This May Bank Holiday Monday, HEM News Agency writes to our beloved fans and readers from a new home office in Ilford, only a short walking distance from the town centre, after four years in the Plaistow area of east London.
For those of you not familiar with Ilford, it is a suburban district which sits just to the east of London. Traditionally part of Essex, Ilford is today considered an outer stretch of Greater London. Home to hundreds of homes, offices and shops (including the great Ilford Exchange shopping centre), the area is becoming increasingly popular with people looking to escape the rising house prices and rents of London itself, and some have described it as ‘upcoming’. Ilford is very hectic, but also relaxed at the same time. It is an ethnically diverse area and I have also family around here, many of them established here for years.
I arrived here on Saturday, 27th May 2017, after seven hours’ packing and cleaning, hiring an estate car to take me and all my belongings. For a month before, after my landlord served notice on me to leave, I was frantically searching for another room to rent (and base my blogs from too) and had to deal with a lot of timewasters. Finally a week ago, I got in touch with an estate agent in Seven Kings, Ilford, who showed me the property. I was satisfied with the room, and duly handed over the monies, including their eye-wateringly steep agency fees.
As mentioned before, I had been previously living and blogging from a houseshare in south Plaistow, close to Barking Road, and a stone’s throw from Canning Town and the border with Tower Hamlets borough. The landlord, who lived in the property with us, one day wanted a ‘quick chat’ with me, and that’s when he dropped the bombshell. For the day job, he worked as a solicitor with his own firm, and after he took over the firm in its entirety, suddenly found himself with boxes and boxes of case files relating to the law firm’s clients filling up his office. As a result, he proceeded to punch a hole through the ceiling to create an access point to the house loft, leaving my room covered in dust.
Back to the conversation, he told me that he wanted to stop renting out the house to lodgers, and that he needed my room first to convert into storage space for those files. He also planned to move his daughter and grandchildren into the house too. Once the smoke from the bomb cleared, I realised my time was up. It was my signal to exit stage right.
Here in Ilford, the Bank Holiday break has given me a chance to more or less familiarise myself with my new room, house and housemates. Not everything is perfect or ideal, but this is the nature of flatsharing. I am impressed with the room though, and am adapting quickly to the rhythm of this place.
As the Half-Eaten Mind Blog, this site began life in another houseshare in Stratford five years ago. Since then, I have moved twice. Moving and hunting around for places to call home is very stressful I can tell you, but until I can save enough for a deposit for my own home, this is my reality. Renting rarely provides stability. I plan to stay here in Ilford another year or two, then possibly look to progressing to a rented studio apartment, or maybe try for a mortgage, depending on my situation then.
New location, same great articles.
IMAGE CREDIT:
“File:Ilford station signage 2015 01.JPG” – Sunil060902, Wikimedia Commons (13 June 2015) is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ilford_station_signage_2015_01.JPG
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