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The Flat Above the Chip Shop

The advertisement said bright, characterful, close to amenities, which in England means dark, odd, and above a chip shop.

We took it anyway, because it was furnished and we owned one saucepan between us, and because the rent was ninety pounds a month less than anything else we had seen. We were twenty-three and had done the arithmetic on the rent alone, which is a mistake I would now warn anybody against, because nobody warns you about the bills.

The flat was above a chip shop on a road that was not remotely residential – a bookmaker, a launderette, a shop that sold only vacuum cleaner parts and was somehow never closed. Behind us, thirty seconds away, was a street of small terraced houses with hanging baskets. The neighbourhood changed character completely in the space of one corner, which I have since learned is true of most cities.

It was cramped. There is no polite version. The bedroom took the bed and nothing else, and the kitchen had a table that had to be lifted to open the fridge.

It was also, and I am aware this sounds like something I have invented afterwards, extremely cosy. The chip shop’s extractor ran until half past eleven and the floor of our sitting room was warm all evening for free. We paid almost nothing to heat that flat for two winters.

Our landlord was called Mr Osei and he was the reason the whole thing worked. He lived four streets away. He came round in person when the boiler failed, on a Sunday, in December, and fixed it himself while telling us about his daughter’s law degree. When we eventually left he returned the entire deposit without an inspection, and said that in eleven years as a tenant himself he had never once got a full deposit back, and had decided not to be that sort of person.

I did not appreciate at twenty-three how unusual that was. I have appreciated it a great deal since.

The day we moved in I remember thinking we would stay eight months. It took nearly a year to properly settle in and then we did not want to leave.

What changed it was the community, which I had assumed did not exist on a road like that. It was mostly the woman in the launderette, who knew everybody’s business and distributed it fairly. It was the chip shop family downstairs, who gave us food on Christmas Eve two years running and refused money both times. It was a man called Derek who cleared the snow off the whole pavement, all fourteen shopfronts, with his own shovel, for no reason at all.

The facilities were terrible. There was no park within twenty minutes and the nearest library had closed the year before we arrived. On paper it was a bad place to live and every single person we told about it made the same face.

We moved out in the spring to a flat in the suburbs that was objectively better in every measurable way – spacious, quiet, a garden we shared with one other flat. I was miserable there for five months and could not explain why to anybody, including myself.

Mr Osei sold the property in 2019. Somebody bought it and decided to do up the whole building, and I gather they had to clear out forty years of things from the room above the shop before they could start.

The chip shop is a coffee place now. The launderette is flats. Derek died in 2021 and there were, I am told, a great many people at the funeral.