Enjoying the suburbia debate very much! And it’s made me try and pay more attention to what I mean by it…
….We have friends who’ve moved out to, say Bromley, and to me that feels massively different to ‘London’ (though obviously I know I know there’s no such thing as a singular ‘London’). The streets are bigger and wider and leafier. The ratio of residential buildings to businesses feels much larger. There’s more of a focus on cars rather than people walking around (and of course the public transport connections are different). The local high streets feels more prosaic. The political vibe feels more conservative.
BUT this is compared to a very idealised romanticised gentrified view of inner London, isn’t it!? We’d all love to live near an independent butcher baker and candlestick maker (and no doubt do our shopping at Aldi anyway). And so much of inner London isn’t like that at all.
There’s no doubt a fair amount of snobbery at play in my opinions and I’m prone to thinking of suburbia as lacking, say, interesting independent businesses as a whole. And just generally being more conservative with a small c… It’s no fairer, I’m sure, to characterise all of suburbia in that way than to characterise all of inner London in the romantic bustling buzzy-but-villagey way.
On the other hand, our friends gained massively from the move in so many ways - in particular a lovely garden, which is obviously much less likely in more ‘inner’ boroughs where the properties are more dominated by Victorian terraces. And, good state schools!
So hey, maybe over the next year or two we’ll decide that’s the compromise we want to make anyway. As people have said, our budget won’t stretch to anything like a perfect balance of these factors. I perhaps should have been clearer about our current situation in the OP, but wanted to create a thread more about people sharing their own ideals and debates rather than trying to solve a problem for me if that makes sense - interested in how others weigh these things up!