While you're sleeping, I'm mucking around south of the Thames

The development around the Tate Modern in South London

It appears, ladies and gents, that I have finally cracked London.

When I say London, I mean accommodation in the UK capital that won’t force me to pay for four nights the ¾ of my monthly Toronto rent for the pleasure of pretending I’m able to relax in a rundown place in Zone 2. When I say three-fourths, I mean it literally.

The place is hell to travel to for someone lowish income, especially with the Canadian-British exchange rate. I remember the time when the pound was $2.5CAD. I’ve rarely crossed over $40,000 in life – and that only when I worked full-time in a non-writing field – and last two pandemic years have been closer to half that amount. (A lot of artists read this Substack, and with some I’ve already corresponded about income… I don’t think there’s a whole bunch of freelance working artists, let alone writers, who cross the $40,000 threshold often, but that’s a topic for another time.) But travel once a year at least I must and it’s the only “luxury” I keep. It’s the only way to see my family, who all live abroad. It used to be when I used to be a music critic, and probably still is, “professional development”. It’s partly work too, as I usually line up interviews or see things to review. I don’t eat in restaurants, I don’t buy clothes or gadgets very often. But travel is an essential need.

Finding half-decent accommodation in various countries with unfavourable exchange rate to Canadian $ has been QUITE a project.

In Paris, after some bleak trial and error (don’t trust the location, guys; you can get a miserable place in Paris that is right next to the Ministry of Culture and the Louvre), I lucked out with a young academic whose tiny fifth-floor walk-up in the 18th arr. I could always count on, first through the AirBnB and later directly via email. I need four days in October? Pas de problème; Roman will move to his partner’s apartment for those four days. The price was €55 per night. [This is where I couldn’t find a room in Niagara on the Lake under $120 to go to the Shaw Festival, by the way.] A kitchen where I could cook every day, a front-loading washing machine. This was about 2013-2017. I actually saved on cost of living in Paris, because the groceries were cheaper than in Toronto and I biked everywhere for next to nothing thanks to the municipal bike-share program.

But in 2018 Roman bought a one-bedroom just outside the Périphérique to live in, and that was it. The next one I found in Paris was a much smaller seventh-floor garret in the 11th arr., rented out by a nurse who lived with her boyfriend. She couldn’t do anything about the clogged pipes in the shower. I did not return. When I attended an all-sister summit in Paris in 2019, the three of us found a place in a new-built midrise in the 9th. There was a green and charming courtyard at the centre of the building, but the ground floor apartments were architecturally permanently sheltered from direct sun light. Fine for a few days, would not have been pleasant to live in. Clearly, my Paris good luck had by then well and truly run out.

I was lucky in Vienna too. A small but high-ceilinged place in a historic building in the Alsergrund district, the area where Freud lived and first started seeing patients in his private practice. A recently spiffed up bathroom, a modest kitchenette. I can’t remember the price, but it can’t have crossed €60 per night.

Berlin was special, but how could Berlin, with its mass of available apartments and its rent control, not be? My first time must have been 2008-ish, did we even have the internet back then? I found a private apartment through a women’s network. It was a word of mouth or a closed FB group situation or something; just a lovely one-bedroom, again very high ceilings and windows in an older building. The owner’s library. A king-size bed. When I revisited Berlin in about 2018-ish, already past the AirBnB era, I turned to hotels. Can’t remember which one it was, but it was a decent one, it was in Mitte, and not far from the Checkpoint Charlie. Could it have been the Select Hotel Checkpoint Charlie? I see the rooms today are about £95 but they were lower then because my non-negotiable line was about $100.

Amsterdam also came through for me. The garret unit with its own en suite within a house with those tight and treacherous stairs that Amsterdam houses excel at, owner occupying the lower floors – but far from central Amsterdam, somewhere in Amsterdam-Zuidoost, if memory serves. You could find various faults with the furniture in that place, but it had skylights, the owner had a parakeet feeder just outside the window (yes, the parakeets would wake you up in the morning!) and she threw in a beater bike in the deal for good measure. I was sorted. A bike is of essence in Amsterdam. I don’t think the place was more than €60.

Italy was lucky too. In Florence, I stayed in a convent, and because the rooms came without the frills and extras that the traveller has come to expect (no TV, no wifi, no mosquito screens on windows), they were cheap. A good number of nuns running the underused convents in Italy would back then (2006? 7?) rent out whatever space they could while maintaining their daily routines in a separate wing. I had first read about these convents in Rick Steves’ travel guides. The travel internet was still rudimentary, so you could not book the convent room via email. I had to phone at a specific hour (it was something like 2 a.m. EST) so I could catch the only nun who took reservations. Once there and unpacked – I remember an oak dresser with a huge built-in mirror, and the balcony overlooking the nuns’ garden -- the place was a dream. On your way in or out you had to pass through large rooms filled with antique furniture, which nobody had any desire or man power to get rid of.

Venice (2005?) was lucky too: a low-ceiling attic in a building next to a canal with a tiny window but lush beds, where I spent many an hour reading Mary McCarthy’s Venice Observed, trying to find a way to bond with the city (it took a couple of days… it was July, and you had to elbow your way through the throngs wherever you went). And what to say of Rome? My very first time was a large apartment in Vatican City owned by a middle-aged guy who lived with his family just outside Rome. You may have to share the bathroom with other guests, the description said. Fine, OK, at this price and location… But when I went there, I was the only guest and perhaps one other person showed up before my time was up. This place was a stroll away from the Vatican Museum. And the guy drove me to the airport at the end. When I returned to Rome a decade later, my budget did allow the crossing of the $100 barrier, but I didn’t have to cross it very far in early spring 2019 in the Best Western President next to a busy road but on the other side (and I did get the other side) the balconies overlooking the Roman rooftops and other balconies.

Munich, a notoriously expensive city, was mixed. I took a separate room with bathroom at one of the out of the way Hostel Internationals and while the room was decent (always go for Spartan, people: no carpets and no curtains made of any kind of textile), it had ants, which I collected whenever possible in a small jar and handed to the bewildered receptionist upon checkout. The hostel in Frankfurt, on the other hand, was a flawless (Spartan) experience: a room on top floor, slanted roof, all the basics, state-of-the-art shower. Another time, when Air Canada had to postpone the flight back to YYZ, they’d put is in a good airport hotel… with sealed windows and strong A/C. Which reminds you what you’re not missing with hotels that are outside your price range.

US cities have been a hard nut to crack, and it’s lucky that I rarely have the desire to visit any of them. My first time in NYC was a couch in a friend’s living room in Washington Heights; poor guy tolerated me for almost ten days, but he had offered (as an act of East-West solidarity; he used to work for the Network of East-West Women). Second time was some sort of a grim guest house on E 25th. I’ve occasionally looked at hypothetical visits for opera since that time, but it was impossible to find anything under $200CAD per night… and why would I spend the almost same amount of money on going to NYC as I would going to a European country. People tell me some Ys have cheaper rooms. I don’t think those Ys exist outside their imagination. Chicago, a city a loved the one time I went, was a terrible accommodation experience. The hostel I could afford looked charmingly red brick on the outside but clearly employed no cleaners. My two-bed room contained one bed that had not been changed since the last guest, and the one that looked like it might have. Not willing to make a fuss (or go back through the ghastly corridors to the reception desk) I toughed it out for that one night.

Which brings me to London.

While many other cities of the world – in fact, most – allow for a possibility of a cheap yet decent hotel, motel, Travelodge or hostel, not this guy. Either you have money, or forgeddabout it.

I’ve looked at many many many places on Booking. No one excels at shabby as London. (No coincidence that the twentieth century shabby hotel novel and play, the dilapidated mansion motif and the Fawlty Towers come out of England.) Hotels well into the £120 range will regularly be dreary. Not knowing this, and presuming at the aggregate rating of “very good” means something on Booking, an Ibis Style hotels caught my eye last year. The building in Earls Court appeared OK – one of those hotels formed by merging several row houses and, one presumes, renovating them. £62 per room did not sound too good to be true for this fool.

When I arrived, the entire area looked shabby, the many Café Neros and the one Paul notwithstanding. Take the side streets and you’ll spot one after another hotels created by merging adjacent row houses into one entity with mazes of corridors. Found the street, found the place, then walked along it for many minutes to the one and only possible entrance. First they sent me to a basement room (NB: London hotels regularly rent both basement and windowless rooms; read your bookings verrry carefully.) Ben bon, I thought, there isn’t much light, but I can open this window. The opened window revealed the room was facing a garbage disposal area where the pigeons came to do their business. I went upstairs, asked for another room. We only have this small one, they said, on second floor, OK I said, let’s try that. The door in that room hits the bed when you open it. OK. Maybe it’s not bad, I mean it’s only three nights.

Middle of the night, the water started dripping from the ceiling and I could hear the tap running in the room above. WHO RENTS THIS TO HUMANS. I go downstairs in a strained tone of voice ask for a different room, ready to storm out pushing my luggage in the middle of the night. Finally I get a livable room. Not having learned any lessons or anything, next time I return I also take a hotel in Earl’s Court (it’s on the subway line that goes all the way to Heathrow, was my reasoning), doubly expensive. The place is serviceable, but kind of makes you resent your life.

Leeds was somewhat similar. An old heritage hotel with dusty carpets and long corridors, but the room was fine and the bed was nice. The noise from the live music venue next door wasn’t. Also see under: curtains, carpets. Better without, than to have those that used to be fancy. They are not well maintained in most hotels, no matter the price range.

So here I am in London, writing this from the London School of Economics residence hall in a heritage (aren’t they all here) stonker of a building behind the Tate Modern Gallery, called the Bankside Hall. And, barring any fires or pipes bursting in the next 48 hours, I just might have finally cracked London.

The LSE has several halls for its students around the city, which they spiff up (up to a point) and rent out to tourists in summer months. I got a large end of hallway room designed for two students to live in, with 2m tall windows and endless armoire and storage space for £84 per night. Shower is tiny but water pressure excellent. Full British breakfast at the canteen downstairs. The location can’t be better. I walked towards it from London Bridge station (where the train delivered me from Gatwick) by the Globe Theatre and Borough market. These people know how to develop swaths of the city respectfully, and wedge in apartments and shops into every nook and under every rail overpass. From the room I see the City of London towers and the Shard on the one side, and Tate Modern on the other.  

A new office building coming up

Social housing not far from the Tate

Before settling on Bankside, I have individually checked every hotel website from at least four lists of The Best Places to Stay in London on a Budget that exist on the internet. (Spoiler: they are all still expensive while looking very sad.) I have since checked every Premiere Inn and Travelodge page on Booking and they all have mixed reviews and live on the expensive-sad axis. But I have found the solution for non-summer months that I will be using in the future: the stylishly Spartan & be-parqueted Green Rooms, with £99 single en suite rooms (it’s located in Zone 3, so a bit of a trek on the subway but whatever).

The weather’s been perfect. Yesterday I met with Vesna Goldsworthy and interviewed her for this newsletter about her work on how Eastern Europe, Russia, Ukraine and the ‘Stans figure in Western imagination, and today I’m seeing the National Theatre adaptation of Sheridan’s 1775 The Rivals, set in Second World War RAF and renamed Jack Absolute Flies Again. About to set out to the Gagosian, and then to the original Daunt Books on Marylebone. I’ve been eating the £6 salads at Pret and £7 Asian fusions at Itsu and a slice or two of cake might have made an appearance. I hear the crows cawing outside. Life’s all right.

TTFN

L.P.