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.

I think it turns into a bunfight because there IS jealousy about living in London, it is vibrant one of two Alpaha ++ cities in the world and has lots to offer

But you're not allowed to say you like London and wouldn't choose to live anywhere else, cause it has to be awful, to make people feel better that they're not missing out ( and you are btw)

Of course it's not jealousy. People have different lifestyles, for some people London is a great place to live and for others it's not. It's very simple.
This thread is odd

I can be exactly what I want to be, thats the beauty of it. I'm a Londoner, came here for uni, at 18, been here decades. Longer than you lived here for sure if you left at 24.

I didn't have windfall property, we bought in unglamorous areas because we could afford it, they gentrified by luck, and longevity of being here.

I've been here far longer and laid more routes down here than anywhere else. I'm a Londoner, if you say anything else, you're not one.

Have to born and raised somewhere before you can claim to be from there? Yeah right, I chose to be here for years and know the city so well I feel its in my blood.

We'll disagree on this one

pah "routes" roots. bloomin hell lurker, thats crap. Time for bed.

really don't see how you can be a 'Londoner' if you weren't born there and didn't grow up there?

To be honest, I've only ever really heard it in the way Lurker is using it - to the point where I have friends who will happily say 'I'm one of the few Londoners who was born and raised here'. It's a city of incomers and it feels to me like all you have to do to be accepted as a Londoner is be living here reasonably long-term, and to have put down roots. I've just done a bit of googling which seems to back up this approach.

It's what makes it feel welcoming to me - which upset some people upthread. Other people who live here describe me as a Londoner, and in turn that makes me feel like one, in a way that I don't feel British or English. And I'm pretty sure that no matter how long I lived in, say, Manchester or Liverpool, no local would ever describe me as Mancunian or Liverpudlian, let alone a Scouser.

But you're not allowed to say you like London and wouldn't choose to live anywhere else, cause it has to be awful, to make people feel better that they're not missing out ( and you are btw)

You can say you wouldn't choose to live anywhere else - good for you.

I like London well enough, as do the dc. Dh is a Londoner himself and has plenty of friends and a couple of family members still there, so as a result we have a fair few visits every year. I also stay a couple of nights every 6 weeks or so with work (i'm in Banking). It's good, I enjoy it there and we've had some lovely visits.

You couldn't ever convince me that I was 'missing out' by not living there...I don't need anyone to make me 'feel better' about that It's not somewhere I would want to live and more so not somewhere I would ever want to raise dc (London or any other big City in the UK for that matter).

Surely you can understand that not everyone, like you, is desperate to live there and would pine for it if they didn't? Or is that too hard to grasp?

If I was rich, I would like to live in London. My ideal is a central London flat, and a house in a Scottish island, with a helicopter to transport me there. But as I am not that rich, I don't live in London. I couldn't bear living there full time.

Well I'm 37 and worked in London until I was 30, commuted from Brighton in my late 20's.

The fact is, experiencing London life as a child gives you a much more real experience of the place. So much of your childhood shapes who you are as an adult, therefore coming to the place as an adult 'has' to be an entirely different experience - the two are not comparable.

My parents afforded me all these experiences-museums, galleries, concerts, visiting my Dad at his office in Admiralty Arch. My school trips 'were' all the museums people have mentioned on this thread. I would accompany my Dad canvassing for a political party- that was a worthwhile activity as people didn't just vote Conservative then. A variety of children went to my secondary school, not just the incredibly privileged (compared to the rest of the children in the country), they weren't tutored and managed at every given opportunity. We weren't that worried about leaving London to go to university, we positively embraced moving away from our parents as university was about learning to 'think' for ourselves, developing your own ideas away from your parents influence.

Of course it's a windfall - you've described exactly why it is the case.

Have to born and raised somewhere before you can claim to be from there? Yeah right

Uh, yeah, pretty much.

You're from where you're from. I was born in Wales, I could move to Australia tomorrow, don't make me an Aussie though does it?

Dh frequently gets asked where he's from because he has a weird accent which ranges from full on Del-Boy Cockney, to Silver-Spoon Queens English to South Wales lilt - depending on who he's speaking to. He'll still say 'i'm a Londoner' because it's where he grew up from 0-19 ie where he's from. Moving to Wales doesn't make him a Welshman

You're from where you're from. I was born in Wales, I could move to Australia tomorrow, don't make me an Aussie though does it?

You'd be surprised

The fact is, experiencing London life as a child gives you a much more real experience of the place. So much of your childhood shapes who you are as an adult, therefore coming to the place as an adult 'has' to be an entirely different experience - the two are not comparable

I agree that a childhood somewhere shapes you to a great deal - but at the same time there are experiences people have of long-term London living (won't say Londoner to avoid giving offence) that you won't have - such as being a parent in London, or an immigrant in London, both have been massively formative experiences for me, and I'm sure shaped by my environment.?

Just as your London childhood will have been vastly different to other people's London childhoods.

Not sure why it's a competition?

I left London when I was 24 but worked near parliament square from 26 - 30. My Dad still lived and lives there now so I didn't just live there in my childhood.

It's not about competing, it's pointing out that people don't need to be 'Informed' of the highlights of London as some of us are very familiar with the plac, due to the fact that we're Londoners not just playing at it!

"due to the fact that we're Londoners not just playing at it!"

Ex pat Londoner fine, you can't claim that if you don't live here, tee hee.

and to the person who made the Wales/Australia comparison um, people might do, I have Uncles who are Glaswiegan by birth but will claim to be Aussie. A

It also seems that when you leave a place and don't go back you can't really say your from there, so,having spent nearly 40 years here I can call my self a Londoner, the term is as said above applied to anyone.

"The fact is, experiencing London life as a child gives you a much more real experience of the place." No it doesn't, it gives you AN experience of the place. When you were buidling up years of being a "Londoner" by luck and just gurgling in your cot, I was building up my years studying and living centrally. Bloomsbury in my first year, with the wonders of that area at my finger tips, as well as the bustle of the city within spitting distance. Working in bars in Soho in my second year and renting digs where me and another girl could sit on the roof terrace and watch the seedy underbelly of that area in the 70s go by. Meeting characters in the French House, seeing Soho in its dirty,edgy, but flamboyant glory. Going to see amazing bands at the Roxy, the sheer glory of the delapidatedness of inner London in the 70/80s. All this and more, as well as the mueseums, libraries, cultural stuff, the beat of the city always in my blood. Working here for the treasury, just scraping enough to get by and live in a bedsit in Clerkenwell, then graduating to buying a flat in a run down mansion block in Maida Vale which was full of squatting hippies and the area was quite vibrant with musicians and artists. Helping friends who ran market stalls on Camden Market for an extra few quid..I could go on about all sorts of London experiences I've had that you couldn't possibly have achieved just by being born here and it giving you that exclusive view, oh so I will.

Working here as a poor NQT and the years when I taught in inner London schools, tough ones with all the problems they brought, the children I helped see beyond the boundaries of their postcode. The years I spent volunteering at local charities and community associations that helped improve areas and help others in them. I raised my children here, paid mortgages here, buried friends here, paid my taxes here.You definately can't tell me that your experience is a much more "real" experience. You got AN experience.

I'll call myself a Londoner, you can choose to tell me I'm not, but I'll disregard your opinion. See thats what great about this city, I don't have to care what you think. Plenty of others will agree with me that being a Londoner, is about living here and laying roots here, not just being born here.

When I've said that people don't seem to know London that well, it is clear on this and other threads that people really believe you can't get by without huge salaries and that anywhere outside of zone 2 is not worth living in. Suggestions are made that expensive things are neccesities, and I've pointed out that there are very reasonable solutions.

I did apologise for my hackles going up earlier and reacting to people telling me that living here is shite. Sorry.

I wasn't just born there - you seem to have conveniently missed the part out where I said I grew up there and lived there until I was 24 but moved to live with my boyfriend in Brighton. I still worked in Whitehall until I was 30. All my roots and I mean my immediate 'family' in that, my blood, my formative years- I'd never known anything else until university, I 'am' a Londoner born and bred. I didn't arrive there as an adult completely unfamiliar with the place.

Nah, I'm definitely a Londoner, it's a real stretch of the imagination to believe someone from the North East is, when they spent the first 18 years of their life there, surely you're an adopted one. It's like me saying that I'm a Brightonian as I've lived here for 13 years. If I said that to an original Brightonian it would be really confusing as they'd naturally ask me which part I grew up in, which school I went to etc. London is not your birth place, it's not an accumulation of years that make you from somewhere- it's your birthplace. I don't understand your argument and have never heard of this liberal definition of being a 'Londoner'!

I have, on many occasions. People say it all the time: " I'm one of the few Londoners that was born here." Its a fairly fluid term.

From the moment I came here, people at home referred to me as a Londoner, for far too long to remember have identified my self as such. So I'll continue to do so.

I wasn't unfamiliar with the place when I arrived here to live either, I'd spent huge amounts of time here with my Aunts and Uncles who lived here, several holidays a year. I even worked here the summer that I was in lower 6th, cleaning tables/rooms in the Crown in Cricklewood (oh my that was an experience back then). I could also claim that whilst you grew up here, I was far more aware of my surroundings from the start of being here, so what you knew in your younger years, I'd probably absorbed by the time i hit 6 months here.

I'll accept you can too, but you need to take the ex-pat bit as a bit of a lighthearted dig.

Anyway, this has gone to a strange place.

The original thread was about how do people cope in London without massive wages, the response was overwhelmingly its possible as you have XYZ.

Then it went to "London is shite and you have to be mad to live there, my quality of life is so much better." Which admittedly goaded me into a bit of a OTT (and intended OTT) rant.

Now you are telling me I can't call myself a Londoner when I've lived here for nearly as long as you've been alive?

Ha, sometimes I wish insomnia wouldn't attract me back to this place.

Absolutely you can be a Londoner if you moved there as an adult. I was born there, but it would be ridiculous not to describe all the people who have lived there for decades but were born elsewhere as Londoners.

It's the difference between an international city like London or New York and the kind of place where they don't like 'incomers'.

(Although there is nothing to stop anybody who lives or has lived in London having a parochial attitude).

I don't understand your argument and have never heard of this liberal definition of being a 'Londoner'!

Maybe it's changed a bit since you left

But if you want examples, the internet is full of them. I'm with merry - it's a key difference between the Londons and New Yorks and, say, the Brightons and Clevelands.

It's not about competing, it's pointing out that people don't need to be 'Informed' of the highlights of London as some of us are very familiar with the plac, due to the fact that we're Londoners not just playing at it!

I missed this special sentence. What constitutes 'playing at it', out of interest?

How long do you have to have abandoned it for before you start to think your experience might be slightly out of date?

I understand where you're coming from as someone who doesn't live where I grew up or spent my early adult life. But honestly, I'd feel pretty silly describing myself as a greater expert on the city where I spent much of my childhood and all my early adult life (I left when I was 27) than people who've lived there in the decade since I left, despite the fact that all my family is there, etc etc. Because cities change, and so do we.

Although I agree that high house prices reduce diversity.

I can easily understand how anyone could afford a house in any travel zone if they bought property in the mid nineties. Scruffy flats in unpopular areas were priced accordingly.

the fact that Londoners are more liberal and open minded in general than in other places.

Absolutely rubbish!

Here - the BBC can help you out with never having heard of this 'liberal definition'. Audio and everything.

www.bbc.co.uk/london/content/articles/2008/06/24/ryl_realyounglondoners_feature.shtml

Just a helpful example. And there's one bloke in the comments who agrees with you...

To be fair I think Brighton has large number of people who moved there from elsewhere - and that is why Brighton has a green MP while other seaside towns have so many UKIP supporters.

Ha! Sorry to upset you Gingerbear, and claim your birthright , but I'm a Londoner through and through even though I am an immigrant. I have lived two thirds of my life here , make contributions to civic life and the community I live in and like many Londoners, have a complex identity . That is one of the things that Londoners cherish: it's melting pot nature.

bb,

Oops DS hit the keyboard!