To wonder why people struggle to live in London.

[m1nniedriver]

Just honestly wondering what it is about London that makes people on, as I see it, huge salaries want to live in tiny flats just because it's london? The cost of living there seems riduculous. Some of the posts on here about the cost of housing just beggars belief! A tiny 1 bedroom flat for 300k?? If that's what you want then power to you but I do see posts with people say they are struggling and stressing every day to get by. Why would you not move to another part of the country that would enable a much better quality of life?

I'm not great at putting things across on posts so I hope this doesn't offend anyone its is meant as a genuine question, not having a go.

[OnlyLovers]

at Chiswick being an urban hell hole.

KERALA, I'm even MORE determined to say that to someone now. [evil]

[KERALA1]

Only I did that once. It didn't go down very well. Non Londoners are allowed to criticise London to your face but it is not on to point out how dull, isolated, suburban, stunted their home town is. That is Not Allowed.

[MrsKoala]

Ha, yes, a bit like when women don't laugh at sexist jokes they don't have sense of humour, when we don't agree London is crap hole we are the rude ones. I did smile when someone from Ellesmere port told me my area was an urban hell hole. I lived in Chiswick ffs!

[OnlyLovers]

Koala, I know. Country/suburban bus timetables are on the walls of one of the seven circles of hell as far as I'm concerned. And country drivers.

I've never done this before, but next time some cunt one tells me happily, to my face, what a shit-pit London is, I'm going to just tell them exactly what I think of the armpit they live in. Own medicine and all that.

They'll probably just chalk me up as a Rude Londoner (TM).

[squoosh]

"Quality of life" is a very subjective measure, anyway, and does not always equate to a bigger living room and more lawn to mow.

Exactly.

Anyone who's baffled as to why some families prefer a small urban pad to a large suburban one must have a very sluggish imagination indeed.

[MrsKoala]

I agree Only, i have lost count of the people who say openly what a shit hole London is to me, slag it off at length then complain i'm rude if i don't agree their area is much much better. Both exPils and current Pils got very offended when after months/years of saying how awful London was that i pointed out i certainly wouldn't choose to live in their areas either. They want to think that us Londoners hate it and are miserably trapped and desperate to leave and that we envy them so much.

I will also say that having just had my first taste of my local bus service i am missing London transport. THREE POUNDS SEVENTY FIVE PENCE! and one every hour till 6pm when it stops. Fuck me, no wonder everyone drives like cunts round here .

Also the only place i actually enjoy driving is London. You can never go faster than 30mph. it's great. Round here if i'm only doing 50 i have a car up my arse and dangerously overtaking me.

[LuluJakey1]

I loved living in London. It was truly unlike any other city I have ever lived in.

But now I know I would miss the sea and the Northumberland countryside and the huge spaces free from people! It was lovely when I was 20/21/22 but now I am 36, I am glad to be back home.

[bruffin]

My mum was from the Wye Valley and when she visited London for the first time in the 1940s she thought that there would be no trees, bless her. She actually spent over 50 years of her life living in north and south London and eventually retired to Norfolk when the area she lived in deteriorated in. She got a bigger house and a nice nest egg to help with her retiring from moving. As I said above there are bits of London I love but there is no way I would live there again when I can have a 3 bed house for the price of a 1 bed flat in the road I used to live in and still only a 20 to 40 minute to the City or West End.

[ButtonMoon88]

Jeffy- she wasn't wrong, and I can say that, I'm originally from wolves

[OnlyLovers]

I know, Jeffy. It just rankles when a) I wouldn't dream of slagging off the places people live to their faces, but they seem to think it's perfectly fine to say to me what a hole London is when they don't know it, and b) they often make such sweeping statements based on so little (real example: a friend who came through Liverpool St Station at rush hour decided from that experience that everyone in London never smiled, looked stressed and unhappy and that it was always like that and he'd hate it if he had to live here.

It's just bigoted and ignorant.

[JeffyJeffington]

People often have misconceptions about places they've passed through but not properly visited or lived in though-that's hardly confined to London. I'm originally from Birmingham, people who have passed through often say it looks disgusting (and Queen Victoria apparently always asked for her train window's curtains to be shut when she passed through neighbouring Wolverhampton ). Yet many people who've visited Brum properly express surprise that it's not just an industrial wasteland and has some really interesting architecture and lovely communities.

[OnlyLovers]

I agree with this too. People when they first come to stay with me have said things like 'I didn't expect you to have a garden so big', 'I didn't think it'd be as quiet as this' etc.

Some people really do seem to imagine that everyone here actually lives in a tiny box on a flyover or in the middle of a roundabout junction or something. It's just ill-informed.

[Artandco]

MrsK- I agree. We live in a flat, but surrounded by open spaces so it doesn't matter. Lots of lovely royal parks in the middle, generally surrounded by huge commons just outside the centre. There's always space to go for a walk, run, cycle, picnic etc.
and what private space people have they tend to use to full potential ie small gardens, roof terraces, balconies. They have farmers markets in school grounds at weekends etc

[MrsKoala]

I know the thread has moved on, but i just wanted to say to those who mentioned gardens, i have had bigger gardens in London than anywhere else i have lived outside London. I find London houses no different space/garden wise to any other area of the country (in fact often bigger - unless you live in the countryside). I always laughed when i met people from cities/towns outside London who assumed it was a horrendous urban jungle. It just isn't. It's really green and spacious. When they saw my gardens they couldn't believe they were 2-3 times the size of theirs. Admittedly these were not zone 1-2 areas, but zones 3-6 is no different from anywhere else. Flats are flats and houses are houses wherever you go.

[Blu]

"Quality of life" is a very subjective measure, anyway, and does not always equate to a bigger living room and more lawn to mow.

[Liomsa]

I lived in London for years. I toured the grubbier bits of South London in rentals, then bought a tiny flat in a dicey bit of North London with DH. It was grimy, unbeautiful, expensive and crowded, and I loved every second of it. I now live in a pretty village in rolling countryside with a garden infested with deer, kestrels, badgers and rabbits, and I still miss world-class opera, the view from Waterloo bridge, drunken camaraderie with total strangers on the night bus, weird pop-ups on the Kingsland Rd, and being able to buy ras Al hanout/good falafel/fifty kinds of olive at 3 am...

[limitedperiodonly]

Oh my m1nniedriver. My east London/Essex mum took a singles holiday in her 70s all on her own on a coach trip to the west coast of Scotland.

She'd been widowed about five years.

When they got somewhere or other she couldn't persuade anyone else in the tour group to branch out from the town so she took a local train one day on her own to see what could be seen.

I know it seems ridiculous and made up, but I promise it's not, she met a lovely widower called Angus.

It's not going to have a really happy ending, because he wanted more than she did. But he wasn't pushy or nasty. He was the perfect gentleman.

They were friends and he came to meet her in London when he was visiting his daughter in Richmond which is a very nice place just west of London.

Like Terry and Julie they met at and had a fantastic day. And then they came to stay with me. Strictly in separate rooms.

[JassyRadlett]

Oh no. Not bloody sheep again. Sheep are too bloody thick to deserve to live.

Cattle if you must.

In fact, my apocalypse survival plan involves Bushy Park and some deer. Assuming I can figure out a way to snare the buggers, I'm quite good at home butchery. I reckon I'll be ahead of most of my neighbours.

Of course, they'll all probably turn out not to be the stereotypical soft-handed types as well.

[ArcheryAnnie]

I like that it takes me about a minute and a half to walk to a decent food shop, and about two and a half minutes to get to a bus stop where there are four buses on offer at very frequent intervals. Within a ten minute walking radius is four tube lines, within a twenty minute walking radius is another tube line and an overground. If I wanted to go to a cafe, a gym, a park, a museum (lots of them) a theatre, a market, they are all easy to get to.

I don't need a car. I don't want a car. London really works for people who don't want to top and tail every bloody activity they do with getting into the driving seat of a car.

[m1nniedriver]

All you Londoners head up to the Western isles of Scotland in the end, no point fighting it. You'll buy a couple of sheep, some pigs and put fishing bhoys randomly around the garden as ornaments. You will wear sandals with socks and brown cord trousers while complaining about the local shop that doesn't open on a Sunday

[JeffyJeffington]

You have missed out! Believe me you have. A few years in London broadens the horizons

this reminds me of a girl i met at uni who told me my experience of the world was totally limited because i hadn't taken a gap yah. I live in London and enjoy it on the whole, but I can accept quite happily that it's not everyone's cup of tea. Many comments here about the 'provinces' are very condescending.

[cleaty]

The City I live in has some country parks with lakes, that many people can walk to from home. I can walk 15 minutes from my house to a canal, that soon leads to open fields. But we can easily drive to proper beautiful countryside.

[longestlurkerever]

I do agree about the countryside actually. The trouble with London's location is that the SE is not full of dramatic natural beauty. Pleasant rolling countryside, yes, but not the stuff that enriches the soul like the Lake District or the Western Isles. In a parallel universe maybe I'm living somewhere like that and having a lovely life too. I'm not sure I could do anywhere in between though. Just fields with sheep in leave me a bit bewildered.

[merrymouse]

Can't help you with North London, (I think I went there once?) but many green bits of London are better than some parts of the countryside because they are so accessible. You don't need a car to reach them and you can pretty much just walk for miles and miles, without crossing A roads and without having to find a foot path. I have lived in other cities and the options for walking were limited without a car.

Pretty sure there is countryside in Hertfordshire.

[limitedperiodonly]

cleaty in a car you could get to Epping Forest from Hackney in about 15 minutes depending on where you started and where you wanted to end up and the time.

You'd make Chingford in that time but I'd definitely say that 40 minutes would take you to the very pretty High Beech area with or without rush hour traffic.

Your driver could park up and have a walk.

Granted, you might be in the boot and your remains might not be found until the leaves cleared in spring, but never let it be said that East London/Essex doesn't have some very attractive spots.