Our Next Flat in Hackney

We have been to an estate agent to place a holding deposit on a property, we have almost sorted out our next house!

Our future flat is on the corner of the main shopping street in Hackney and all of the windows face a park. The property is ideal for us in every aspect, for example, the station is situated just down the road and buses come every few minutes. There is a huge Tesco and a Marks & Spencer supermarket, a few bakeries, a video shop for Rich and lots of £1 shops. Also the main public library of Hackney is down the road, which has a great collection of books, films and CDs.

The flat has 1 double bed room and 1 study room, which can be used as a single bed room, it also has an open planned kitchen and a quite spacious high-ceiling dining room. There are two showers and two toilets aswell as a brand new fridge-freezer and an oven. I was longing to have a fire place some day and there are two decorative fire places in the flat, so I am one step closer to my dream.

Down stair of our flat is a quiet breakfast cafe where I might have a coffee and read a newspaper with Rich every weekend. The shop roof will become our illegal roof terrace, which we can access from our huge front window, on which we plan to put flower pots and flowers. Rich has also managed to persuade the estate agent to put a free washing machine and fix the roof at the front of the cafe ceiling.

Unfortunatelly there are a few more flats upstairs and one concern is the road outside our flat seems busy and the police station is just situated on the other side of the park, from which we might hear the siren of police cars coming from the station at night.

To me the best thing is it will be much closer to Sutton House, one of the National Trust building, where I can have a cup of coffee in their cute cafe (Old buildings are kind of spiritual and inspirational to me). In my opinion, the problem with Hackney is that there isn't really a calm place for a lady to have a cup of tea on her own without being interrupted by somebody. In pubs there are lots of gangs hanging around in the daytime, the breakfast cafe is full of a construction workers and the bakery shop is full of grandpa and grandma or drug addicts.

When we lived in Brick Lane I could have a cappuchino every morning in the cafe 1001 or another cafe a few doors away from my flat. In Muswell Hill, there was a Starbucks and a sort of cafe/restrant all in one pub and lots of beautifull parks. Goodge Street in Central London, there were cafes everywhere just a minutes walk away. I have been quite lucky so far and as long as there is Sutton House, I am happy to live in Hackney.

We are moving to our new flat on the 1st of July.