Our "grand" tour of London

Tony flew into London with the mission to find us an apartment that he'd like to live in. Our original budget was £300 a week (approx $460 a week). Most places price out by the week. One thing to realize in advance, is that you will pay by the month, and that a month is not made up of 4 weeks. Actually, you will be prorated by the price per week times the number of weeks in the year, and then that number will be divided by 12 to get the monthly rate.

In order to prepare for this in advance, Tony had been speaking with some letting agents (the equivalent of a rental agency in the US). As renting an apt in the UK is incredibly common, there are numerous agents that are anxious to work with you and show you around the different properties they represent. The only downside of the system, is that the agents are fairly restrictive to the neighborhood they represent, so in a quest to find an apartment, you may work with numerous agents. I think Tony met with at least 8. It was definitely a full time job. In watching some of my coworkers working with agents completely on their own, I feel incredibly fortunate to have Tony here to look at properties. I also threatened him that if he did not find a property during the week while he was here, that I would either have to live in a flop house until his return, or that I would most likely select a property that would not be to his high standard.

In preparation for meeting with agents, it was suggested that we wander around the different neighborhoods and check them out to see if there were any in particular that we liked, and then stop in with the different agents in those neighborhoods to see what apartments they might have.

Several neighborhoods were recommended to us by friends. Among them were Maide Vale, Clapham, Kensington, Islington, Little Venice, Camden, Hampstead, and Regents Park. Tony and I had a grand tube and walking tour of London the weekend that he arrived. It was a tour that most tourists would never get of London. It is interesting that in London there are nice streets, and then not so nice streets right next to each other. You can go from classic georgian row houses to scary ghetto inside of a block. We had been warned in advance that there was a real housing shortage right after WWII, and that a lot of inexpensive, quick to build, housing was created. Some of this "counsel" housing is very scary looking. You'd swear you were in a 3rd world country, not the premiere cosmopolitan city of London (more on that later). One tool that proved tremendously useful was Tony's iPhone. It has a built in GPS, that in combination with it's tube map app made for easier navigation in this new city.

I think Tony and I were starting to feel a little disappointed until we found Angel/Islington, which is London's answer to an LA residents prayers. It is a lovely pedestrian mall area, with quaint clean Georgian Row houses. Most of them look clean and upscale. It has a Starbucks on every block and many fun restaurants. It even has a burrito shop!

We grabbed phone numbers for every Letting/Estate agent in that area, and made calls to them. Unlike the US, letting agents do now work on Sundays, so we could not get in to see any properties that day. We then traveled through many more neighborhoods, but nothing seemed to strike our fancy as much as the are of Angel.