to think that there is the UK and then there is London?

[Bogeyface]

These are generalisations based on MN, personal experience and friends btw, so they probably wont stand up to scrutiny!

Seems to me that London is a different world! In London you pay £20ph for a cleaner, other people paint your lounge, you put private education above having a nice home, half an hour on a train is "around the corner" and 2 hours on the train can still have you in the same town.

And then you get non London, which means £10ph is pushing it for a cleaner (she had better be good!), you paint your own lounge, you move to get a good state school or supplement a crappy school with home ed, half an hour in a train gets you to the next town and 2 hours gets you to the seaside!

Absolutely not a criticism of Londoners or their lives, I adore London and wish I could afford to live there! But I do feel that there is a wide gulf of "normal" between Londoners and the rest of us! I sometimes think it should be classified like The Vatican, a country within a country! Might work taxwise for Londoners, thinking about it!

AIBU?

I sleep in my lounge so my dc can have a bedroom each. It's not a problem to be honest, what's the point in having a room that stands empty for 16 hours a day while my dc were having to bicker and share in one.

I think the OP is spot on. I've lived all over the UK and many years in Germany and Cyprus. I've yet to come across anywhere as fab as London.

You're right about the travelling though. A 45 minute bus or tube ride to work doesn't feel like anything yet doing the same length of journey when I lived elsewhere felt endless.

I've three cinemas within five minutes of my house and endless activities and beautiful parks for my dc. You could go out every day here and never do the same thing twice. No one I know lets their kids out alone though. They are taken to parks and activities then sat with or picked up again later. They start becoming more independent aged around 12/13 I would say.

I am not rich by the way but so much is free here.

I think about moving back to the Midlands, where I am from and it really depresses me, that's not me anymore.

Just left zone 2.

All the new housing developments for the last couple of decades there have been one or two bed flats which perfectly lovely couples move into as young professionals - a decade later they breed and realise they can't afford to add another bedroom to their mortgage/rent without moving somewhere like Dartford or worse Thamesmead lol!

My old neighbourhood badly needed someone sensible to come along with a plan for creating new, affordable family sized homes. However the local council were a bit intellectually challenged on many issues.

We eventually threw our hands in the air and moved to the other end of the UK, as I'd hate to be on the doorstep of London wishing I was back in the thick of things. It made more sense to opt for a complete change, especially as we can now house swap with old mates in the school holidays to get our fix of museums etc.

It was the working poor I saw increasingly being squeezed. The immigrants to be fair around me were anything but afraid of hard work, and suffered the same problems with housing and school places as the locals. I think in some areas there may be resentments, but in my locale it was all firmly directed at local gubberment for trying to close down an oversubscribed hospital lol!

^Most people sleep in their lounge due to high housing costs meaning overcrowding is the norm. My old neighbours really envied the fact I got my own bedroom when we moved.

An hour is perfectly reasonable each way to work. What is not reasonable is imitating an oxygen starved Sardine to get there. It takes longer if you have to get the bus because you can't afford the train fare. ^

This did make me laugh and it's the London I know. I was born in London and have moved out because it too expensive, housing is a premium which I couldn't afford, I wish I lived in the London you described on your op.

We've had lots of people on out sofa it's shit

Don't recognise this picture of London, so I think YABU.

More like the difference between rich and poor.

I take it op you don't live in

London

Most people who earn below 50k rent because you can't but with that sort of money and there if defo no money for cleaners

Any one who I know who pays someone to paint there lounge is either old or disabled

I can be by the sea side in 2 hours or less and in fact we have a man made one here which is lush

Oh no private schooling here just a tutor which my oh works over time to pay for YABVU

And if I spent 2 hours on a train from we're I live in London I would be in MANCHESTER so your are being silly and clearly don't live in London

By the way op there is a sea side in Essex Leah on sea (granted the shops are full of Gollys) or canvey island is not far at all

Could I just add that our cleaners are more than £10 an hour and we have some lovely private schools around here that parents send their DC to.. Also as DH and I both work(ed) long hours on ML now and both of us are rubbish at decorating we did have decorators and would do it again.. We live is West Yorkshire by the way!

Absolutely this word for word -including that we already have DD and we do educate privately.

where i live (around Radlett) there are some massive gated communities and people who have 'phillipinos' it's pretty crap and getting worse but then again the gap between rich and less rich is getting wider

luckily on the roads we are equal mwha hahahah

I think DH and I are probably pretty standard examples of some of the young, urban professionals you talk about.

I moved to London 10 years ago aged 25 and lived in a hideously expensive 1 bed place in Camden which I couldn't afford, but was around the corner from my DSis who had bought in the 90s. Cue a move on average once a year (because houses I was living in got sold), picked up DH along the way, and we finally bought in Zone 3 a couple of years ago using a mixture of savings and an inheritance from DH's Mum who died when he was little. It was not a massive deposit either. We are both lucky to have pretty good jobs, but only one of us is in a higher tax bracket, so we're not rolling in it by any stretch.

2 years on, we are moving about 1.5 miles away elsewhere in Zone 3 (all in SE London) to another 2 bed flat, but one with a study and on the ground floor where we can conceiveably have the 1 DC we are planning and hoping for and will stay in. We could move out to Zone 6 for a proper house but would miss all our mates.

Our lifestyle is not particularly extravagant - we prioritise a couple of holidays a year, but don't employ a cleaner; don't expect to live in a house; don't expect to amass savings; don't expect to be able to stay in London in our dotage (we will probably cash out our London place and move out to the country when we retire, if that is even remotely possible).

We both work long hours in full time jobs and won't be able to afford for one of us to give up work to be a full time parent so will be using full time childcare.

So also probably not very different to people in other parts of the country, really, given our age, apart from the size and standard of property.

However - this is a massive difference to the people my company employs who are under 30 or on lower rungs of the employment ladder. I regularly see people struggling hugely and as a charity we try to do the absolute best we can in terms of wages of our less well paid employees, with only a few on above NMW but lower than Living Wage - all of whom are on a plan to be on LW jobs within 12 months whilst they are training.

Have friends and family in the 'townhouse in Islington and 4 holidays a year' bracket, and others in the 'working zero hours contracts' bracket. London's massively diverse and also pretty Darwinian, and it's not fair. But it is still IMO the best place in the UK to live in, and has given me and DH opportunities we wouldn't have had elsewhere.

To visit my friend in East London. It takes me 10 minutes to walk to my nearest tube. 30 minutes on the tube till I change to another tube line, wait of about five minutes for a tube, then 15 minutes journey till I reach DLR station at Tower Hill, 20 minutes from Tower Hill to Canary Wharf, 20 minute bus journey then five minute walk to his flat. That's 1 hour and 45 minutes, without factoring in waits for buses and tubes and waiting for drivers to change over. I've tried driving it too. It took around the same time and was a freaking nightmare.

When I go to visit family in the midlands it takes me 40 minutes just to get out of London and I live pretty close to the North Circular.

The two estimate of some journeys in and around London, is spot on, I know because I do it.

I live in London and its nothing like you describe for most people. There are all different kinds of people and situations in London, most cannot afford private education. Oh and I never hear of a cleaner costing £20. Have you actually ever lived here?

Sorry if you've already answered, I didn't read all the posts.

Yeah and getting to the M1 from our place to go to the Midlands to visit parents is at least an hour, more like two most times. NeoFaust has it spot on :)

London is in an international network of super cities linked by major airline routes. It is definitely not part of the UK now. It is a place that is flooded with international money and people.

It is geographically located in the UK bit its economy is linked to the global financial network.

Me and DW used to live there and hardly ever went outside London except on an airliner. We never visited other parts of the UK for over a decade except to see parents once/twice a year. I never ever spoke to anyone in the UK on the telephone when I was working. None of my work involved anything or anyone in the UK. I never used £ sterling at work. The UK was irrelevant to my whole life.

I now live outside London in the UK. I still like London and occasionally work there still but with no permanent job and now with children it really holds no attractions. My sister lives in a flat in a rough bit of South London. She loves it and will never move out.

London is to the UK what New York is to the US - not any indication of what the country as a whole is like. London is more expensive, busier, more tolerant, has more cultural opportunities crammed into it than other UK cities.

Born & raised in London but don't recognise it from the op, apart from the insane travel times - I leave an hour to go anywhere and I'm in zone 3.

I'm in Glasgow, and I wouldn't dream of painting my own lounge. I'd only make an arse of it.

I'm just about to move back to London after two (ill-advised) years in the Home Counties. I can't wait. Yes, we are buying a smaller house, will be in a slightly shabby area, etc. but since the day I left it has been like a hole in my soul, and I will never leave the city again.

FWIW, I have never met anyone who sleeps in their sitting room...

Wow a complete generalisation of a city with a population of 8 million people. God, if every family in London could afford a £20 p/h cleaner it would be one of the richest cities in Europe!

I've done youth work and seen first hand the poverty in some families in south London. Trust me £20p/h cleaner is not their priority, going to thier local food bank in Southwark this Xmas is.

I have friends born and bread in London who are struggling to afford their first house at 40 years of age.

Get a grip.

I'm in Scotland and think half an hour on the train is round the corner. I'll pay other people to decorate when i can afford it as they do a better job and I'm better off working overtime to pay someone to do it. When I leave London to return to Scotland if I'm still in the same town after 2 hours something has gone badly wrong. I wonder if you're thinking of tubes rather than trains with the 2 hour thing as i went to college in london and can't think of any train trip lasting 2 hours that would still have you in London, you can't cross London in a train anyway so usually by 2 hours you're miles away.

Can I just say, as a foreigner who lived in the UK for a good number of years, enough to learn how to feel part of the society I lived in and appreciate its history etc, that my experience in a small city in the SW was totally different to that of other friends who moved to London instead.

They are still in London. We moved back

I live just outside Greater London, so not London at all and it takes 23 mins on the overground to get to Kings Cross.