SELLING OFF NOTTING HILL




I am currently attending a journalism course in Chelsea; Chelsea is one of those areas of London that truly speaks to the truth of the city being a collection of villages. If I did not live in Notting Hill I would settle for Chelsea. With its hidden nooks and crannies and irregular streets it possesses great charm.
 Of course it is been long prey to the ravages of the developers and property speculators, a good portion now consisting of absentee owners, Russian Oligarchs or Arab Sheiks, neither group having gained their wealth by any means that might be said to further the development of mankind. They occupy but do not live in the area, contributing nothing to the local community. This is particularly sad in Chelsea which has contributed so much to the cultural life of the city, from the pre-Raphaelites to hippy communities of the 1960's.  Soon the area will be as dead culturally as any of those villages in Cornwall solely consisting of second homes.

Of course this phenomenon has spread to Notting Hill. However here the higher proportion of housing association properties have acted as something of a brake on the process. This is something of an irritant to the 'developers' and myriad estate agents operating in the area. In my own block we are constantly deluged by brochures and appeal letters from agents; so much so I provided a recycle bin in which to deposit the wretched stuff as soon as it comes through the door. If I had a £1 for every letter I received from an estate agent over the past year I would now have enough for a much needed pair of shoes. Having received yet another one yesterday, and prompted by an article in yesterday's Guardian, I finally decided to respond. Here is the edited text of my e-Mail:- 

Dear Mr C,

I am responding to your letter dated 18th September 2013 in which you specify a Mr S ‘who has specifically requested…Road as a their ideal street to live in.’

 Your Mr S certainly has good taste; I also think…Road an ideal street to live in and indeed have lived in this street for over 30 years. I also suspect your Mr S would be very taken with my flat, which, whilst I don’t do estate agent speak, I would say was a spacious one bedroom flat ideally suited to the needs of a single person or childless couple. I pay rent for my flat at a level I suspect  that some of my more wealthy neighbours, if indeed they ever bothered to inter-act with me, would make green with envy.* For, if you haven’t guessed by now, this is a housing association flat in which I enjoy full security of tenure and will live, provided I continue to pay my rent when due, do not decide to become another Ginger Baker and take up the drums, or adopt fire setting as a hobby, for the rest of my life.

Housing Association properties are where people live whom you will never see enter any of your showrooms, people who care about the community, attend meetings for local residents and keep Notting Hill from becoming completely taken over by people who think money trumps all. The kind of vacuous souls whose apartments: - ‘

‘…have few books, no dust, vast TV; impeccable exterior paint, but no paintings – instead cheap 1920s posters of ski resorts; chandeliers like suburban Dallas on a bad day. Many do not live here, but add these houses to their portfolios purchased by offshore trusts. Their "developments" trash the harmoniously terraced architecture – huge rectangular windows replace the Victorian bays. Strange junk mail appears – absurd but expensively produced free magazines with names like The Hill and invitations to "wealth management" seminars, one promising that "fortunes are made during a boom, dynasties during a recession".[1]

I am sure that the existence of whole blocks of housing association properties is a great irritation to estate agents like yourself and the get rich quick developers. This affords me some satisfaction as I dump your glossy brochures and unsolicited mail into the recycle bin I have placed in the communal hallway.

 I've never understood why society needs estate agents, and of course no healthy society would. I do not know how you spend your days but I now have the pleasure to relieve your workload by one small amount, you need no longer compose letters, or send glossy brochures to me.

Yours Etc

 *Envy being a terrible thing, the poor of course always being told how immoral it is to ‘envy’ bankers with their fat bonuses



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