What is the UK like to live in now?

[Arianasande]

Im originally from the UK. I currently live in Spain and I have done for the last five years. I work in student services. I interviewed for a job in the UK last year, didn't get it but she told me she'd keep my details on file. They just rang me this year and asked me would I like to do an interview again as the job has become available again.

I said why not and did the interview. They've offered me the job. The job and benefits are really good, and it's in a nice part of the UK. And part of me would like to go back. I wanted to go back to the UK for a year. I love Spain but sometimes the language barrier can be hard. And I wanted to live somewhere where everyone spoke English again for a while

However im also really nervous about going back to the UK.

What's making me nervous is that there are lot of English people working here in my school in Spain, and they are always telling me how awful the UK is now. That they hate it,that it's awful.

I know I won't really know until I decide to make the move. But I just wanted to know how do you think it is living in the UK now?

I think I'm just a bit scared of change. But we all are !

You never really know what somewhere is like until you go there.

But I'm going to trust my gut and go to the UK

It depends where you will be living and how well that matches the things you value. What do you care about? What’s your ideal and how close would your new location be?

And I hear you about navigating the different languages in Spain!

Yeah no sorry, I wasn't trying to be nasty but rereading my post it does come across that way 🙃.

Things that you will find noticeable in the past 5 years:
Road conditions - potholes, uneven surfaces, poor markings
NHS care - difficult to get GP appointment, long waiting lists for referrals, very hard to get NHS dental care
Cost of living - food and energy costs in particular. Probably Spain has also seen some of these rises, although you will spend more on heating in the UK
General shabbiness - most towns and villages are not well kept and look more run down
Increase in dogs and dog poo
Lack of obvious police presence and "lower level" crime basically going uninvestigated

I expect most of these were already issues five years ago but have got worse since then.

It's highly variable. For some people living in poverty it's truly shit. For lucky people like me, it's great. We live in a nice house, in a beautiful area, great state schools, really good NHS service. We have a great life. I'm aware that maby people don't and inequality has increased hugely
If you're comfortable you can have an equally good life. If you live in a deprived area it can be horrible.

I think it’s very much a postcode lottery so really research the area you will be living in well, such as the nhs in that region, I love the UK but my area isn’t working great

It's interesting that the responses are more or less split between 'it depends where you live' and 'we have a great life' which demonstrates what an incredibly divided society the UK/England has become.

Where I live in the Cotswolds, people look down on us because we 'only' live in a 60s estate house whereas the area is packed with cottage dwellers driving 4x4s and enormous, over-wide new cars.

I would say this extends to the whole of the south and south west. Property prices are eye watering as are difficult-to-find rental properties; unapprehended shop lifting is the norm; train travel is absurdly expensive and the trains are dirty and packed; there is a lot of crime and an over-stretched police force, for instance, ebikes are popular now so there are gangs waiting on remote cycle paths like the Bristol-Bath path or canal towpaths, to attack ecyclists and steal their bikes. In general, people don't talk or answer their front doors of say thanks. On the roads, I've noticed that people don't signal at roundabouts or even stop at the give way lines, this is new and quite shocking.

On the other hand, perfectly nice people live quietly somewhere that is more decent, usually they have inherited money from a family house sale and can afford something better than average or they have a well-paying job or a double income of £100k or thereabouts.

I would say the UK will seem a shock after Spain but then it depends where you are thinking of living....

Road conditions - potholes, uneven surfaces, poor markings

Spanish roads suffer from all the above too! Especially potholes.

I don't have a problem with the weather. Prefer it to the blistering heat in my home country, especially with global warming kicking in.

But where I am in London, can barely get hold of my GP.
Still, things may be different where you are. Since you are single and have no dependents, I would give it a try for a year.

You do make it sound like you'd be going somewhere you've never experienced yet you are from the UK....

Haven't you been back at all to visit any family or any friends in the the years you been in Spain and Italy?

That summary would be valid for anywhere in the world, not just the UK - live in depravation and poverty and it's crap, wherever you are.

It depends whereabouts you will be living. Unfortunately there are too many people in the UK now and something strange has happened to British Good Manners. They have been undermined by a laissez faire attitude / ignorance, so generally ones experience everywhere is less pleasant. There is more litter and less smiling. It’s very sad.

I'd say it would greatly depend on where in the UK

No. All of my close family have moved away from the UK too. They live in a different country to me. I don't have any close family living in the UK anymore.

People move around a lot these days.

What's making me a bit stressed is that any English people that i meet in Spain, tell me that the UK is a total sithole.

They say to me "you'd be a fool to move there. It's absolutely gone to the dogs".

Etc etc. When so many people tell me this, it does make me think, God how bad is it these days. Is it that bad

Still ill go and move to the UK and work there for a year. If I really don't like it, I can always move again.

Maybe I will like it

It depends where you will live and whether you will be able to have the lifestyle you want. The UK isn't completely different to how it was five or ten years ago, it's just a bit worse in every area of life. Prices are higher than they were and satisfaction with life is lower. Things are more run down and more crowded.

The thing to compare though is not so much "is the place I'm moving to worse than it was five years ago" - because yes, obviously it is. What you need to think about is where you will live, both area and property. A nice home in a nice area is still a nice place to live. Better areas are still better areas.

Yeah I know.

It's just everyone that I say it to here, that I'm moving to the UK, keep trying to talk me out of going.

They say "you don't realise how bad it is. It's like a third world hell on earth"

It's all extremely negative.

But I just need to make my own decision I know. If I make a mistake and hate it, I won't be trapped there

Heh. I am originally from a " third world" country and no way is the UK that bad. They call us developing countries these days.😊

Obviously expats have to justify moving.

When did you leave the UK?
I personally think it's fine . I'm not from Britain but have lived here for 20 years now. Wouldn't dream of going back to my home country (EU)

If you've got money, are earning well or able to be frugal then it's great. Lots of the issues are around price increases, house prices and childcare cost which are making people feel less well off.

I think it’s partly the media - the bad news about immigration, shoplifting, stabbings, child Poverty has been sidelined thanks to Trump so the country seems better -also Labour have started being upbeat and positive. Also no country is immune-I just read an article about squatters taking over properties in a big way in Spain!
The U.K. has problems but so does Spain.

I like living here. I loathe the heat and dislike beaches, so places like Australia and Spain are wasted on me. On the other hand, I love history, poetry, literature and architecture. I also like seasons – the smell of bonfires in October, the cold snaps in January, the countryside in the Spring, etc. The UK suits me. Cambridge or Edinburgh on a cold, bright, sunny morning in April is my idea of heaven. Lots of things about the UK piss me off (the constant cloud and drizzle, the dark Novembers and Decembers, etc), but I do find it an interesting place. I understand why some people want to leave. If you are young and you crave blue seas and hot sun, then OK, but anyone who says the UK is boring is obviously unimaginative and dim. Last weekend, for example, I went to Oxford and saw the pub where Tolkien read Lord of the Rings to C S Lewis, and the college where Oscar Wilde studied. It's things like that that make me grateful to live here. I love the way Britain's cultural history is so closely wound into the landscape. So, for example, the Yorkshire moors mean the Brontes, Heathcliff, Ted Hughes. Liverpool means the Beatles. Bath means Jane Austen. London means Dickens. When you walk around Cambridge, you can drink in the pub where the people who discovered DNA announced they'd found the "secret to life," and see the colleges where Newton and Charles Darwin and Byron and Wordsworth and Nabokov and countless others lived and studied. If you are interested in history and ideas, the UK feeds the imagination.

For me the worst thing is the overcrowding. There are just too many people jammed onto this little island. Closely linked to that is the shit housing. Because there are so many people, the demand is high, and that means developers take advantage, building horrible little rabbit hutches, squeezing them on top of one another, and then charging ridiculous prices. Too many people, crap housing, and not enough blue sky. Other than that, I like this country.

I went on a magical mystery tour on Saturday as picking up stuff I had bought online all over the county I live in.

We had the quaint village, it’s not too far from us. It is incredibly expensive to buy a house there, it’s a 15 min drive from me. My little town is perfectly fine. Then city shithole would describe the next place. Then a huge council estate, too many reform posters up in the windows for my liking and kids in balaclavas . Stereotypes abounded all round. As usual if you have you money don’t have to live in aforementioned shitholes. The quaint village and my town are fine, the estate and the city just awful.

Shit mostly. DH fell and broke his hip on Tuesday. Took 5 hours for an ambulance to arrive. He ended up on a trolley in resuss as there was nowhere else to put him.

Things I've noticed, but of course it's going to be area-dependent:

• food has gone up in price massively: supermarkets put prices up when inflation was high and that trend continues
• the quality of fruit and veg is often (not always) lower than it used to be, and the shelves are too often sparse, lots of items missing
• cheese is fantastically expensive, as is butter, and the range of cheese seems to have about halved after Brexit
• as someone said, lots of hollowed-out town centres. Betting shops/charity shops/a couple of sad gift shops/a little co-op or Nisa
• there's a real gap between what's for the urban hipster or wealthy population, and what's not, in terms of services. You need money to live as well as you could with a starting salary in the 90s/early 2000s
• rents are just mental, I don't even know where to start with that
• energy costs: they are fleecing us constantly
• trains: might be ok, might be fucking awful, often on the same line
• eating out is either lovely restaurant, no change from £150 for two with a couple of drinks, OR Zizzi-type places, it's hard to find something in between
• hotels are way more expensive than 10 years ago
• government is pretty poor at a local level: there's no money
• government at national level is frustrating/moral standards in government have really plummeted
• there really are a lot of small-minded people quite openly being racist/misogynistic
• there's a bit more outdoor eating than there used to be but of course the weather...