A virtual trip back to the dingy bedsits and old haunts of my London days reminds me why I left when I did

There must be some law that decrees that any website, technology or app relating to tax affairs should be an experience on a par with sticking your hand in a fire. This week, I found myself in the incredibly unfortunate position of playing Catch22 on the UK’s HMRC website. Want to proceed? You’ll need your old National Insurance number first, sunshine. Need your National Insurance number (the equivalent to a PPS number)? You’ll need your old address and the address of your last employer. Which is how, in the course of some overdue life admin, I found myself trying to sift through the sands of time to remember long-forgotten addresses. Did I live at 824 or 642 Harrow Road? 235 or 345 Camden Road? There was only one thing for it — to find specific houses and flat complexes, I had to log onto Google Street View and take a virtual walk down the old roads I lived on in London back in the 1990s.

It made for a supremely weird Saturday morning, revisiting roads I had walked on many, many times in real life before, often while young, lonely or broke. From the comfort of my warm, non-mouldy, non-bedsit home in Kildare, I arrived at each of my old front doors with a slight shudder.

One building, a tightly packed jumble of utterly depressing flats back in the day, had now been turned into some manner of boutique hotel. Over on the Harrow Road, the adjoining Thai takeaway to my house, with its kicked-in door, was much the same, as was the nearby corner shop. I could smell the takeaway’s jasmine rice that seemed to linger on all of my clothes from all the way over here.

It’s really quite something to revisit these spaces of old, albeit virtually. It’s almost impossible not to recall your emotional state of mind when you lived there. Muscle memory simply kicks in, and soon you remember every walk of shame, every post-club taxi ride, every time you ran down the street late for work, every godawful flatmate. As Dickens himself sort of said, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times. I still wouldn’t swap the worst of times for a second.

When you’re 20, have no job and have even less of a clue, London can be an unforgiving place. To be fair, I was as wet behind the ears as they come at that age. Working in the bar, I told a punter that I had just moved over from Ireland. “Ah, fresh off the boat,” he said, making amiable conversation. “But I came on a plane,” I replied, dead serious. Not Getting It was a recurring motif for me in my early 20s.

Friends of mine in more recent years have moved across from Ireland to London, but have had lucrative jobs and a set of friends already waiting for them. They’re at a different life stage or career stage than I was, so they’ve been offered moving fees by employers or temporary digs from which to find their sea legs. Their experience as the Irish in London couldn’t be any more removed from mine. Technology has closed the gap between Ireland and London, but back in the pre-internet era, London felt so far away, requiring an epic schlep, both physically and psychologically.

In some ways, I was lucky. I had a degree, and was enrolled on a master’s degree. The plan, such as it was, was to find a live-in bar job, usually found in the free TNT magazine. In the mid-1990s, those jobs were plentiful; it was simply a question of picking your preferred neighbourhood. Within two days of arriving, I was gainfully employed and had a roof over my head in Soho.

Thanks to Google Street View, I took an amble across to the old pub I lived and worked in, and looked up at the window of my old digs on the third floor. I wonder if anyone lives there now. For a year, that room was my whole world; the site of homesickness, stony-broke anxiety and misery after long split shifts. But at the same time, that room was once stuffed to the corners with youthful ambition and excitement.

I had dreams and desires bouncing off the walls, the way you do when you move into your first post-home place. All I wanted was a job in which I didn’t have to clean skid marks off a toilet. All I wanted to do was to meet some friends, friends I hadn’t yet made, at an All Bar One, which felt as accessible to me as the Ritz. It all felt like a lot to ask for at the time.

In time, London softened up and became a less hostile city. I made friends, moved into media, felt like less of an outsider, could afford the occasional pub Sunday roast.

There comes a moment in many an Irish person’s London journey where they have to decide if this is their city or not. My London friends were hopped up on deadlines and busy shimmying up the corporate drainpipe. My Dublin friends were spending the summer making records and bringing cans and crisps to the Phoenix Park. Many friends stayed on the drainpipe and the payoff has been immense, but it wasn’t for me. Not just the Tayto’s fault, but it was time to go home.

Do I miss London? I visit for weekends and often only encounter the highlights reel — Hackney, the South Bank, Columbia Road market. They are great to experience when you’re at a remove from London; less so when you live there, preoccupied with its hamster-wheel pace. For now, I’m exactly where I’m meant to be, a feeling that has a price over rubies.

‘When you’re 20, have no job and have even less of a clue, London can be an unforgiving place’