I live here?

[ButternutSoup]

My husband and I are South African and are immigrating to the UK (with an ancestry visa as my grandmother is British). While we were researching nice places to live, we stumbled upon this funny website called ilivehere.co.uk, where people write scathing reviews of their towns/cities. It must be satire, as nearly every town is made out to be some kind of crime-infested hellhole, which can't be true.

Some of the reviews do seem to contain elements of truth, I'm sure, but which ones? I've always had a romantic notion of living in the Scottish Highlands, but the "I Live Here" review makes it seem like the setting of The Hills Have Eyes.

Can anyone here recommend nice towns/suburbs? Our three criteria are: low crime rate, clean air, and house prices that are not clown-shoes expensive. We don't care that much about weather (my irritatingly pale skin has had enough sunshine for a lifetime and every time I go to the dermatologist his warnings become more severe), so maybe somewhere up north would be nice?

Between the gushing estate agent write-ups and the pessimistic "I Live Here" reviews, I don't know what to believe.

Excuse me? This is a very ignorant and upsetting comment. We are hard-working taxpayers who pay thousands a months for excellent private healthcare in SA and will be paying a huge surcharge for NHS. On our ancestry visa we must work continuously for five years before applying for indefinite leave to remain, and after another year will be able to apply for citizenship. All of this will cost us a huge amount of money but we are willing to pay because we are traumatised from living in South Africa and being victims of many crimes.

During our first 6 years we will not be able to access any public benefits. And we would not want to anyway. We are both driven, ambitious professionals.

You sound like a horrible person. I hope you deal with your character issues and become a happier person in the future.

South Wales. Direct train into London Paddington from Swansea via Cardiff. Swansea is cheaper than Cardiff, but Swansea has the beaches of the Gower. Both have easy access to the Brecon Beacons.

Ideally two bedrooms.

Best rent at first, until you know what you can actually afford. This also means you need to worry less about where you choose - find jobs, pick somewhere handy, and by the time you know how much you have to spend, you will probably know where you want to buy.

I've researched average annual salaries for our professions, and it seems we will earn around 60k (pounds) per year in total (adding both our salaries together), before anything is deducted like tax etc. So 60K gross. I see that rentals in London are super expensive and realistically it looks like we'd be paying around 1k per month when we first arrive, which will be doable for us.

Sounds lovely! Do you know how the air quality is there? Or where in South Wales would have the best air quality?

About 60K per year?

Somewhere in the Scottish countryside not far from a city could be lovely, and quite affordable. The Highlands isn't an impossible dream - depending on where you live, you can get into Glasgow quite easily, where there is loads of culture, things to do, and hospital provision.

1k pcm is not going to be enough for a London rental, even a 1-bed flat. London housing is very, very expensive!

Not Port Talbot - the steel works often make the air a bit grim. I don't have data but from getting a general feel I'd say either on the coast to the west or inland a few miles in the valleys (but the valleys are not so well connected for transport).

The Lake District, dirt cheap on NW Coast, stunning scenery, lovely community and people, only a few hours drive from Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds, Edinburgh.

Also agree that £1k per month won't be enough in London. You might get a room in an ok house share for that.

ILiveHere eis a satirical website where people focus on the detritus of their locality;

As other PPs have said it depends on where you work. There are some bits of our larger cities it is best to avoid at night particularly London, Manchester and Birmingham but none are anywhere near as dangerous as the cities in South Africa or even the US.

Nicest places to live...

Small Cathedral Cities - Winchester, Canterbury, Ely, Hereford, Worcester

Towns with Posh Private Schools - Shrewsbury, Marlborough, Malvern, Canterbury, Winchester

Spa Towns - Bath, Cheltenham, Malvern, Leamington, Harrogate, Buxton

Other than that villages and small rural towns are good.

OK, so your drive is to move away from where you are rather than to move to a specific place - that widens your options.

As other have said, crime rate really won't be a factor. Yes there are small areas that are less desirable (nothing like what you're coming from) but that's a case of ruling out clusters of streets, maybe individual towns, not whole regions.

Jobs and budget are therefore the determining factors.

Highlands are no good if you need to be working. Even for remote work you'll probably need to travel to the office from time to time. And also no good on the 'close to a hospital and culture' front.

But in or near a Scottish city could be an option. There's some lovely country between Glasgow and Edinburgh, commutable to either city. Otherwise the North of England could be a good option. Have a look at the areas around Leeds and Manchester as a starting point.

On the budget your talking about, I'd steer clear of London and the South East. Bristol or Cardiff could be options, but not ones I know that well. Have a rummage on Rightmove or Zoopla to get an idea of property prices in different areas.

Northern Ireland would also tick a lot of your boxes, but choosing an area has some local community factors that are hard for an outsider to spot. The sectarian issues are much less prominant than they used to be, and on the whole it's a very friendly and safe place, but there's still the odd complication (you don't want to end up right next to a 12th bonfire site, for example). You'll need to use Propertypal instead of Zoopla/Rightmove - and if a price looks too good to be true, there's a reason for it.

Chelmsford/ Colchester and surrounding villages might fit your bill to start with. 40 mins on the train to central London. I think the area is cheaper than the Kent and Sussex commuter towns.

Nicest places to live...

Small Cathedral Cities - Winchester, Canterbury, Ely, Hereford, Worcester

Towns with Posh Private Schools - Shrewsbury, Marlborough, Malvern, Canterbury, Winchester

Spa Towns - Bath, Cheltenham, Malvern, Leamington, Harrogate, Buxton

Nice, yes. Also expensive. I wouldn't be looking at any of those on a budget of £60k before tax.

And I wouldn't fixate as much on air quality. Unless you are right in the middle of a city or next door to a huge industrial site it's fine pretty much anywhere.

What about Stockport? Town / Suburb edge of Manchester.

my brother and his wife have recently moved up there from London. Good access to Manchester for jobs, low house prices, seems very safe, good schools, easy to walk to parks / shops etc.

OP, it’s true that nowhere in the UK is as dangerous as SA, nothing close. I know your beautiful country a bit and also know it’s hard for Brits who haven’t been there really to understand the level of violence that is sadly afflicting it. While 13 years of conservative government with austerity politics have led to horrendous falls in quality of life and rises in poverty in the UK, we’re nowhere near that situation.

£1K a month for rentals in London is too low. For somewhere self contained with 2 bedrooms you can approximately double that, I think (though I don’t live in London myself any more).

£60k for two adults is doable in London or sensible commuting distance from it, but would be tough and depending on how much capital you have to put into it, you might struggle to afford to buy. £60K in a different city could be a lot more doable (Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cardiff, even Bristol) and certainly property is far cheaper to rent or buy and all of those have nice towns and countryside nearby.

Long commutes, eg from South Wales to London as suggested above, are possible but bear in mind that the train service, while more reliable than SA’s, is still pretty awful for punctuality and cancellations, and is also horrendously expensive. Traditionally it used to be said that you make up for cheaper accommodation in such places with the commuting costs, though since Covid as more employers are allowing work from home more often things might have changed.

I live here is a satirical website: it’s very British to whinge about the town you grew up in, a particular vein of humour, so I wouldn’t take it too seriously as a source!

Good luck with your planning. I do think narrowing it down to a particular city or urban area and then moving to rent a flat for a while during which you can scope out possibilities is the best advice I can give.

Agree that unfortunately a pre-tax joint income of £60k will rule out much of the SE and pretty much all of London. Of course you may have a decent deposit from selling your house in SA to factor in, but in terms of buying in these areas it would be very tight on that budget.

Even where I live (Kent coast - fab air quality!) in an area traditionally thought of as cheap (even 'undesirable' to some), we are feeling the pinch. And that's on a joint gross income of over £80k, a small mortgage, one car.

I second Glasgow though - fantastic city, beautiful countryside around. Well worth considering.

You could try Stroud in Gloucestershire and surrounding areas
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/136772978#/?channel=RES_BUY
Painswick is a beautiful Cotswold village with very little crime. Nearby Stroud is a lively and active place with lots going on and it is on a fast mainline route to London. There are big hospitals in Gloucester and Cheltenham although you may need to go to Bristol for highly specialist care

If I didn't live where I currently live I would live in Penarth, just outside Cardiff. It's an affluent, slightly smug little town with all the facilities you need on a day-to-day basis, a station to take you into Cardiff (ten minutes or so on the train) and a Victorian park that leads down to the sea, a pier and coastal walking opportunities. Cardiff has a lot going on culturally — music, galleries, theatre, opera — and good restaurants. There are also good restaurants and cafes in Penarth. Low crime, easy access to the beautiful Brecon Beacons to the north, two hours to London on the train or bus, a convenient, quiet airport at Cardiff which can take you to a limited number of European destinations. Cardiff's got everything you need from a city, including regular rugby matches. if you're a Springboks fan. You can be on the M4 within about 15-20 minutes and head west to the glorious countryside of Pembrokeshire or east to Bristol, Bath, the Cotswolds. Plenty of opportunities for walking, cycling, swimming, sailing etc.

It really is a cracker of a smallish town, if that's what you want.

For rental costs I own 3 bed 2 bath flat in a nice part of London. Well maintained but no garden only a roof terrace. 'if 'i were looking to rent it out would be 2,500 - 3000 per month

Penarth. Check out work in Cardiff.

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/find.html?locationIdentifier=REGION%5E1047&index=24&propertyTypes=&mustHave=&dontShow=&furnishTypes=&keywords=#prop136605284

I live in Northamptonshire, which tends to get a bit of a bashing, but I love it. The towns leave a lot to be desired (especially Northampton itself) but the countryside is a wonderful place to live, and easily do-able on £60k. Market towns / larger villages include Brixworth, Long Buckby, Oundle and Brackley; then there's Market Harborough just on the border with Leicestershire. The county is also well connected for getting to the bigger cities like Leicester, Nottingham or Milton Keynes.

Hoesit OP. Sorry SA hasn't worked out the way we all hoped (I'm british but lived in SA for a time in the 90s).

You can find uk air quality info online, but generally in cities it isn't great because of traffic (and also wood stoves in winter which have neen fashionable lately) however even within a city there will be big differences between living close to a main thouroughfare and in a leafier back street.

(Though I think Joberg winters with a lot of open coal burning are probably far worse than anything here even in the cities - so not sure what your benchmark is. No-oneuch really burns coal here any more)

Just as general rules of thumb- uk is small but crowded, that includes roads and public transport so what looks like a short distance can sometimes take a surprisingly long time to cover whatever mode of transport you use.

Broadly, the east half of the country is flatter and drier (flat until around york anyway as you go north) the west of England, all of wales and much of scotland are much more scenic but also wetter!

Good luck with your search!