The good
- The location is absolutely awesome. You’re right next to Tower Bridge/Thames River as well as a plethora of restaurants just across or down the street. Whether you want breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinks, or groceries, you get it all with a very short walk from your building.
- The kitchen/dining area overlooks a pleasant courtyard. With birds chirping this makes for a very nice area to enjoy a morning coffee/tea/breakfast.
- The in-unit washing machine was very handy as most places we were looking at didn’t seem to include this.
- Check in was very quick & easy. Just remember you need “Block 6”. Coming from the tube station we saw an entrance that looked similar (Block 2) which confused us a bit.
- The bed despite being pretty shallow was very comfortable to sleep in.
The meh
- There isn’t much insulation from the noise on the street below as it’s quite loud. That said, this was very easy to look past as a trade off for the great location, so it didn’t bother us.
- We wish it was a bit closer to the nearby tube station (a ~9 minute walk), but we knew this about the place before we booked, so again it didn’t bother us but it might others.
- Only one pint glass - really!? Apparently bring your own if more than one of you wants to enjoy a pint of beer while you’re here.
The bad
- The unit smelled, I don’t know if it’s cigarettes from another flat below us, or a prior renter/owner, but it was pretty intense the whole time we were there. Further, our clothes now smell like whatever smell was there for the rest of our trip as we did a load of laundry and hang dried in the unit - our clothes just soaked up all the smell.
- The floors were extremely dirty, we were constantly washing off our feet from the dirt left on the floor. Also several nails not properly flush with the floor resulted in a cut and multiple ripped socks from walking around.
- The bathroom drains constantly backed up. I don’t know if this is an issue with the building or the unit, but the bathroom sink was always backing up and there was very quickly an inch of water on the floor when showering.
- The toilet was in disrepair - the seat slid around and the flushing mechanism was just loose on the top.
- The dishwasher smells horrid. We ended up hand washing any plate/glass before using.
- The main couch is extremely uncomfortable to sit on - the cushions are well past their life.
- The flat looked so much nicer in the pictures than in reality when we got here. It also didn’t feel very clean - with the walls, floor, and some of the counters quite dirty.
- The ceiling or wall flaked off onto our clothes and bags in the bedroom - possibly when shutting/opening the curtains - which made a huge mess and was a pain to clean out of our items.
All of these items should be easy fixes for the owners, we just wish the unit was in better shape for us when we were here. This place definitely has potential to easily be a 5 star rental with just a couple of fixes & a little love, but it was a really disappointing start to our trip.