Has London succeeded at the expense of the rest of the UK?

Interesting, I'm on the exact same version of Chrome on Yosemite and it's rendering fine. I wonder what the difference is? (unless they've just fixed it in the last 20 mins!)

pbhjpbhj• 11 years ago

Ad-blocking? Noscript?

biokoda• 11 years ago

firefox reader view actually makes this article readable. First time I've needed it.

mavdi2• 11 years ago

It's funny how the article considers overpriced housing, zero social mobility and a conversion of once a great city into a luxury den for super rich a success.

The very people London needs, nurses, doctors, programmers, firefighters, artists, carers etc are leaving the capital. And not to suburbs, a lot of them to other European cities.

PythonicAlpha5• 11 years ago

Maybe, after a while, they will find out, that they can not eat and will not be healed by their money?

pjc5012• 11 years ago

The UK has effectively decided to run the country as a property export operation: selling real estate to the global rich. This is setting up a future where we pay a significant fraction of our trade balance in rent to overseas landlords. Is this really politically sustainable? It'll require a lot of funding of newspaper propaganda to keep it that way.

treve• 11 years ago

The UK has effectively decided to run the country as a property export operation.

That's an insane hyperbole.

notNow• 11 years ago

What makes yield collected from real estate properties any different from yield collected from bank deposits or dividends from shares on the stock market?

Also, I don't think that yield from real estate is classified under the "trade" item in the Balance of Payments

api2• 11 years ago

Canada is doing the same with Vancouver.

buffoon6• 11 years ago

I'm not super-rich and I'm doing fine in London. So is everyone I know and that includes nurses, programmers, artists and carers perhaps ironically. None of them are moving away.

What is a big problem is hyperbole, media and vocal whiners.

Social mobility is bollocks as well. It's perfectly possible to do it and it is easier than it has ever been due to the sheer piles of education available for little to nothing and the thousands of opportunities. Motivation and time are the only constraints.

Edit: everyone I know has moved up the social ladder, if there is one. We all appear to be in the same shit at the end of the day.

DanBC3• 11 years ago

Carer is a term defined in law as someone who provides care without being paid for it.

Did you mean carer, or did you mean care worker?

cjrp2• 11 years ago

Just because you and everyone in your social group is doing fine, doesn't mean there isn't a problem. See, for example, the massive increase in food bank reliance.

babatong• 11 years ago

Thank you! I can only second what you say.

As a student living off savings from a previous minimum wage job, it is quite possible to live a comfortable life in London. Motivation and time are most certainly part of the few constraints.

I'd like to add financial wit to that. Most people who struggle also struggle to control their finances in any way and spend irresponsively.

logingone• 11 years ago

Of the millions of people in London, how many of them do you know? Presumably a statistically significant proportion or you wouldn't mention it for risk of appearing blinkered and living in a bubble.

dageshi• 11 years ago

They'll just be replaced by immigrants from the new entrant EU countries won't they? Problem solved.

nkoren• 11 years ago

I'm an American entrepreneur who has started two companies in London. My most recent startup was recently accepted into an accelerator in Berlin. Like-for-like, the real estate in Berlin is cheaper by a factor of roughly 6. The overall quality-of-life multiplier is roughly similar. It is definitely making me reconsider my long-term commitment to the UK.

mavdi2• 11 years ago

Same here. My clients are in the US and I work from home. So it's only logical I rent my flat for a ridiculous price and live elsewhere.

ThomPete2• 11 years ago

Berlin has the culture and the cheaper prices and def some interesting companies but it still doesn't have the capital and proper access to the things that make London (and SV and New York) great cities for startups.

So I think it really depends on what kind of startup your are trying to build. Europe doesn't have much going for it with London ,Berlin and Stockholm as the exceptions.

But just like you can go to LA and pay a third in rent of what they pay in SF doesn't mean that it's advisable.

Again depending on what kind of business you are running.

branchless20• 11 years ago

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/11/global-hou...

And that's UK prices not London! Please come to the UK and instead of re-investing your profits give them to a rentier.

vacri• 11 years ago

What do these 8.5 million super-rich londoners do, if doctors can't afford to rub shoulders with them!?

pidg• 11 years ago

Finance.

cjrp2• 11 years ago

Also there are doctors, and then there are _doctors_ - e.g. junior doctor working in A&E vs. partner at a Harley Street clinic.

irremediable• 11 years ago

Doctors aren't tremendously well-paid in the UK. Look at the recent attempted reforms to junior doctor pay.

ZenoArrow5• 11 years ago

Doctors would join the thousands of other people who commute to work in London.

gutnor2• 11 years ago

There is a lot of social estates in London. There are area like East Dulwich where you are either living in the estate and pay fuck all (while you qualify), or you can afford 1 million+ to buy a place.

So that's a weird mix where the rich lives with the poor, but the middle class is excluded. ( well, from time to time, one of the estate flat goes on sale for between 300 and 400K which is somewhat accessible to middle class, but then less than 20% of the housing on an estate are privately owned via right to buy scheme, and most of the time the original owner are still living in as they can't really buy better anywhere else )

edit: note that for nurse, there are help scheme available via key worker shared ownership ( you buy a share and rest the rest ). So you have more chance to find a nurse living in the center than a doctor.

Also note that the problem comes from the price explosion of private housing over the last decade. 10 years ago, where I was looking, there were estate, shared ownership (50% of 200K) and private properties starting 200K and up. Now, you have estate, share ownership (25%!! of 600K) and private for 600K and up. The salaries are about the same and the level of help to access government assistance hasn't changed much either. So you can progress from poor to lower middle class, but then there is huge gap to be able to afford your place.

simonbyrne• 11 years ago

If you include commuters, London's population is much larger than 12.5%: approximately 14 million people live in the "commuter belt" [1], which would put it at 21% (and a lot more people commute from even further, myself included).

Still, London has nothing on Seoul, whose metro area encompasses 49% of South Korea's population.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_commuter_belt

billybofh• 11 years ago

Brings back to mind the row about Eddie George's comments : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/197995.stm

PythonicAlpha5• 11 years ago

A success that is based on basically gambling and helping super-rich people to avoid taxes, is moral bankruptcy.

Even without believing in a universal power, one can only hope, that such an endeavor (of the British government since Thatcher) will ultimately collapse.

branchless20• 11 years ago

Can't believe this is down-voted. Clearly by people who are not in London having the life squeezed out of them as they toil for usurers who are in complete control of the money supply.

PythonicAlpha5• 11 years ago

To those that downvote my post without reading it: You can downvote this post, but not the truth -- because one day it will stand behind your own neck!

The problem, IMHO is, that many educated people still don't see what is happening in real life. They dream the capitalistic dream of never ending wealth -- but capitalism never was crafted to make all people happy and it was even not crafted to make the diligent people happy, but it was crafted to make a few random people happy by taking from the rest.

Capitalism might be the best system crafted by humankind, but it is still a system, that is not sustainable and in today's form it brings us sooner or later back to the dark ages of industrialization.

You can see it first in the developing countries, where communities exist, where big corporations come, take the water sources away from the people and sell the water with big profits to the better of people in the big cities.

Days will come and have already come, that also in the western countries, many people (will) see, how capitalism is destroying those which created the wealth to give even more to those which own the wealth.

spacecowboy_lon4• 11 years ago

Really I thought you where describing the main Chinese stock exchange there.

Compared to other exchanges the LSE is well regulated - even the USA's exchanges get away with stuff (doddgy share classes with different voating ) that woudl get you kicked out of the indexes here.

s_dev• 11 years ago

London's financial markets are notoriously unregulated since 1986. They mention the Big Bang frequently throughout the article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_(financial_markets)

stevetrewick• 11 years ago

tl;dr: We may never know as the article doesn't address the question, choosing instead to list the author's favourite reasons why London is so awesome. I beg to differ, personally. Poor air quality, overcrowding and hopeless mobile infrastructure put it low on my list of desirable places. If your idea of 'culture' is state subsidised opera and looting then maybe London is for you, but there are superior and more diverse cultural offers around the UK. YMMV.

Anyhoo, a more cogent statement of the question the article poses might be 'London has recently greatly benefited from globalisation in ways the rest of the U.K. has yet to duplicate, why ?

parsnipsumthing2• 11 years ago

Agree that the article doesn't actually answer the question. I love London but the article is poorly reasoned.

Additionally a lot of it is focused on the post-2008 recession period which is ludicrous. London's dominance is a century old, it has nothing to do with "London bankers".

spacecowboy_lon4• 11 years ago

TLDR its "I dont want to go to Salford"

The BBC to curry favor and to save money and screw people on pensions moved a load of its shows to salford in Manchester.

You do understand thats why Dr Who and other shows are made in wales.

rjsw2• 11 years ago

There are plenty of nice places to live in Manchester.

pjc5012• 11 years ago

London gets a large chunk of public transport spending and investment which the rest of the country does not: http://www.ippr.org/news-and-media/press-releases/transport-...

London extracts money from globalization through the financial services industry, which has to be in one place because it's dependent on all going to the same pubs. (The back office work is a bit more distributed across the country, but none of the high-value jobs).

branchless20• 11 years ago

Very weak. Briefly touched on something of substance here:

Financial regulation in New York was far stricter than in London, where the relatively light-touch oversight regime proved attractive to investors.

The UK is playing regulatory arbitrage. They let banks come and do whatever they want because the UK is going down and they are desperate (and corrupt).

London is controlling the rest of the UK because the banks are there and it is the banks, not our government, who decide how much money is issued. They are drug pushers and The City is a cancer.

ig1• 11 years ago

I don't think you understand how finance work, the UK has one of the best financial regulatory regimes in the world, market participants want to be in London not because it's unregulated but because it's well regulated.

If you have too much regulation you stiffle innovation and development, but too little means that investors don't trust institutions with their money. So it's a trade-off between the two factors.

ZenoArrow5• 11 years ago

"I don't think you understand how finance work, the UK has one of the best financial regulatory regimes in the world"

If it's that well regulated, why did the subprime mortgage crisis hit us so hard (compared to the countries that escaped relatively unscathed)?

branchless20• 11 years ago

I've worked in it for a long time and read many books plus lived in London for 12 years.

The UK was known to be "light touch" that's why all the banks locate there. No criminal prosecutions were brought from 2008. Lots of US banks put their bad deals through London.

You have no clue what you are talking about.

SixSigma• 11 years ago

I think it could be your knowledge that falls short.

The City of London is not governed by Westminster.

See http://treasureislands.org/

venomsnake2• 11 years ago

LIBOR rigging was regulation at its prime.

icebraining• 11 years ago

For an entertaining view of the issue, there's Yes, Prime Minister - A Conflict of Interests. An excerpt:

  - Yes, well, they lent a bit of money to the wrong chaps. Could happen
    to anyone.
  - You haven't heard rumours?
  - There are always rumours.
  - Of bribery? Embezzlement? Misappropriation? Insider dealing?
  - Dear lady, those are strong words.
  - So they're not true?
  - Well, er, there are different... er... different ways of looking at things.
  - What's a different way of looking at embezzlement?
  - If a chap embezzles, you have to do something.
  - Have a serious word with him?
  - Absolutely. Usually it's just a chap who's advanced himself a short-term,
    unauthorised, unsecured temporary loan from the company's account and
    invested it unluckily.

branchless20• 11 years ago

Sadly that's the UK in a nut-shell. Finance crime is just "bad luck" down the Mayfair clubs.

sinzone• 11 years ago

Same problems in SF. City booming, high cost of living, not enough houses for everyone.

simonh2• 11 years ago

I wonder under what circumstances do those three things don't go together?

SamReidHughes• 11 years ago

When there's spare land.

ZanyProgrammer• 11 years ago

In San Francisco it's a ridiculously low density of building.

branchless20• 11 years ago

In a world of land value tax.

cylinder• 11 years ago

Except London is surrounded by very nice commuter suburbs with very good, comfortable rail where you can get large houses near a train station.

In cities with significant commuter infrastructure, like NY and London you can always find cheap places to live. Plenty of affordable rents in Staten island and NJ. That's why I ignore all the media whining about prices in NY, they just mean buying a place in Manhattan or northern Brooklyn.

guard-of-terra• 11 years ago

In Latin American countries, 1/3 of respective country's population live in or near the capital. The countries in question are already pretty sparse by european standards - doesn't prevent population from skipping home even more and coming to capital, both best and worst.

Seems like UK implemented the same principle.

throwaway049• 11 years ago

"32,000 businesses were created in one modish postcode, EC1V"

I suspect a big part of this is businesses being registered to accountants' addresses, and people registering as self-employed many of whom work for a single 'customer'.

Hansi• 11 years ago

Yes correct, I actully lived in EC1V, there are not a lot of businesses there. But there a whole lot of businesses all over the UK registered with a 'registered office address' with https://www.yourvirtualofficelondon.co.uk/ . Including me when I was running my own company (contracting business, rental agreement where I lived forbade using address as registered office address).

IkmoIkmo4• 11 years ago

In many ways London isn't just a centre for the UK, it's also a centre for Europe. i.e. if we assume a natural tendency for most young people who are able to want to move to a more metropolitan area, then London is pretty much in the list of destinations for all European countries in a way that virtually no other city is to that extent, and it has to do with language.

For example I'm in the Netherlands in my early twenties. I know pretty much 3-4 people whose German or French is good enough to consider studying or working in say Paris or Berlin. Compared to that I can easily name 100 of my peers whose English is good enough to study or work in the UK. So if they list their destination choices, it's basically Amsterdam & London miles ahead of anything else, and then come some Dutch cities like Utrecht or Rotterdam or Haarlem. Paris and Berlin are sort of on the list, but with the caveat of either 1) having to take a job that's way below what you could have had in the Netherlands or UK, a job where language isn't important, e.g. waiting tables when you have a Master's in marketing, because landing a marketing job on your level in German or Spanish or Italian or French is just not doable without knowing the language very well. 2) investing a few years into mastering the language, a significant (opportunity) cost.

Of course there are exceptions, like international English-speaking companies/jobs in France, but you'll find most jobs in Germany require German, in France requires French, in Spain requires Spanish, same for university education (although English programmes are rapidly on the rise, particularly at the Master's level and in certain fields like business schools), and obviously not everyone in Europe speaks fluent English, but if you look at the ratios, language should play a major factor.

Either way, at the end of the day young people in say Spain either choose Madrid or Barcelona or a few other cities like Sevilla/Valencia, or London. In the Netherlands they choose Amsterdam, a few smaller cities, and London. In France they choose Paris, maybe Marseille or Lyon, and London. etc etc.

In effect, London is the top destination city for the EU, a union of 500 million people who require no visa or permission or anything like that to move and work anywhere else in the EU including London, and 40% of them speak English as a second language. Every other city is either not the top dog (e.g. Liverpool), or excludes hundreds of other millions of Europeans straight away on the basis of language (e.g. any city in the Netherlands (99% of EU doesn't know Dutch as 2nd language), Germany (86% of EU doesn't speak German as 2nd language), Spain (93%), France (86%), Italy (97%) etc). Then add to that a similar language-driven attraction from the US, Asia, middle east, who must all be rich as they'd need a visa, and you get this ridiculous demand for London fuelling network effects and feedback loops. The demand has led to some pretty perverse mass-gentrification as of late and to a large extent it's from natural (language, in particular) causes I think rather than very specific British policies which obviously also play a role but not a dominating one I think (outside of course the concept of the EU which plays a huge role in not discriminating between any member of the EU and prevents the UK from just having to deal with the problem of balancing London as a centre of the UK and forces it to deal with the problem of balancing London as a centre of the EU, but that's an EU policy not a UK or London policy).

thorin• 11 years ago

This is an excellent post, but in the experience of colleagues I've had in the EU doing software development, BA, management etc is that for most jobs with international companies in whichever city they are able to work in English. It does happen that a lot of the jobs are in London, but also Switzerland (banking), Brussels (EU admin), and quite a bit in Scandinavia also (generally not EU I know).

IkmoIkmo4• 11 years ago

I agree, there's a fair bit. It's tricky to find numbers, and it's definitely really in flux, offices that speak English today would sometimes have been unthinkable 10 years ago. Fun story, worked at foreign affairs as an intern some years ago and due to the nature of our work being international and so much of our communication with partners etc, our papers, presentations and research etc was English, it was proposed to start having meetings in English, too, so we wouldn't have to translate any English documentation we might be discussing. Again, foreign affairs, a job you can only get if you're a national of the country, that requires you to sign documents you won't disclose state secrets etc, obviously it's by its nature a pretty chauvinistic affair so I thought that was funny. Another interesting remark is that they used to require you to speak French, too, to work at foreign affairs, for decades and decades this was THE diplomatic language of the world and you couldn't get a job unless you spoke it fluently. (same thing for the UN for example, Ban Ki Moon had to take intense classes in French to get his job although somehow he got a pass as his French is beyond horrible), but at foreign affairs they also let go of this French requirement. It's still beneficial but it's no longer mandatory. How times have changed.

Finally a fun anecdote about the role of French in history and some thoughts about where language might go in the future, I remember when reading war and peace where the Russian aristocracy's command of French is much better than their Russian, and as Russia is invaded by France, they scramble for tutors to improve their Russian lest they're deemed 'too French' in a Russia at war with France. It reminds me of arab family members who went to French private schools in arab speaking countries, and their arabic is pretty bad because of it. It's kind of funny in that in history the elite were often relatively multilingual and internationally oriented, but the rest (the vast majority) was not, and instead spoke the local language (or even dialect) and was locally oriented. Each spoke the language of their network, one which was relatively large, the other which was local with most people never traveling 50km from where they were born, or communicate with people outside that radius. But with the advent of modern tech, we're seeing dirt cheap long-distance communication networks, relatively cheap transport etc etc, you know the story... and I wonder if that will create language homogeneity in the world on a scale we've never seen before, when the majority of the population starts speaking a more international standard language (like say French was for some centuries the standard international language of elites, only now it's not confined to the top 1%). With the above anecdotes I can hardly imagine we won't all be speaking English/Spanish/Chinese/Arabic/Hindi as our first language next century, and everything else as our second, just like the Russian elite spoke French first, Russian second, and some of my family French first, Arabic second, and I in my professional life (and increasingly personal) English first, Dutch second. It'd take some major conflict to flare up nationalist notions to preserve the hundreds of languages different people now have as their 'first' language, like it took the invasion of Russia for the Russian elite to denounce French culture and fashion and choose Russian first.

Anyway I definitely share your experiences back home in the Netherlands but then I did always pick international jobs. But more generally speaking, there's tons of jobs where I'd absolutely have to speak Dutch, virtually anything client-facing, most B2B comms is Dutch still and I've read a few times on Glassdoor of employees complaining that despite the company being internationally-oriented, Dutch is still used a fair bit and they feel left out of conversations (often non-work convos). That doesn't say much about what you can get away with, if you wanted you could probably speak to 95% of customers, partners and colleagues in English just fine, but it says something about what is expected and happens in practice, which is surprising as the Dutch do speak a ton of English and they even enjoy it (to the extent a big complaint from foreigners is that they can't practice Dutch because if you try a sentence, the Dutch person will switch to English. But that's 1 on 1, if you're the only foreigner in a bar or workplace with 6 Dutch friends/colleagues, Dutch is still very much the norm and that's why it's still a requirement for most jobs. In looking abroad for jobs in say Spain I still feel the jobs I can pick where English is good enough are pretty narrow and I really only have the option of a narrow selection of jobs, same for France, Germany slightly less so but there too. And the further out you go, Italy for example, it gets worse. In London I can land any job - except translation or teaching jobs where native proficiency is really crucial - the difference is pretty big.

sjclemmy3• 11 years ago

I live in Northern England, and this disparity has long been a source of irritation to me. In the 19th century there was a reasonable balance between north and south, mainly due to the wool and cotton industries in the North.

At some point in the last century that parity ended and moving to London to pursue ones interest was the only way to further ones career. This created a virtuous circle as far as London is concerned and a brain drain for the rest of the country. The BBC's Evan Davies touches on some of these points in his TV programme 'Mind the Gap'.

If you want to work at a decent tech company and work with like minded folk in an inspiring environment, London is really the only answer.

The friends and family I have in London who have a similar education / skills / upbringing to me generally earn more and work for better companies but their quality of life is nowhere near as good as mine with respect to general living. The main trade off is the paucity of like minded friends who live near me.

The price of property in this country is absurd and I find it very difficult to see how the situation has not been gamed by the land owning moneyed / political elite over the last 20 years or so. From personal experience there was a 4 fold increase in property prices between 1997 and 2005. There was not a corresponding increase in wages. Who does this benefit?

I'll end with a joke: http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/northerner-terror...

porker• 11 years ago

Exactly my experience (apart from living up north, which I'm considering).

So far I've gotten round it by living an hour and a bit out of London, and going in every so often to meet likeminded people and enjoy the capital, knowing that the cost of travelling there / eating out / staying is _far_ less than I'd pay if I lived there.

pjc5012• 11 years ago

Moved from Cambridge (which is starting to have London house prices) to Edinburgh and it's worked out very well: affordable, less crowded, more friendly, enough of a tech cluster, lots of culture.

In re wages, I know at least one person in London whose house earns more in tax-free annual value appreciation than their salary.

sjclemmy3• 11 years ago

Edinburgh is a lovely city. Ticks a lot of boxes as you mention.

jeeva• 11 years ago

As someone in Cambridge bemoaning the housing market, and having loved Edinburgh when visiting a few times, this is... interesting.

Thanks!

Oh, wait: <redacted> I used to work with you.

simonh2• 11 years ago

We're doing it to ourselves. We have an effectively fixed stock of housing, but everyone wants to live in a better house. So we're continuously bidding against each other, driving up the cost of houses trying to move up the ladder. Government subsidies intended to make cheaper houses more affordable, to help people get on to the property ladder, just mean that new entrants into the housing market can afford to bid even more against each other for those houses than they would otherwise. That just drives the cost of low-end housing up even more.

dazc• 11 years ago

Plus, volume house builders have in interest in maintaining the status quo.

I think what's needed is for builders to switch from a 'build to sell' to a 'build to rent' business model but this needs long term finance to more readily available and, of course, a willingness to embrace new ideas.

I'm not optimistic though.

sjclemmy3• 11 years ago

It's the fixed stock of housing thing that bugs me. There is no shortage of space in this country. There are ineffective planning laws and most of the land is owned by offshore trust funds controlled by the wealthy few. /rant.

api2• 11 years ago

The same thing is happening in the USA. It definitely feels like you must be in one of around 5-10 cities or you don't exist. If you don't go to one of them for at least part of your career, you go nowhere and command half or less the pay. The rest of America is "flyover country" where people supposedly live but nothing happens.

This effect has always existed to some extent, but the "alpha cities" phenomenon is definitely something I've watched intensify as I've grown up. I've asked older people about this and they've agreed: in the past 15-ish years the prestige value of where you live has exploded in relevance.

Here are some examples from the tech field:

- The first true "PC" by most accounts, the Altair, came from Albuquerque, New Mexico.

- The Compucolor II was the first "color" PC by many accounts and came from Atlanta, Georgia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compucolor_II

- The IBM PC was designed in Boca Raton, Florida.

- The BBS phenomenon was largely decentralized, with major BBS efforts all of the world.

- The Commodore 64, the biggest selling PC in the early-mid 80s, was from West Chester, Pennsylvania.

Can you imagine that today?

Now almost everything happens in SF, a notable but much smaller number of things happen in NYC, Boston, and LA/OC, and nothing happens anywhere else (or so it seems).

I'm not sure exactly why this is. It could be a side-effect of increasing wealth disparity: the alpha cities are where the rich live, and the rich are increasingly richer than everyone else. Another factor could be the Internet. The net was supposed to decentralized, but as we've seen in other areas this has not always been the case. The net has been a powerful centralizing force.

ilurk2• 11 years ago

I'm an european citizen who just moved to London and I can attest that is insane trying to find a room in London. A room! I'm not even talking about a house.

It's so complicated that there are flatmatting speed dating events. I've been to 5 or 6 now and the ratio is like 15:1.

There are even ads on the tube for websites with that purpose.

I've spent more than 2 weeks as a full time job! trying to find a place is at walking distance (0-15m) from a tube station. Any! tube station. And there are a lot of them.

Finally settled with long term Airbnb room. Which was what I should have done in the first place!

750£ for a room, which is on par with what is being offered in non-Airbnb sites.

To put it in perspective the average salary in London is £35k, which gives ~ £2,240 liquid per month. A studio costs you between 1k and 1.5k. Add bills, council tax, transportation (which is quite expensive), and you don't end up with much at the end of the month.

If you're emigrating to London and don't have a job and no friend to help you – despite having money – go with Airbnb.

If you insist on ignoring that advice, then please avoid agents like the plague! They'll ditch appointments making you waste 2h, ask for 12 months upfront, and leech their 250£ commission from you for basically doing nothing.

In the recent years there has been more people moving into London and fewer houses being built. London has a housing problem and the Mayor should fix it.

Right now we have a generation of young people in their 20s to early 30s living in houses of 3 to 6 people. This is just nonsensical to me.

If you are unable to have your own life in order then how are you supposed to go further and do things like constitute a family. Hence the birth rate decline and the need for a crazy influx of immigrants. In the name of what? Banks and real estate?

https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/Housing%20in%2...

harryc2011• 11 years ago

I assume that you mean any tube station within Zone 1 because otherwise this is just not true. For 1.5k you can rent a 2 bed flat in Zones 2-3 and get much more than this further away if you're willing to flatshare. I have a friend who shares a 4 bed in Morden and pays something like 650pcm all in.

acrooks• 11 years ago

That seems a bit high to me. I pay £650/month all-in for a room in a three-bed just around the corner from Stockwell station.

Granted, my room is small, and the only real common area is the kitchen. But the only thing I need in London is a bed and a shower, I'm spending most of my time not-at-the-flat. So it feels like the inflection point between location and price.

ilurk2• 11 years ago

1) Forgot to add the zone but it's a room in zones 2 or 3.

2) Mind that I was searching for a room, so I haven't looked much into studios, but I haven't been able to find a studio for less than 1000£ for a short let.

Note that there are "studios" which are in fact shared with other people in the same house, so not really a studio.

IkmoIkmo4• 11 years ago

35k average salary might not tell the whole story. e.g. the median figure for inner London is about 34k, bit below the average, but for outer London it's 24k. Then consider that inner London is about 3 of 8.5 million people, and 12 of 32 boroughs, so I wouldn't be surprised if the median salary for all of London was below 30k.

Of course salary doesn't truly matter much in the city of finance, a huge chunk of the city's income is not linked to wages or derived from wage labor.

Anyone considering moving to London has to appreciate that the city is partially tuned for a group of people for whom a base salary isn't the main source of income, and if that's not you then it's a bit like living in a giant auction house full of millionaires and they're auctioning off everything you need, from sandwiches, a home to live in to a public transport card, and the rich guys keep bidding 5x the national average on any item and more rich people enter the auction house every day, buying anything becomes a struggle.

vegabook• 11 years ago

What a beautifully presented article. So beautiful, in fact, that I didn't feel like reading the text.... I just wanted to move on to the next picture.

venomsnake2• 11 years ago

Well ... London real estate is a textbook case or resource curse. You cannot expect anything different.

Has London succeeded at the expense of the rest of the UK?

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