONDON: A construction worker responsible for excavating a luxury basement beneath a Kensington townhouse has questioned Britain’s housing priorities after spending three years building a private swimming pool for a man who has never learned to swim. Bricklayer Dennis Cooper, 46, travels daily from outer London to work on an…

Business Culture Social

London Housing Crisis

Aishwarya Rao

London Housing Crisis: Five Observations and One Very Tired Lawyer London housing has become so expensive that the phrase “roommate” now refers less to a human being and more to a rotating cast of financial co-signers. Estate agents in London no longer advertise apartments. They advertise “opportunities to experience vertical breathing.” A London bedroom is now defined by the legal standard: any rectangular object large enough to contain a mattress…

News

London Headlines Explained

Alan Nafzger

London Headlines Explained: The News That Never Actually Changes London does not so much generate news as recycle it with confidence. The city wakes each morning, checks what was confusing, expensive, broken, or mildly alarming yesterday, and reissues it with the word “new” somewhere near the top. What follows is not a parody of London headlines, but an interpretive guide—because after a while, the city stops reporting events and starts…

Culture Social

Generation London

Alan Nafzger

Generation London: The City That Raised Itself on Flat Whites and Existential Dread London has always had a gift for making people feel both deeply cosmopolitan and deeply broke simultaneously. But the current generation of Londoners — those wide-eyed, overqualified, perpetually exhausted souls who arrived clutching a 2:1 from a mid-ranking university and a Pinterest board full of exposed brickwork — have elevated urban suffering to something approaching performance art.…

Culture Social

London Is Closing Its Historic Pubs

Isla Campbell

Last Pint Standing: London Is Swapping Its Historic Pubs for Luxury Flats Serving £14 Sparkling Water and Existential Dread Five Observations About the Death of London Pubs Londoners insist pubs are “the heart of the community,” which is why they have bravely replaced many of them with luxury apartments whose main community feature is a shared recycling bin. The British invented the pub as a place where people gather to…

Current Absurdities Political

London Politics

Aishwarya Rao

London Politics: A Calm, Sensible City Run Entirely on Meetings London politics is best understood as a long-running performance art piece staged across committee rooms, bicycle lanes, and strongly worded letters that are never read. It looks like government, sounds like policy, and behaves like an argument between flatmates who all pay rent but none of them own a screwdriver. At the centre of the production is the city itself,…