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This summer I reached the milestone of having lived in London for a decade. This means two things: one, that I have spent more of my adult life in this city than in the place I come from, Belfast. And two: that I have spent, conservatively, hundreds of thousands of pounds on rent and expenses for the privilege of doing so. Both of these realisations are sobering.
But — particularly when it comes to the latter — are they things I can complain about? After all, I chose to move to London. I knew it was expensive to live here. Am I justified in moaning about an outcome I anticipated before I even left George Best airport?
I’m not alone in wondering. Every generation has their London exodus, and we’re on the cusp of our next one. The last exodus took place during Covid, when a wave of young renters fled the city during relaxed WFH practices. Two years post-pandemic, many of us are leaving again.
Millennials should be logging into Instagram to see nothing but a sea of baby showers and weddings, but instead it’s all going-away parties of friends migrating to commuter-belt towns in order to pay for those weddings and babies, or because they’ve graduated from the age at which it’s fun to live in house shares, but aren’t able to financially support being single and living alone.
Figures recently released by estate agents Hamptons show that in the first half of the year, Londoners purchased 33,130 homes outside the capital, and that the typical first-time buyer with a 15 per cent deposit leaving London is still paying £642 a month less on their mortgage than someone buying in the capital — a new record. Those trying to buy their first home made up 30 per cent of the Londoner exodus, a figure that has been trending upwards for more than a decade.
The average number of miles those people flee is 23.8, though some go further afield, where they can be ensconced in towns such as Horsham, Stroud and Waverley, which had the biggest increase of Londoners buying their first home.
But were these people ever Londoners to begin with? At the end of August, arguments raged online about whether or not people who weren’t born and raised in the city could justifiably complain about the price of living here. The “leaving London” genre of writing was branded “self indulgent”, perhaps even more so than its predecessor, “leaving New York”.
“I think you’re only allowed to be upset about being priced out of London if you are from here”, said one viral post on X. “[Or] at the very least lived here before age 16. [You] can’t move to my city and then be upset [you] can’t afford it!” The implication is clear; that those who chose to move to London were interlopers or tourists, play-acting at struggle while actively contributing to gentrification in the process.
There’s some truth to that theory, at least. The Times recently reported that Gen Z creatives are moving further into Essex, to locations like Leigh-on-Sea and Westcliff-on-Sea, having found that the previous London exodus location du jour, Margate, had seen prices driven up — by increased demand. And for those left behind in the basin of price-gouging that is Zones 1 to 6, it’s understandable that it would sting to see the people who had previously asked you for £2.38 for your share of the Uber home jet off to the home counties to suddenly buy their own homes.
Undoubtedly, demand outstripping supply means that moving to London makes you complicit in the city’s gentrification. How can you not, when you’re helping to split ex-council houses into Spare Roomified HMOs with three Gail’s Bakery locations within a one-mile radius?
But what are the alternatives for the “new” Londoners who don’t have the family help and high salaries that can support a move to countryside idylls? What is the alternative to moving here in the first place, when so many industries are concentrated in the city, and the train infrastructure to other parts of England is currently so poor?
Many working-class creatives still follow the well-trodden path of moving to London to start their careers, even if the rental crisis and the high costs of student loans (as well as the changes to squatters’ rights made just over a decade ago, and more recently those to universal credit) have made that path more difficult to follow.
The mentality that “only those who were born here through quirk of fate can complain about the difficulty of living here” too has sinister undertones. Migrants, whether from elsewhere in England, Europe or further afield, of course have the choice to move to London. They also have the freedom to complain about the relentless financial precarity of doing so.
We should remember that freedom of movement — into and out of this city — is, of course, a privilege. London can be an unforgiving place, both for people who were born here and for those who move here as adults. When we turn on each other for the narcissism of these small differences we direct our attention away from the real villain of the story: exploitative landlords.
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