Goodbye Memory Lane

I lived in a design studio called Unit 4.

Live-Worked it there for 5 years.

I shouldn’t really have been there because it was an industrial unit and no one else lived in the building, but the landlord turned a blind eye and officially no one knew.

There was no running water, or heating, or toilet in the studio.

Down the corridor, there were sinks where we would draw water from each day using three large 5litre plastic bottles, which we carried back to the studio for storage.

We would use between 15-20 litres each day, washing, cooking and drinking.

We became completely used to living without a tap.

Next door there was a painter, fine artists opposite, a photography dark room in the unit on the other side of us, and a building bursting with commercial photographers, graphic designers, percussion tuners, shoe designers, gentlemen’s tailors, garment factories and leather makers.

We would wash our dishes daily in the sink in the toilet in between the hubbub, and use the facilities there, but at night time pissed in a silver champagne bucket stolen from Moet, who were dishing out free champagne backstage at one of our London Fashion Week shows.

For cooking we used a small electric camping stove with 2 hobs and a dual oven/grill, kept things cold in a borrowed fridge with a freezer section about the size of a small shoe-box, and stored all our dry food in an office filing cabinet.

At 10.30pm the lights used to go out throughout the entire building and all the corridors were thrown into pitch darkness.

We used torches to move around the corridors at night, and had wired up an outside light to the mains from our studio so the area immediately outside the door was illuminated, just in case we ever needed to see what was happening through the small glass spy-hole in the door.

There was a large bolt fitted on the door that was always locked, and we would hammer a small wooden wedge under the door for extra security and to stop the door rattling.

The fire doors in the corridor used to creek in the wind at night, but the building was completely empty from 10pm at night to 8am in the morning, when the factory workers would clock in for work and start sewing.

The leather factories in the building would sometimes work late, but we became used to the hum of activity: the purring of industrial flat-lock sewing machines in our sleep, and the distant pounding of wooded hammers on leather.

The whole building used to smell of leather, oil paint, butane gas, skunk, and whatever we happened to be cooking at the time, which wafted through the corridors.

We switched the number on our door with the studio next door, because the guy was never there, and it gave us forewarning in case debt collectors came knocking.

We would boil our water in a kettle from Woolworths, and wash twice daily in buckets of water with flannels and towels on the bare wooden floor.

We used to alternate the position in the room in which we washed to stop the water from soaking into the wooden floorboards and warping them.

In winter we had 2 electric heaters to keep warm, which gave out a smell of burning dust, fabric lint and hair when first turned on.

At night in winter time we used 2 hot water bottles, wore pyjamas, socks, sweat-tops and t-shirts, and piled sheets, coats and extra blankets onto the bed.

In hot summers we worked naked, spraying ourselves with water from a plant feeder, and standing in front of the fan to keep ourselves cool.

We didn’t sleep on a proper bed, but instead used a fold-out metal frame 2-seater sofa bed that transformed into a rather cool looking leather chesterfield.

After 5 years it was a little warped, but our bones became accustomed to its flaws.

There weren’t any phone lines in the unit because we’d been cut off early on in our stay there, so instead we used pay-as-you-go mobiles to keep in touch with friends, family and business.

As the computers weren’t connected to phone lines, we would save anything we needed to email onto CD disks, then take them down the road to the Costa internet café to send or print.

The wheels of industry never stopped turning.

The studio was lit by 6 fluorescent tubes that were bright and harsh, so at night we used a bedside lamp adapted from an illuminated bodyform mannequin.

We later attached a glass chandelier to it, which diffracted the light softly.

To save having to get out of bed in the cold to switch it off we would use the television as a light, as it had a remote control.

We’d watch the Sopranos, Nip/Tuck, Big Brother, Green Wing, CD UK, Friends, Six Feet Under, Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, Grand Designs, Location Location Location, East Enders, Holby City, Casualty, Frasier, Will & Grace, Sex & The City, Status Anxiety, History programmes and videos from the Apollo video store.

I would sit up watching News24 into the early hours, which after a hard days work would relax me and send me to sleep.

We didn’t have a TV licence, so during the day we would unplug the TV from the mains to avoid detection when we were out, the down side being that we would constantly have to reset the clock on the video recorder in order to tape TV programmes.

We had an old second-hand wardrobe there that we’d picked up from a dealer round the corner in a damp railway arch near Bethnal Green tube station.

It was made of oak with attractive wood carvings.

We put smaller clothes like socks, underwear and t-shirts in a set of draws from Argos.

It arrived flat-packed, so I screwed and glued it together myself.

The rest of our belongings were stored in cardboard archive boxes from Viking Direct.

We would dry our towels and flannels on the back of chairs, and on an old industrial steam iron.

The fuse blew on the steam iron and was never replaced, so it never really served any other function other than a rather elaborate ironing board and drying rack.

We didn’t have a washing machine, so we would carry our washing in plastic Habitat carrier bags to the laundrette down the road near Tesco’s.

It cost £2.00 for a small wash, £2.50 for a large wash, 20p to spin dry, and 20p a shot for the heat dryer. We collected 20p’s in a box during the week so that we had plenty at hand.

When we felt flush we would get a service wash instead for £6 a bag, and collect it from the laundrette the next day.

We couldn’t keep any food out in the studio because at one point we had had trouble with mice.

Graham the landlord once told me they came up through the old industrial lift shaft down the corridor from London Underground. I would see them in the morning running between the rails as I waited on the Central Line.

We set traps, and probably caught about 4 mice in total using Cadbury’s chocolate as bait.

One very hot summer, we had cockroaches in the street and building, and a few somehow managed to get into the studio.

Unlike mice, which scurried around, jumping, climbing, rustling, and were pretty easy to detect and get rid of; cockroaches were pretty silent and could squeeze through the tiniest of gaps.

They had a different mentality to mice, and didn’t seem to fear you, or recognise territorial boundaries, or personal space.

Once, when my back was sore and we were sleeping on a mattress on the floor, I felt a cockroach crawl over my leg in bed and completely freaked out, knocking the ashtray flying.

Bleach spray and traps seemed to deter and get rid of mice, but with cockroaches we just turned the studio upside down, pulled out all the furniture and appliances, vacuumed, bleached the entire floor with a mop and bucket, and blitzed every corner, crack or crevice with ACME roach-killer spray.

We would evacuate the studio after doing this because the smell from the aerosol was pretty intense and nauseating.

It sometimes made you feel a bit giddy like glue or lighter fluid.

Only one of the windows opened in the studio, and we left it open almost all of the time.

It was pretty safe because we were on the first floor and the windows had metal mesh on the outside.

The window had a broken pane of glass that when I moved in was stuck together with masking tape.

Eventually the tape peeled away in the heat of many summers and gravity alone seemed to hold the shattered glass in place.

It remained in this precariously balanced state for 5 years and never did fall apart.

I suppose I never really intended to live in unit 4, but life went by, work consumed me and it was all I could really afford.

The rent was low at £95 per week, and it was pretty spacious for the price at 1000sq.ft.

It was my home and I was comfortable there, and felt relaxed and at peace.

Of course sometimes there was trouble in the street outside, youths with knives and masks, crack heads, fights, a man stabbed in the bollocks, and a girl raped downstairs when the outside door was left open one night.

But you took that kind of shit in your stride living in London.

Sometimes we’d go round the building at night with torches, broom handles, and kitchen knives if we heard any strange noises or screams.

We were like night watchmen, checking the outside doors were properly locked before bedtime, but it wasn’t something we could do every night.

I know it doesn’t sound ideal, but I was very happy living and working there, and life doesn’t always turn out the way you think it should.

I never complained, as I knew one day I would move on to something better, but I also knew that I would really miss the place when the time finally came to leave.

I never stayed anywhere in my life as long as 5 years, and I have a lot of happy memories from unit 4.

I shed a tear the day I left.

Words by Professor Julian Roberts