To want to get far away from London?

[bluecherry1]

I have a very nice house with a great dh and 2 lovely dc, good jobs and no real worries BUT I live 2 streets away from one of the recent stabbings and it has put me so on edge, crimes rates here seem to be soaring, I hate not letting my children go out to play and don’t even feel totally safe myself walking the 10 minutes home from the station. I know there are nice places in England to live but me and dh are thinking of homeschooling the kids and travelling, we have family in Spain, South Africa and the USA, I want them to experience a carefree life for as long as they can. Ahhhh I’m so confused?

London is not for everyone, but even though the murder rate is far too high (one is too many but I am sure you get my drift), far more people die in road crashes.

Our street has a good number of banker-city types but there are also houses divided into bedsits, nextdoor on one side is a house owned by the council with 2 flats, a whole house opposite is lived in by a big Somali family, another house down the road is home to a big Bangladeshi family, another house is empty pending redevelopment as it was left to a Housing Association by the leftie old dear who lived there and there are a good few young working couples and mc families who've been here years. It's actually quite diverse although no-one would call it poverty by a long way

Wow. That’s a bit racist. Why does the fact a family is Somali or Bangladeshi does it mean they’re not wealthy?

They may also be one of the lucky few who bought housing before the cost was insane who I should have put on there too.

And yes, I did say that the only non-rich people left were social housing tenants (only affordable housing) and young migrant workers. Those bedsits are probably full of transient workers. It’s not the sort of place that you would want to stay long term.

Unless they bought before prices rose or have social housing the traditional working class has been cleansed from London by pricing out. If I look at my friends list on FB at old school friends it separates into three groups, those who are wealthy, those who got council housed in the late 90s and the rest have left London. We were too young to buy before prices went up.

People can whinge all they want. But without a social let it is impossible to survive in London on working class wages.

When I grew up couples who were, say a secretary and a builder, could own a 3 bed house comfortably. Nowadays people in those jobs would be just about scraping by with a shitty flat and travel taking up half their income before they even got round to paying their bills. And if they wanted to start a family - forget it. You just can’t argue with the numbers. If a couple are on £20,000 and £16,000 a year they’ll have about 2.5k take home a month, at least 1k rent, another £500 on travel. That’s £1k a month left for all bills, food, leisure.

If you want to have any sort of life - just basic things like a trip to the cinema or new clothes occasionally or a modest holiday every now and again - you have to move out of London.

I didn't say those two families are not wealthy, that's your assumption

But without a social let it is impossible to survive in London on working class wages

OFGS no it isn't.
I am as pissed off as the next person about the social cleansing of London but I am equally pissed off about my existence being constantly denied
I am a working class Londoner. So is my OH. We did buy before things went mental in this borough but so did a lot of people. My street is a mix of social and private. There are no wealthy people here. There are none for a good few blocks. You have a 15 min walk before you hit the affluent classes and in London 15 mins might as well be 15 miles.

There is this bloody annoying and all pervasive idea on mn (and therefore elsewhere) that London is a mix of Knightsbridge and The Bronx with nothing in between. Londoners are Harry and Meghan or illegal immigrants.

London is massive. Around 9 million people live here. We have the very poorest to the richest and everything in between.

As I have lived her all my life I think I am probably pretty well placed to comment on what its like.

But wasn't that poster referring to now? As in it’s hard to rent if your earning working class wages now as opposed to 5 years ago. Plenty of my neighbours are working class but their mortgage free homes are 1m+ so they & their children are in a different position to a kid today on a Battersea council estate.

But the rest of us have disappeared have we?
We are all still here with our low incomes and cheeky cockney ways

TheFirstMrsDV

Has your property not gone up in value though? In 30 years will there still be the same social mix there is now? My area of SW London has changed a lot since my youth & there is certainly a difference in the diversity of school pupils due to catchments and associated house prices.

So MrsDV so you own your house? When did you buy it? I would bet my socks it was pre 2000

Plumbers, builders and electricians are working class. Most of them make pretty good money. I know plenty of Londoners that private rent in the areas they grew up in, they're not rich.

You've hit the nail on the head with catchments. In the 80's and 90's a lot of the wealthy Clapham, Vauxhall, Kennington, Battersea middle class kids went to schools in Pimlico, Victoria, Chelsea and Fulham. Now they are more likely to be in local schools. That's changed the diversity of the average classroom but that's not necessarily changed the area.

I think areas like Brixton, Peckham & Hackney have changed a lot in the last 10 years.

Plumbers, builders and electricians are working class. Most of them make pretty good money

Not really anymore. London construction is mainly staffed by Romanians now and there is little difference between wages in London and elsewhere so it’s not really worth being in London. Most of the people I know doing jobs like that live in places like Chatham or Thanet and commute.

There is a lot of construction round here but I've never encountered Romanian builders. Still lots of Polish, many of whom are now starting up their own companies, Asian and English

^^This is pish. And believe me I know about this. Romanian builders have pretty much taken over the London construction trade. They will take low wages and ignore H&S. Pretty sure that thing with the crane dropping bricks on the woman who died will turn out to be a Romanian, they were breaking soooooooo many rules.

Which is interesting because I was on here talking about the problems with Romanians breaking H&S rules the week before and people who knew bugger all about the industry were saying it was impossible then that happened.

Or are you talking about domestic builders? That’s a tiny part of the industry and isn’t really important.

mrsdv when did you buy?

It used to be possible to buy in London on a modest wage certainly, it's not now. My parents bought in the 80s. Their house has gone up over 45 times in value, and this is just based on its current, very dated, state. They haven't touched a thing in it for 30 years.

Now, I can only dream of buying a house in their area. I live in a part of London that is pretty notorious, and not for the right reasons. It's not through choice, but lack of it.

Yes, things are all fine and dandy if you bought before the property boom. For the millennials it's very different.

YABU wanting to leave London because of a gang stabbing near your area, but YANBU to want to leave because you want to live somewhere else and your travelling idea sounds amazing.

Of course I'm talking about domestic builders. I don't visit or pass by office blocks or sky scrapers under construction.

Do it! Kids in schools are so regimented. Take them out and home school. You can always let out your London property and see where you are in a couple of years. Good luck and I hope you will let us know how you getting on x

davros domestic builders can do very well eg if they are loft conversion specialists.

One company I know charge around 30k plus vat per loft, and start one every 2 weeks, year round.

I would imagine most people do walk past office blocks and large construction sites and come into contact with builders if they’re out and about, given the amount of building going on.

When people talk about the construction industry they’re mainly talking about large scale developers building big buildings like shopping centres, schools, offices or housing estates/blocks of flats. Domestic building is a tiny, unprofitable part of the building sector which doesn’t employ many people. I don’t really know what’s going on in that sector, it’s off my radar because it’s not significant to me.

But in the construction industry proper in London, wages are very poor at the moment as are conditions and standards have dropped. People who can get out have got out. I live in Yorkshire and 10 years ago you got big differences between wages in London, about £8-10 ph more in average paid jobs. Now you get the same as the regions, sometimes slightly worse. My DH was on a job in our city where apart from two specific jobs (one of which was his) they brought an entire Romanian workforce with them because they were paying them less than local workers.

London workers getting paid less than regional workers is a truly crappy state of affairs.

Hibble, then that’s a company with a £780,000 turnover. Given that a lot of that is going straight back out the door in materials and wages it’s not much. Nice for an individual to live on, but incredibly small fry when you look at the value of the industry. Put it this way, a shopping centre is about £500 million.

It's still a very profitable company for the owners. The argument was that domestic building isn't profitable: it is, it is just on a smaller scale.

Er, nobody said domestic building wasn’t profitable. The closest I said is ‘not very profitable’ and it isn’t. A company like that probably has a few employees and keeps the owners family fairly comfortable. But it’s not very significant.

It’s one of those things, people who don’t know this industry when you say ‘construction industry’ instantly think people that build your extension or convert your loft. But that is a tiny and insignificant part of the industry.

Domestic building used to be the worst paid sector. The fact that long term settled builders are trying to get into it now is actually just a sign of how much of the construction industry is going to shit.

In a lot of the rest of the country, when you hear people moaning about not being able to get a builder to do quotes or take jobs that’s because nobody wants the domestic jobs because commercial jobs pay better.

The opposite is happening in London because commercial wages are so shit.

Then mightymucks we must have very different definitions of 'not very profitable'.

Living in London, there is a shortage of reputable domestic builders. The company we used for our loft has a waiting time of nearly a year now if you want them to do your loft. There is a huge demand for home extensions, as no one can afford to up size.