My job only exists in London

[ILikeyourHairyHands]

I see this all the time on threads. Unless you're the Prime Minister, Queen, keeper of the ravens at the tower, a genuine pearly queen or jellied eel and pie and mash slinger, I reckon that's utter bollox.

There may be more opportunities within your chosen career in London but outside very specific roles, your job does not only exist in London.

A London cabbie can only be a London cabbie on London. It would be ridiculous to say the same job doesn't exist anywhere else.

@shearwater my point was that the excuse of the job only existing in London was a paper thin lie.

Whether or not it might have been right is a separate question - As it happens, his wife was (is) desperate to leave London. It would have been the right thing for them to do - I didn't pad out with all the detail before but the kids would have massively benefited from the move (they were in a terrible school at the time) and they have friends and family all over the UK and Edinburgh wouldn't have been any worse.

But all that is beside the point. I was giving an example of someone who claimed for years that it would be impossible to move from London as per the subject of this thread, and was proven to be just using it as an excuse to avoid having to say "I don't want to put the interests of my family first" when it came down to it.

Both my job and DH's job only exist in London. Huge, expensive Institutions and networks that both jobs relate to would have to move out of London if jobs outside of London in our fields were to be created. And they're both jobs that we have to be physically present for.

I work for the Government in one of those jobs that "can only be done in London" according to lots of people (involves ministers and Parliament). I don't live in London, I very rarely go to London. It's true there aren't many locations around the UK where you can do this kind of job but London definitely isn't the only one.

We even have parliamentary clerks and Speaker of the House equivalents outside London...

Professional musician would not get regular theatre/concert work anywhere in the UK other than London. You’re wrong.

Op your point is stupid! There are TONS of specialized jobs can are solely based in one or two places!!! My dh’s Job for example CANNOT be done from home or In any office in ANY city in the whole world, nor can it be done remotely...🤔figure that one out!!

I guess it's hard for someone not particularly career focussed (e.g. me!) to understand how someone would choose to live somewhere they otherwise hate (although lots of you also love London, but I think that's what the OP is getting at) for a job.
I love where I live, I also like my job and am progressing up the ladder that is available here. I wouldn't live somewhere I didn't like for my dream job. It's very important to me to live somewhere I love.
For me, with my career aspirations, the beautiful North East coast has all the job opportunities I need.
I guess if someone is posting that they really want to leave London for xyz reason, but can't because they or their DH can't do the job they love elsewhere then that is their decision. Career/job over other aspects of life and that is their perfectly valid choice and their decision to make.

I think I'm in the same position as lots of people whereby my job doesn't only exist in London, but if I was to be job hunting and wanted a similar role or step up then I could look today and find 30 or so roles that I could feasibly apply for and have a reasonable chance of getting.

However, if I was to look for other UK cities then there may be 1 role every 6 months, a smaller town there'd be no chance. Therefore, it would make no sense whatsoever for me to relocate, unless it was to a major city overseas.

John Bercow is friends with my bf, I’d love to know what these “equivalents” are!

The Presiding Officers in Cardiff and in Edinburgh, and Belfast when Stormont's sitting. Tell your bf to ask John Bercow - he visited his counterparts out here in Not London when he became Speaker.

It can be the case that yes the jobs exist outside London but if you move for one and it ends then you might be in a more precarious position - terms of getting the next one.

So staying in London is lower risk.

My old job was indeed only in London (it involved working with celebrities). My DH’s job exists in many places but London is the main hub for what he does, and therefore the only place that pays a premium salary to do it and we can’t afford for him to take a drop in salary to do it elsewhere.

Yeah that’s not really comparable is it?

Yes, yes it is. It's directly comparable. Seriously, get your bf to ask Bercow how it works if you don't believe me. You know there are Parliaments outside London, yes?

“We don’t actually have to justify choosing to live in London, you know.”

I don’t think the op is about people choosing to live in London though... it’s about people who say they have to.

A London cabbie can only be a London cabbie on London. It would be ridiculous to say the same job doesn't exist anywhere else.

I'm not sure this is the best example, Stealth. London cabbies notoriously hold themselves apart from taxi drivers/mini cab drivers/Uber drivers, because Black Cab driver has specific qualifications and licensing, and of course you cannot BE a London cabbie outside of London. Because, obviously.

You can be a taxi driver anywhere though.

Same for lawyers - you can be a lawyer anywhere, but you can in a lot of cases only be a specific type of lawyer in a niche specialism in a handful of firms, probably in London.

Or a West End performer - there are theatres outside London but for long-run theatre or musical shows, you need to be in London or accept you will be touring permanently.

The title of the thread is "my job only exists in London" not "my career is unavailable outside London" or "my transferable skills are non-existent". Job is the singular, specific thing. It is a specific job, within a wider career.

I WFH outside London, but lived there for many many years in a career that 100% required me to live in London. Because if I hadn't lived in London I could not have got a job in my career specialism. Now I have experience I can use it, but I couldn't have got the experience without being there. Now I have moved outside London I have far fewer opportunities to do my specific job. Not none, but really vanishingly fewer.

I think people who take umbrage at this phrase somehow think London people are being myopic, and dismissing opportunities in the rest of the country. It's never that, though, it almost always is that it is genuinely harder to pursue a career you may be very committed to outside of London in a lot of industries. I wish my industry had a more regional spread.

It’s a bit like saying Boris Johnson doesn’t need to live in London because he could just go and become the head of the Welsh Assembly.

That's not anything like what I'm saying, no. What I'm saying is that there are equivalent jobs to Speaker of the House in other Parliaments, because there are equivalent jobs to Speaker in the other Parliaments.

You can say "oh no but that's totally different because there's a different political party in power!", but this suggests you have somewhat missed the point of what the job of Speaker is, or what the word 'equivalent' means. It's like saying that the equivalent of First Minister of Scotland is First Minister of Wales, even though you couldn't just swap them over.

“If someone posted that they had to live by the sea or in a really remote area of countryside for their job they wouldn’t be told “you’re a liar you could easily move to Birmingham they have parks and bodies of water there too!””

It’s not the same though...

The equivalent would be someone insisting that they can only work if they live in a particular town on the coast, not near the sea in general.

I’m assuming the op is on about the threads that come up every so often where someone is moaning about living in London but at the same time insisting they’d either be unemployed or couldn’t afford to live elsewhere because their job is so untransferrable.

Maybe it is possible for people to find A job somewhere else in the country but maybe there aren’t as many vacancies and it isn’t as well paid as London or people may have to work to broaden their knowledge slightly. All this is cost in time/money/effort.

I think that’s totally reasonable Namenic but it’s not the same as the job only existing in London. The number of jobs that only exist in London and nowhere else in the U.K. is pretty small. But the number of jobs with better/broader career prospects in London is a lot bigger.

Well, yes, the skills might be transferable, DH could take a step back careerwise and go elsewhere in the country, but the drop in salary wouldn't be made up by the drop in living costs, and you'd still have the problem of not being able to progress, and possibly being stuck doing more boring work...

On the other hand, we don't feel the need to live in London, we move out, DH's commute is now about an extra 10-15minutes a day compared to when we lived in London, there is a lot of fast public transport to move people into central London from all round the Homes Counties, it does mean being out of London but working in it is perfectly possible for most jobs (obviously some roles like Doctors and Nurses who work shifts that means the trains aren't as reliable and it's not an option in the same way).

Every single national UK newspaper office is in London. So yeah, does actually.