London Rental Opportunity of the Week: A… Shed? Alleyway? In Dublin?

What is it? Genuinely if I said ‘a shed’ I would be lying because this is not even up to the standard of a shed, so I am forced to describe it thusly: ‘an aspiring shed.’
Where is it? Sutton, a residential suburb of Dublin, ie: you have to drive quite far out of Dublin and find a little attaching dangling landmass with some semi-detacheds on it, and there, among the stiff sea air and the breeze, is Sutton (took this from looking at it on a Google Map, may not be entirely accurate, stiffness of breeze may not be as advertised, y.m.m.v.).
What is there to do locally? I am normally stumped by this question when it comes to about 30 percent of the areas in London, where I live. And when it comes to residential areas in Dublin – a city in a country I've never even been to – I have to hold my hands up and say: dunno. Time Out says, of the nearby Howth (Sutton has no presence of its own on Time Out): “There’s a Cliff Path Loop for walkers which starts at the DART station, as well as Howth Castle, the National Transport Museum, and the Baily Lighthouse, as well as a regular little weekend market for organic food, freshly baked goods, clothes and antiques. Visit House – once home to Captain Bligh – an upmarket café/brasserie serving local foodstuffs for excellent breakfast, lunch or dinner. House has been in the 'Top 100 restaurants in Ireland' for five consecutive years, and features jazz on the first Wednesday of the month. Don’t miss the ginger cake.” Honestly that sounds… sick? Shall we all get bang into Howth? Big trip to Howth? Big bag of ginger cake with the lads?
Alright, how much are they asking? Seven hundred of your Irish euros, per month.

It is hard to know what to do with this:

The questions you are having, in order: is this a shed? I do not think this is a shed: as best I can tell this is an alleyway (or ‘ginell’) that has been repurposed somehow, roofed over and closed behind a gate and given, inexplicably, a bathroom with a floor made of concrete and stone.

Why does this exist? My overriding theory so far is that the house it was attached to is a family home that had a moody teenager. Because I believe we all went to school with one string-haired moody teenager, one who had a big barney with their family and trudged out to go and live in their shed (insulated and set up with electricity, actually v cosy) where they, the teenager, could stay up uninterrupted until 3AM, playing electric guitar and N64 and staring out of the curtains at the big house and going “pricks,” but also very much trudging back there for three square meals a day and to get their laundry done.

And I feel that this… situation, with the bed and the ladder and such – was built for them, and that said teen has since vacated the property to go to university and now it is vacant and they’re trying to get €700 a month for it. Conversely, though, has anyone ever lived in this? Part of me is inclined to say this has been built, and never lived in, for this simple reason: three coat hangers, taped neatly together.

If you look at the kitchen of this place, it looks like it might have been used, and loved, by a very neat person: there are tea towels arranged around it, a bulging spice rack, a cute trivet, all the accoutrements to make tea. The wood is stained and worn. And look, too, at the table-and-chair arrangement behind it: a soft blanket! A Jessica Ennis book! You, too, can curl up in someone’s alleyway, shuddering beneath a blanket, reading about hurdles. Every visual clue here suggests this has been lived in by a person before, except for the coat hangers, taped together.

Clothing storage is the one blindspot every property manager, estate agent and landlord has when they arrange a home: they forget the sheer number of clothes it takes to keep a human being going from week to week. Anyone who has lived in this place will have figured this out, somehow – an extendable bar for hanging coats off, hooks, a rack, a plastic storage box full of t-shirts – and the fact that this hasn’t happened and that there are just three coat hangers, hooked up and taped together, suggests to me this is actually a very well-dressed dystopia forged out of an alleyway by someone on the Cath Kidston newsletter mailing list, and that sort of makes it a dark and horrible thing of its own.

Dublin has featured on this column a number of times in recent months, and its housing market at the moment is a sort of Patient Zero in terms of what a number of cities in the UK, most particularly London, could soon become. Essentially, it’s a five-way car crash: inept government has led to massive benefits for private landlords (which an estimated one in five parliamentary representatives are); there’s a lack of housing stock and plans to build more are hampered by the very modern ‘developers are building flats nobody can afford’ conundrum; there’s not really any suburban space to extend into; Airbnb hitting the Dublin market caused available rentals for the people who actually live there to drastically slide; young people are forming activist groups and getting pigeon heads thrown at them. In times of great crisis you will always find some vile lot trying to spin a buck off it, and this is what you get: an alleyway with a bed above it, three coat hangers, a main house where you are allowed access only for the washing machine, and this monstrous mess that's 45 minutes from Dublin City Centre, and a five-minute walk to the bus stop anyway. If I have to commute close to an hour to get anywhere fucking useful, I at least expect a bed and some coat-hanging facilities there where I go! Come on!

As ever, I am forced to tiptoe backwards through the dark thought processes that led to this mess. Someone had the idea. They decided they could build and rent out the small space on a bit of their patio. They hired builders to come and scope it out, who agreed to it. "Just build it out of pallet box wood," they said. "Not good wood, or anything like that. The broken down pallet shit with all the weevils in it. It’ll look cute." A builder then said: "I agree to this mad plan, and will do it for money. A builder went: "sure, I’ll build a toilet sort of into the stone-studded concrete floor of your garden, then mount a shower over the top of it." Someone – with a house, remember, connected to this – climbed up that ladder, made up a bed there, bounced on it once or twice and said: "yeah, this’ll do. Some cunt can live out here while I sleep in my warm bed." And then they advertised it, and decided it was worth seven hundred euro a month, and a property listings website that actively goes to verify properties to see if they are habitable actually signed off on it before taking the advert down when it went semi-viral. At no point did anyone involved go, 'This isn't right, is it?'

And that's what scares me the most. We’ve talked about global warming this week, how it’s a massive, almost unthinkably large logistical problem that needs to be tackled by government, and how us refusing straws at bars or eating less meat can’t make a massive difference to it all; in the same way, the housing market is the same. Yes, it’s a massive faceless problem that can only be sorted by policy and a governmental shift. But also, deep buried within there, are absolute scum – property developers, homeowners like this – willing to rip a pound of skin off to make a landlord seven hundred euro a month. Well! I hope they all feel true agony! No moral!

@joelgolby (h/t @JohnHyphen)