I now own a piece of London. It's just a little piece; an ex-local in a yet to be gentrified part of Hackney, with the traffic hum of the Eastway between us and the lights of the Olympic Park. Given the eye-watering rents in London, and the historically low interest rates its probably a good thing to engage in generating debt I hear you say, sensibly sounding like an elder relative.But there is only one good reason that I can think of for buying my own space .... The chance to spend days putting flat pack together! I love flat pack almost as much as I LOVE my new Bosch. I love the fact that I made the bed I sleep in, the wardrobe where I hang my clothes, the table I eat off and the chairs I sit on (not to mention a desk, an office chair, a lounge chair, a bedside table, and a bathroom caddy).
Now I know the real craftspeople among you will be rolling your eyeballs - ikea is not exactly artisan - they also need to rethink their tax policy and what's in their Swedish meatballs (refer to recent horse meat scandal sweeping Europe). But it is about the only opportunity I get to justify owning power tools. And there is something awesome about the scale of the place, and, perhaps only to those of us who are compulsively organised, about being able to count every nail, screw and allen key in each pack.
More importantly, anyone into flat pack instantly gets what some of the most densely written concepts in social science are on about. Take 'assemblage', for example, one of the popular A's (others being Affect, Affordance and Actor network theory). There are bits, we put them together generally according to a plan usually derived by someone else. Sometimes there may be bits left over or bits that don't fit quite correctly and require a degree of pressure, or a hammer, to get them into place. Affect is the sensation you get when you realise you should have bought two of the wardrobe door packs (damn you ikea) or when you can only get to an ikea on a Sunday afternoon along with the rest of London, and realise an embodiment of Dante's seventh circle of hell. And the interactions between human and non-human on such occasions, between people, and more people, and trolleys and prams and cardboard and aisles and soft and hard furnishings, are all you need to experience to really understand Actor network theory. A theory for exiting ikea without feeling claustrophobic or developing rage would be handier.
The new home is also a great place to engage in some ethnography of hipster led gentrification. Cross the Eastway and you enter a space where a shop, run by a man who shaves only half his face, survives by selling just one type of bike - fixed gear. Next door the shop sells only 12" vinyl. In the cafe, a woman enters wearing a towering flowered head dress and no one blinks. And everyone, from the bike shop to the laptop repair shop, serves espresso with their goods. Between the Eastway and the Peanut Factory is a Cash & Carry and book warehouse. Next to the White Building, with its trendy micro brewery, pizzeria and performance spaces, is a swingers' club with blacked out windows. Dotted among it all are squatted dross-scapes, warehouses and artist studios. And binding it all together is the smell wafting from Mr Bagel's and the German bakery across the road. Welcome to Hackney Wick.
