Stylish 2 1/2 bed London flat, 4-minute walk from London Fields Station

Description

My recently-renovated apartment is on the top (9th) floor of a '60s Council building (designed by Eric Lyons, he of the Span House), situated on a little green just off Mare Street in Hackney. Transport links are excellent. It is a 3-minute walk to London Fields station (and two of the best bakeries in London, E5 and the Snapery East), and about an 8-minute walk to Hackney Central; a surprising number of buses (26, 30, 38, 55, 106, 236, 243, 277, 394) stop just outside the door or down the street. From London Fields it is only 8 minutes to Liverpool Street, and from there it’s an easy, 2-minute change to the Circle, Metropolitan, Hammersmith, and Central lines; the new Elizabeth Line goes straight from there to Heathrow: in many ways much faster and better located than flats that say they are 10 minutes (or more) from a tube stop. Door to door, it takes me 30 minutes to get to King's College on the Strand; a bit less to the British Library. The neighbourhood (the UK's only mention, if you're into that sort of thing, on Vogue's list of the "World's 15 Coolest Neighbourhoods") has everything within a short walk: shops (including a Lidl, a small Sainsbury's, a big Tesco and an M&S), pubs, galleries, bars, markets, restaurants, a cinema (the Hackney Picturehouse), a theatre (the 19th-century Hackney Empire), and two magnificent parks, one with the city's only outdoor heated Olympic-sized swimming pool (London Fields), adjacent to buzzing Broadway Market, and one with a canal and a Sunday farmers' market (the 213-acre Victoria Park). There is also a major hospital within walking distance (Homerton University Hospital). The flat itself has two bedrooms (one with a big double bed; the second, has a loft bed and a sofa bed) plus a little office (which has a single sofa bed, and so can double as a spare room), separate WC, bathroom with jacuzzi bath and rainfall shower, a large open plan kitchen-dining-living area, windows on both the north and south sides, and a small balcony with a panoramic view stretching from Canary Wharf to the City. The design of the building is very smart: all three bedrooms are over the communal hallways, which means there is no noise; and the entrance to the flat is downstairs on the 8th floor, which means there is a separate vestibule for coats, shoes and the like. Behind the building there is a little grassed playground and a basketball court, with access reserved for residents only. Rent includes all utilities and Council Tax.