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“The apartment I’m in right now isn’t the one I booked.” Within minutes, a reply: “Hi James, Hope all is well. “I’m a little confused,” I write to my host, who goes by the name Robert & Team. I close the door, look around the apartment again and open the Airbnb app on my phone. “No I don’t think so,” she replies, half-laughing. “So nobody lives here?” I say as she steps out of the open door. “No, you don’t need to lock it.” I raise an eyebrow, and she explains that one of the cleaning staff will come and collect the key straight after I leave.
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“Just leave the key on the table and close the door,” she replies. “And for checking out.?” I ask the cleaner who has let me in, gesturing at the open door of my sparsely decorated apartment. It’s like a hotel – except there’s no front desk, and the allegedly clean duvet on my bed has a human-sized, yellow sweat stain running down its centre. There are cleaners in the hallways, cleaners lobbing bin bags of rubbish out of the front door, cleaners grabbing armfuls of bed linen in the elevator. There are hints everywhere that something is up: the apartment block, a barely finished newbuild sandwiched between Battersea Park station and a Catholic church, is teeming with cleaning staff. All the rooms are the wrong sizes, all the furniture in the wrong places. Everything is slightly, confusingly, off.
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It’s November 2019 and I’m standing in an Airbnb in Battersea, south London.