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.

@merrymouse

London has more funding per head of population

Is that true? I would have thought that more remote parts of the U.K. have higher per capita expenditure, but London benefits from economies of scale.

Don't know if true or not, but it's clearly not enough and/or very unevenly distributed. London is the capital of homelessness.

Certainly the money isn't going where it's needed. To help and to house London's 165,000 homeless.

Lots of people live outside of London but travel for work, I assume for jobs which are available and / or for higher wages. Loads rent or buy a small property in London and go home at week ends.
Prices in London are affected also as well as packed out trains and tubes.
Works both ways londoners are allowed to move like anyone else.

I've seen plenty of communities mixing in my area of Brum. My friend's son is White British and is doing a media apprenticeship with a Punjabi film studio. We have a local community board of people from many countries and religions who organise litter picks, helped get food to the vulnerable at the height of Covid etc. My DC have always been surrounded by Sikh's, Muslim's, Jew's and different forms of Christianity through their school and I love it. I was raised in an insular white British area further out in the region and am glad my DC aren't having the same experience. My 8 year old was telling me all about his friend's Ramadan plans the other week. At his age I knew nothing of other cultures.

JassyRadlett
I think though that’s something around the idea that the majority of people in London come from somewhere else - whether that’s elsewhere in the UK or another country - to a degree that you only get in a handful of global cities. So the idea of local identity is quite different to those places where you have a larger part of the population who are ‘local’ for want of a better word.

I would say it's the same in Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds, which, for better or worse, are fast becoming the Londons of the North and Midlands but it isn't so much those cities that are a problem or the poorest. It's the urban areas around them. Places like Bradford, Rochdale and Wolverhampton

The shiny cities of the north are a long way from the industrial power houses they once were but are gentrifying at a pace. Big crane counts and high rise buildings shooting up all the time. Fashionable and happening districts popping up. Manchester and Leeds have changed beyond all recognition in just a few years but they are not where most urban "local" if you like, northerners live

People who don't know the north only think of Manchester and Leeds, but it's the conurbations around them that will suffer the most by colonisation from elsewhere

It's the wider Greater Manchseter and West Yorkshire areas that still have trouble dealing with the fallout of deindustrialisation of their mills and mines shutting down and millions of people still affected it. These are the areas with the poverty.

Even if all Londoners committed mass suicide and the city sank into the sea, the haters would still complain that ‘that London’ was in the news.

Not the OP (who took comments on board) but definitely some of the other posters on here. One in particular who I won't name but who is eaten up with misplaced and ignorant blind hatred of London, and who thinks the misfortune of London - the capital of homelessness - is something to envy and resent.

No. Should build a hadrians style wall, at york, 😁thats as far down as i can cope with😎

Lots of people move from Manchester to London maybe its when they also move back they create the inflation. Prices in Manchester have also been going up because with the footballers and music culture its become a desirable place to live. House prices are going up all over the country.

I mean, other areas need support too, but to not first deal with the most urgent issue - London's extreme homelessness crisis, the worse in the whole country, is deeply wrong. It's immoral. People have been making money out of London for years (and bashing Londoners at the same time). Now they owe it to the 165,000 homeless to help and house them.

Two thirds (a massive majority) of all of England's homeless families in temporary accommodation are in London.

London is in a housing emergency.

I know where you mean, used to live right next door to where your talking about. But I left the city and now live in a small northern town, and couldn’t be happier, could never see myself going back. But unfortunately yabu, nobody should have their movement restricted, and you might move somewhere one day and realise it was the best thing you ever did, should you not be welcomed if you took residence in another part of the country?

However the north south divide is a horrendous scandal, but on the flip side we don’t have to find a good enough job that supports living in London, I lived their in my early 20’s and was paying for a small studio flat, what people would be paying now for a 5 bed mortgage in Manchester.

Well, the OP didn’t come back following her various musings yesterday, so maybe this thread has helped her see things in a slightly different light.

However the north south divide is a horrendous scandal

Yes it is. Not much in life more essential than a home.

The housing and homelessness crisis in London is an emergency.

@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.

I think I know where you mean, op, and I totally get the London thing, used to be based in London, but having to live in their second choice place...Actually happened - said by a man wearing a cashmere jumper as a cape. I kid you not, and this was fairly recently, in a pub in the NQ. There’s my first issue- the wearing of a jumper/ cape in the NQ… gestures to a street across the way ‘ and look at the state of that- now, if that was in London, it’d be made to look so much nicer… also the people here aren’t very friendly when you tell them things.. no sh.. Sherlock.

I grew up in Cornwall but had to leave to buy because I couldn't afford anywhere there. Unfortunately with Cornwall it's not even a case of people buying to live there. They buy homes as 2nd homes (from all over the UK). Cornwall has a lot of empty properties throughout the winter. That is incredibly frustrating

Are you talking about Chorlton? I have family who live there and the last time I visited it looked like / felt like Hoxton. Or Altrincham / Hale?

If you are talking about Salford - that was an absolute shit hole 20 years ago and I was really pleased Media City / the lowry etc went there as it needed substantial investment (a bit like Manchester city centre pre the IRA bomb)

@sambaa

Well, the OP didn’t come back following her various musings yesterday, so maybe this thread has helped her see things in a slightly different light.

It did. She took on board other poster's comments. I think that takes a lot - many people refuse to acknowledge they might have got something wrong. She has my respect. I suspect her initial posts were influenced by the hate filled narratives of other people, who so often like to perpetuate an untrue myth about the capital of homelessness 'having it good'. OP made the mistake of blaming long suffering Londoners, but she acknowledged that later on in the thread. Her concerns about housing imbalance and affordability - across the UK - are valid.

@user1472151176

I grew up in Cornwall but had to leave to buy because I couldn't afford anywhere there. Unfortunately with Cornwall it's not even a case of people buying to live there. They buy homes as 2nd homes (from all over the UK). Cornwall has a lot of empty properties throughout the winter. That is incredibly frustrating

Yes it seems to suffer the same problem as London. Second homes - bought as bolt holes or investments - left empty.

YABU I live in a place (south east) that has always had high prices and you can’t get up the ladder or on it without help. You wanted to “level up” now you’ve got it

@user1472151176

I grew up in Cornwall but had to leave to buy because I couldn't afford anywhere there. Unfortunately with Cornwall it's not even a case of people buying to live there. They buy homes as 2nd homes (from all over the UK). Cornwall has a lot of empty properties throughout the winter. That is incredibly frustrating

So does London sadly. The house next door to me is owned by someone who lives in Singapore and has never visited in 4 years that they have owned it (so not even holidaying as a second home), not rented-must be just an investment and we have the overgrown garden issue too. None of this is unique to particular places and no ‘one’ location to blame.

My last London workplace consisted of:

Canadians
Australian
Chinese
Indian
Irish
People from Bedfordshire
Essex
Yorkshire
Manchester
Hartlepool
Newcastle
Scotland
Northamptonshire
And approx 3 londoners

Can we all just accept people move around at different points in their life depending on what suits them best.

It sounds to me like the SE is in horrendous need of overspill estates, and lots of them.

What about all of those green spaces in Kent, Surrey and the Home Counties? I'm sure some 'locals' there would have something to say about London overspill social housing being built there, but the situation in London sounds horrific and something needs to be done whether privileged people in other areas like it or not. Right now lots of London's homeless are being sent up here to Birmingham, and we're struggling as is. People from Birmingham are being sent to you guessed it, Manchester.www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-56536212#:~:text=A%20young%20boy%20had%20to,housing%20available%20in%20the%20city. And why should London's homeless have to be sent to completely different regions? If London is full, it's full, but there are places much closer to home than the West Midlands.

YABU.

Londoners really don’t want to live up North 😂. Some just don’t have a choice.

People can live where they like btw.

I'd say Cornwall is the most similar to London actually. Whilst London is the capital of homelessness, I think the problem of unaffordable housing is hitting Cornwall hard.

Reposting for those who don't believe me (and no Flax. This isn't a lie by 'biased' media. It's a fact. Come and see for yourself, if you think it's made up).

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

London faces the most severe homelessness crisis in the country.

Those Londoners having it good...

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

The bit you're missing is how hard it is to get yourself established in London in the first place. It's not free. As a northerner who moved down south, I can tell you that we were substantially poorer than all my northern relatives in every way for years.

We lived in shite rented places long after all my northern friends had bought property, and then lived in flats while similarly paid family up north lived in mansions.

The Londoners who are moving there will likely have had a similar crap standard of living for years in order to afford the mortgage on their tiny house in London.

All that's happening now is that they are breathing a sigh of relief that mortgaging your right arm actually buys them something worth paying for.

My husband and I have been killing ourselves for years working full time in stressful, senior jobs to afford the huge mortgage a super modest house in London suburbs.

Our mortgage would terrify all my Northern family who all owe substantially less than £100k in mortgage on homes worth at least three times that.

If we move elsewhere, it's not like that money was free. It wasn't, we paid it off over years. It's not a freebie, but expectations of property are different down here.

Almost all the professionals we know our are or younger are living in flats with kids, and they make the best of it. If they were lucky enough to get a job out of London, who could blame them for moving out?

The housing market is a tragedy for anyone younger, but has made paper millions for people who had reserves of capital at the outset. Its a disease that is spreading outwards from London, but it's caused by policy, not people.

Regional folk "I can't believe you'd spend £1m on a house you can get in my town for £250k".

Also regional folk "don't buy our houses". Sad face.

Well, which is it then..?

Find your own little cheap town and go live in it? Why shouldnt someone move wherever they want? Yes I agree house prices are not offering people the opportunity to buy but that is a different issue. The Government are raking it in.....they should encourage lower prices. Instead of savings mortgages. Everyone should be able to buy a house of their own and also get paid a decent wage!