To be irritated by the Londoner exodus to my town?

[thesecondnamegame]

I've been priced out of my Greater Manchester town by the London diaspora. Anybody who knows the area will know which town I mean. My tatty council town centre terrace is worth 300k. A load of Londoners came up after the BBC moved to Manchester. Half the kids in my kid's school's parents are from London and they love to make sure you know that. House prices have become ridiculous and are in a different world to the rest of Greater Manchester. It's ridiculous as it used to be a very unremarkable market town (albiet with not much to it) and now it's gone all 'naice' and I'm having to move 10 miles away because it's reaching the surrounding towns and I simply cannot afford to live here and I want to buy a property. It annoys me, I keep imagining somebody who had a London salary and bought a house in London, sold it, and came up here and bought a house 3 times bigger for the same price as their smaller London home. It just seems like they cheated. There are no school places either, because a lot of the Londoner's chose this particular town for the schools. The catchments are bloody tiny, I know somebody who lives in a village about 4 miles away. The schools in this town are the closest schools. No school would take her child and she ended up having to home educate for months.

All my relatives who bought properties or private rented have had to leave, even those who went to uni and got great jobs.

If London didn't have such extortionate house prices then less people would be moving. I have empathy for the situation your in, its very unfair re schools. I'm currently in a 2 bed flat with 2 young kids and desperate to move to the North West so I can get a garden! X

[quote Blueeyedgirl21]@Confusedandshaken not at all what I meant. I should have elaborated further, my apologies, but what I think the new demographic I mentioned signifies is a shift from working class families to a a different type of class. Class can be as much of an indication of privilege as race, especially when education disparities come in to play. You only have to study the 11+ entrance exams of Trafford to see where it comes into play. Schools like Altrincham Grammar are very ‘diverse’ in a non-white sense - but the family backgrounds of the students are incredibly privileged in other ways. Almost No one gets in without extensive expensive tutoring, and/or attendance at paid prep school. It’s basically a free private school for those who can afford to live in the area, where a 3 bed semi will be half a million pounds. Anyway I work in the field and am very keen on education equality and find a lot of the time that economic hardship affects kids the most regardless of ethnic background, which is why I feel strongly about the ‘ghetto-fication’ of schools and prefer the Scandi type approach of meritocracy. But I digress.[/quote]
^ This.

@LoudestCat14

Is nobody allowed to talk about social issues anymore? Let's get rid of politicians then, they make policies that affect what people want to do. I absolutely think that a couple selling a bog standard house in London and then using that money to buy a massive house in an area that's had a completely different history and much less investment historically is wrong. It may not be a common thought process, but it's mine. That's my opinion, I'm expressing it.

To be honest, I do despise the way this country is in general and would welcome socialism, but that isn't going to happen.

I think to be fair to the op, us ‘up north’ feel like historically we have had a raw deal compared to the south east. I remember abject poverty in the area I grew up in coinciding with our local industries closing down. At the same time we were seeing the yuppies in London throwing the cash about. I think that era has long gone though but the memory lingers. Londoners do not have it any easier than us northerners. We are experiencing being priced out and that is something londoners have experienced way before us. It’s a nationwide problem.

www.mylondon.news/news/east-london-news/map-shows-london-boroughs-most-20641932.amp

London faces the most severe homelessness crisis in the country.

London Councils estimates there are currently 165,000 homeless Londoners living in borough-provided temporary accommodation, accounting for two-thirds of England’s homeless.

165,000 homeless in London. That's more than the total population of UK towns.

Those Londoners. Sooo privileged...

@Tealightsandd we need to look at why this is the case. Why on earth is it too expensive for a working family to exist in London - it shouldn’t be that way. Selling off social housing was a massive mistake in my opinion. Then the gentrification of areas that normal working families could afford. Is it Brixton that’s one of the places they’ve completely wrecked, driving out locals and doing up housing stock and selling it on for twice as much? I remember watching a documentary on it and it was shocking. But the people being driven out of these places to find affordable, nice places to live are not the problem. It’s the people that want the gentrification, that think they’re doing somewhere a favour by opening a gourmet dog food shop or whatever (lol), that are the issue. They have money - family money usually - and want to be cutting edge, to fix the next ‘cool place’ - the exodus out of London to Manchester and the north west is the same thing, except they’re trying to pull the same stunts on unsuspecting working class towns. There’s no reason parts of London can’t be trendy, expensive, slick, arty ... whatever they want to be! But there needs to be parts where normal people can live work and send their kids to a decent school.

I always wonder where the Londoners with normal jobs live - where does a single mum who is a staff nurse possibly live? What about a taxi driver and a cafe worker with four kids? There must be people living in awful conditions.

Agree about Urmston. Less so Stretford at the moment. But there are bits on the edges which are being sold as up and coming so I think it will happen more in time.

Houses in Urmston are now going for silly money. I've looked at some of them and thought wtaf.

Almost no one gets in without extensive expensive tutoring, and/or attendance at paid prep school. It’s basically a free private school for those who can afford to live in the area, where a 3 bed semi will be half a million pounds.

I think actually the second one is more of a barrier than the first. In the past it was much more possible to get in from further out. Ok, you might have needed some tutoring to know what the exam would be like, but non-verbal and verbal reasoning are (in my experience) generally picked up quickly by children who will do well at a grammar school. And you could live on Spath Lane, or Colshaw Farm and go. Now getting in from that distance is vanishingly unlikely, and prices inside the catchment continue to rise.

There's no poverty more abject than homelessness. Which has been worse in London than anywhere else for a long time. It's the reality of 'investment'.

People need to look beyond the ill informed stereotypes.

Those coming up north just to buy luxurious houses they couldn't have afforded in London are the issue, as I've repeatedly said. There are many MN posts of people who've done just that.

When enough people do it, the property prices sky rocket. It's bringing London's issues elsewhere but with none of the opportunity London provides.

So who is allowed to buy these luxurious houses?

To be fair twenty years ago I didn’t get a place at a Trafford Grammar due to oversubscription, despite passing the 11plus and living 1.5 miles from the nearest as the crow flies. It has always been a postcode lottery and I highly doubt children from further out in greater Manchester are getting the places!

'Investment' my arse. Proper investment would be investing in Northern rail, for example, make it easier for those in Lancashire to commute to the cities. Or see what can be done with Preston or Newcastle or Leeds.

Instead what this 'investment' consists of is just dragging up London institutions to Manchester. We don't want to become London 2.0.

@Tealightsandd I’ve said a lot more in my last post to you but I doubt anyone where I live with ever have an issue with a family that were homeless in London and have moved here because it’s what they could afford. Completely different to what OP is talking about. However, there is hardly an social housing, you need a proven link to the area to get on the list, and the house prices have gone MAD because of people moving in from out of area who will pay above and beyond the asking price, so it’s not even a cheaper option for a homeless working family any more! We are running out of places for people to go and it’s crazy

Outing but: I live in OP’s town and know lots and lots of people here yet only have one friend who is a ‘Londoner’, as in moved here recently from London. Her and her partner originally tried to buy a normal family home for [redacted extortionate amount] but were priced out by a local couple who had offered more - me and my partner. We bought the house from a family who were moving to the North East, as OP strenuously insists never happens. I’m sure they got a fuck off massive house (that could have otherwise been bought by a local) and much improved lifestyle for their trouble. The real issue with this story is that that couple bought said house I now live in for about £200k cheaper not that many years earlier, and both me and my friend - who have young children - were now relying on seriously hefty parental contributions to get anywhere near the stratosphere of purchasing family homes in our area. That’s got fuck all to do with London and everything to do with an absolute hellhole of a housing market that’s completely inaccessible to the vast majority of young people.

By the way, OP, since we’re doing anecdata, all the affluent people I know round here who live in big houses are Irish. Maybe post a thread about how irritating we are for moving into the area, it’ll certainly go down a lot better on MN

@awaketoosoon Those who have earned their wealth, not necessarily in the local area but who aren't buying purely on equity gained in a property from a completely different part of the country where house pricing is another world.

It's bringing London's issues elsewhere but with none of the opportunity London provides.

Unless they are retiring presumably there are opportunities in the North.

Instead what this 'investment' consists of is just dragging up London institutions to Manchester. We don't want to become London 2.0.

So, you want investment and big businesses provided they don't come from London.

@JaJaDD it is now just a lottery of who can offer the most for a house closest.
Urmston and Stretford have a few more further afield pupils - kids come from Worsley, Eccles, Irlam, Chorlton, Whalley Range - all over - but the Alty grammars, Loreto, Ambrose etc are literally highest bidders for the houses closest.

This is utterly nuts. It's just someone who has a massive chip on their shoulder WRT. London.

@merrymouse

It's bringing London's issues elsewhere but with none of the opportunity London provides.

Unless they are retiring presumably there are opportunities in the North.

That's true, but I think OP means it's much easier to live on a £30,000 salary here if you have a five bedroom house bought with the proceeds of selling somewhere in London rather than living on £30,000 salary and trying to get on the housing ladder.

Alty has always been expensive, comparatively. It's hardly sow's ear to silk purse stuff.

I think you are conflating 2 very different issues - rude or insensitive people (from anywhere) and the difficult UK housing market. And I think we all understand the impact rising house prices have had in pricing out locals and low income people in very many towns and communities, in and outside of London.

I would also say that the smug bleating works both ways I'm afraid. I'm regularly asked by people living outside of London - in a patronising pitying tone - why I live in this 'grotty, dirty, overpopulated, crowded shithole'. And then banging on about how they have some huge mansion with a massive garden or a chocolate box thatched cottage for the same price of my flat. Or were mortgage free at 35 because their house was so cheap compared to stupid London prices. All said with the same tone deafness you accuse the 'BBC higher ups' you've encountered of having.

Yes I am sure some of the "BBC types" at the school gate are irritating self satisfied entitled gits braying on about cheap housing and lack of yoga or skinny lattes. I've met some in actual London funnily enough. But not all Londoners or indeed BBC employees are like that, any more than all people outside the M25 are resentful, envious and unfriendly to incomers.

You say you have "nothing against working and lower middle class Londoners who've been priced out" so you seem to be reserving your intense dislike for a particular and quite small minority of new arrivals. The thing is, they really are a small group, and you are being unreasonable not to mention unrealistic to expect that only people from a certain class or salary bracket can move to a particular area. It's just not how capitalism works.

In the meantime I shall continue to browse my property porn sites from my sweaty shoebox in a scruffy London suburb, dreaming of my own front door and a garden.

@Blueeyedgirl21 I picked up a black can from Liverpool Street once who recognises my Suffolk accent.. although he was originally a Londoner he brought a house in Norfolk but worked in London 3 days a week. I have fellow NHS friends who live in Suffolk but catch the train to London to work at St Thomas’s etc.

@thesecondnamegame the housing market here is the same, EA here are advertising houses in London before they advertise them locally. I cannot afford to move at the moment as the prices are bananas here. People are buying houses without even looking round them in person, and having bidding wars over property. I cannot afford to pay over the odds to stay in my village and will no doubt have to leave to afford the size home we need.

@SoupDragon

Um. What I want is for Lancashire and the north east to get a look-in. It's not northern investment at the moment, that's a load of shit.