Leaving London

[Sonotcivil]

Hi in a serious mess about this, I'm so confused on whether to leave London or not.
Background : grew up in small insular town in lincolnshire. Left at 18 and moved to London working with the civil service.
I'm now 24, in a relationship on about 35k a year in the civil service.

My issue is I want to start a family in a few years time and London is just so expensive. Me and my partner both earn ok money but renting in London is he'll, and would struggle to get a mortgage and the I don't want to be in my eyeballs in debt worth millions the.
However I love all London has to offer and think it could be an amazing place for a kid to grow up and live.
My job restricts me to some cities if I move, it can be Norwich, Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, Cardiff or Edinburgh.

Any help appreciated

If you want to buy a house then yes, I'd move.

Don't get me wrong, I love London. But we would never have been able to afford a family home in the kind of area we wanted. I saw no point in moving to commuter land, which seemed like all the negatives of London with none of the positives.

We moved back to Dublin (we're Irish) but seriously considered Edinburgh. It's a fab city, beautiful, loads to do. Not wildly cheap mind. And yes, it's cold.

Most of the nightlife will pale into insignificance if you start a family.

@lalalaloopy check your PM.

Thanks all. Yes I couldn't do commuter land, like you say expensive property, outside and sometimes quite far out of London, nothing really exciting.

Yes I do want to own a house, and tbh that is the main reason I'm thinking of leaving is that it will be nearly impossible to own my own home. Saving for a deposit is really hard with such high rents, and you can't really get a decent sized 3 bed house with a good ish garden for any less then 500k at the minimum.

PickAChew. I understand that but I still want easy access to a bustling city centre.

This is my take. You could move outside London but that extra £5k you earn would be eaten up in commuting costs and you’d spend ages on a train.

I think it’s it’s best to live where you work. You’re lucky in that you can transfer to another city and one near your families so great for future kids.

Yes London can be great for kids depending where you live.

However there’s a big world out there and you’ll do fine somewhere else with a better quality of life (money/time/family near).

I moved out a few years ago (for different reasons) to a town an hour away. Huge shock to system but actually now we are settled. We’re still Londoners at heart but life is just fine.

I wouldn’t bust a gut to stay in a place that’s going to seriously compromise you financially for the sake of kids you don’t yet have.

What about buying in another city so your on the ladder & renting it & you staying in London for a bit?

Thanks for the PM I was just wondering, I used to work in buying & merchandising.

Plus I think prices in other cities will continue to rise whereas lots of London areas will stagnate.

My family originally come from Sheffield but most are now in and around Leeds.
I live rurally and love visiting.As well as within Leeds there are nice villages,those on the train lines to Leeds are often reasonably priced if you should Ilkley(lovely but pricey).The advantage being that the railway station in Leeds is in the clty so is faster than buses from within the city.Schools are good and the children get the best if outdoor activities(imagine cycling clubs for kids in London)and easy access the the city when older.
London is great before children but after not so good.

I think I agree.
London is a great place to be, but is just so expensive.
I could still get my inner city fix outside of London and always visit.
And if moving out is so bad, then I can always see if I can transfer back. I think I realise now that I will forever be busting my gut and never be on the property ladder in London.

Now here's the big choice which city?

lalalaloopy. You're welcome and if you ever want to get back into it, the government are crying for people with commercial skills, it is one of the 3 target areas of the civil service at the moment.

London is special. We stayed when everyone else was leaving 'for the children'. Dont regret it for a minute. Nor do the children.

Yes compromises. Parks instead of a garden, tube and bus rather than a car, less space. But absolutely worth doing.

Needmoresleep. But do you own your home? How much do you earn etc.
No offence I do love London, I've lived here for 6 years, all my adult life. I've made amazing friends here and got a good career out of it, but no way in he'll will I be able to afford a house here realistically. And that is something that I want.

I think I've realised that there are other big cities in the UK, and financially I will be better off outside london. Being in the civil service postings are flexible. If I move and don't like it I bide my time and move back.

But then I guess I could compromise. I could live in a flat with no garden in a decent area for 500k. But that would be so hard to achieve whereas I could have a house with a good garden close ish to the city centre in some of those cities mentioned for half that.

That's what I've been struggling with, is living in a flat, no garden etc worth it for london?

London commuting can be fairly hellish from any distance unless you are lined up onto good transport links - Waterloo or Liverpool St for the city, London Bridge or Stratford for Docklands. On £35k I wouldn't hesitate to go. Your 20s are the time to be in a big city, as your start to look beyond them, it's a good time to think about moving on.

Norwich has a lot going for it as a place to raise kids - far more than a big cities in my experience, having lived in Norwich & several of the big cities up North & London. You are half an hour of unstressful drive from a deserted beach & a National Park. I spent more time outdoors in Norfolk than anywhere else I've lived. Very safe as well.

With the fantastic rail links London enjoys and the fact you can often pre-book cheap day returns at weekends, now is the time to get out and look at what the rest of the country has to offer?

Thanks @AnotherRandomMale. I am definitely off to have a look at some other places I think. Anyone else got opinions on the cities listed?

Of Norwich, Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, Cardiff or Edinburgh?

Narrowing it on property prices first, I’d rule out Edinburgh as nearly as expensive as London, and Manchester as already well on its way.

Personally I think I’d look at the Yorkshire two and Norwich.

Thanks @Battleax. Leeds and Sheffield are close ish to my family to

I miss London but what I don’t miss is this idea that kids there are somehow blessed as they get to experience ‘multicuralism’.
Quite a bit of it is from people who aren’t born Londoners.

How do I possibly cope outside London - well, erm, I’m from a very multicultural family and we cope outsiide the m25 just fine. We take our ‘multicultural’ ways with us😉

OP - I used to work in Whitehall. Felt at the centre of things but quite honestly once I became a Mum I pretty much stopped the supposed London lifestyle. Too knackered. Life got smaller and I was never really a nappy valley enthusiast.

You can live a decent enough life anywhere. You are young so no wonder you don’t want to relocate yet.

Quite a bit of it is from people who aren’t born Londoners.

There’s something to that

Multiculturalism is much the same in all the big cities. (Not sure is count Norwich as one of them but it has other things going for it.)

I think I do want to relocate . I think it has dawned on me, that no way in hell will I ever own a house here . Also as mentioned previously moving to a regional hub can increase promotion chances.

I think I've come to realise is, I've lived in London for 5 years, I've travelled the world (quite literally) but I've only ever lived in 2 places in the UK. . I think now is the perfect time for me to go from London, I've reaped what it can give me, but it's time to try something New, really push my career forward and experience other things ie affordable rent .

Now it's just deciding on what city to ask to be transferred to.

I'm originally from Lincolnshire too. We lived in London for 10 years but as it happened didn't start a family until moving back to the Midlands. We now live in Nottingham which is city enough for me (if there's a John Lewis I'm happy). It could also have been Sheffield or Leeds.

When we lived in SE London we had lots of friends raising families but this was in the 90s when housing was a lot cheaper. Even then there was a steady exit either to other cities or the countryside of people who who couldn't afford to up size their flats.

I agree don't worry for now but think about your contingency plans and if you want to start a family soon, good luck

The thing with cities like Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester etc... is that whilst property can be cheap, they invariably all have a handful of areas in the centre and outskirts where it is ferociously expensive in comparison to the rest, as those are where people actually want to live. Not in a Kensington & Chelsea "I'd live here if I had £25m" way, but more of a "I have a fairly good job and don't want to be tripping over dope smoking scallies walking their pitbull or have my car broken into by a junkie" sort of way. Still cheap compared to London, but price it in. The areas of Manchester, Leeds or Liverpool I'd choose to live in now are more expensive than living in my village in rural Northamptonshire 75 mins from Euston door to door.

AnotherRandomMale - I think you're overstating it a bit! It isn't a choice between "dope smoking scallies walking their pitbull" and "ferociously expensive". A lot of house buyers have an eye on eventual resale, so that places are expensive partly because they are perceived to be nice, and so the price escalates without necessarily having the facilities to justify it. Other places don't have the reputation, but are still very nice places to live.

Exactly. Maybe about 10% of areas in Leeds (and probably other cities too) are naice and expensive, 10% are 'I wouldn't live there if you paid me or if I had no other choice' and 80% are just normal and you live there based on a number of factors such as ease of commuting, bus routes, local facilities, family ties etc etc.

Probably not unique to Leeds, but some of the most desirable areas are literally around the corner from some of the worst areas (Chapel Allerton and Chapeltown being the prime example) and guess what, the 'dope smoking scallies walking their pit bulls' have legs and cars and know exactly where to go to find people who have nice cars, jewellry and other expensive possessions that might be ripe for stealing. I have several colleagues who live in the naice areas of Leeds and have been burgled, often more than once.

I live in an average and perfectly nice area of Leeds that some people perceive as less desirable, so hence cheaper but it has it's advantages, such as ease of access to the motorways for travel across the UK (both DP and I travel for work) and travel across the city is easier because most people are going the other way.

The schools in north Leeds are famously oversubscribed, it's a real problem. DSis lives in a town on the south side and they got their DCs into a good primary and has just got DN into their first choice of high school, both for quality of teaching and ease of travel.

I would choose an area based on budget, ease of commuting and access to other facilities/amenities and not necessarily stretch myself to the prime areas because they too have their disadvantages including cost, overstretched schools, crime higher than you would imagine and worse traffic conditions, despite having an above average public transport provision (trains and buses are much more frequent on most northern routes into the city than they are from our area).