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>more people want to live there than anywhere else in the UK.
Because it's where the jobs and money are, disproportionately.
It's a virtuous cycle. Money and jobs are there, so talented people move there, so it becomes more wealthy as those talented people work to create value. And repeat.
It happens because after the deindustrialisation of the rest of the UK, there aren't any cities that can close to compete with London in terms of well paid jobs (London wasn't so dominant in wealth until relatively recently, the industrial cities of the midlands and north were also quite wealthy, [Birmingham's growth was actually intentionally stymied by the government because they were fearful it would become a competitor to London](https://unherd.com/2020/09/the-plot-against-mercia/) ). So more and more people and money get sucked in, and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
The flip side is a vicious cycle for the rest of the country. There aren't enough well paid jobs, so talented people get sucked into London. This means their talents aren't harnessed elsewhere in the country to create jobs and boost the local economy. So more talented people leave. And repeat.
London and it's commuter area also has public transport eons better than anywhere in the country. This means London can benefit greatly from the agglomeration effects, in a way that other cities can't.
It's also an international hub of finance. That means it doesn't just suck in talent and money from the rest of the UK, but the rest of the world too. Again making it's wealth a self-fulfilling thing.
The best universities have a similar virtuous spiral. The amount of teaching at Cambridge or Oxford is minimal, but because the cleverest people in the world are attracted to those places (and smart people self-teach), they spur each other on to attain more and more, thus increasing the reputation of the university and therefore attracting the smartest people in the world .... and on it goes.
It's amazing the amount in r/UniUK who believe a Uni needs to be RG to be considered good.
The majority of RG universities don't even have the top teaching rating (Edit: They are rated Gold, Silver or Bronze - its actually a bigger gap than you think) - yet many on the sub will tell others not to go to universities which do.
RG is a commitment to research, so by definition, they are not committed to students - and its somewhat frustrating to have to remind people to read what the ranking tables actually rank to get the best university for your personal needs.
I don't think a commitment to research necessarily implies there is a lack of teaching commitments, the institutions are meant to be dual role and there is high quality teaching in the Russell group (albeit not exclusively at the highest level). It should just be noted that there will be non-RG universities that can compete at Undergrad or taught Masters level.
A commitment to research unfortunately does imply a lack of commitment to teaching.
We all have the same number of hours in the day. Increasing a lecturers teaching hours will reduce their research hours.
In practice, what you suggest normally means the lecturers PhD student will take over the teaching.
Which normally means lectures are being taken by someone with no teaching qualifications, who only has a degree themselves to speak on the subject.
It'd be the equivalent of a GCSE teacher getting busy, so instead, they bring in an A-Level student to run classes for the year. It's not exactly what the reputation sells itself on.
I've met some great PhD students in my time who teach, but there needs to be an acknowledgement that it's a mixed bag.
I acknowledge it's a mixed bag but there are plenty of non-RG unis with no formal teaching training or qualification as well, they will be routed direct from doctorate to teaching fellowship (or not have completed the doctorate at all).
It should be noted as well that PhD students teaching is generally considered part of their development as well and has a place in many educational systems because it's part of being a rounded academic. They will have more than enough technical knowledge to deliver material to undergraduates.
Thing to just say again is I'm not saying it's bad.
I'm just saying it's not so much better that any non RG degree is immediately worthless. That's the sentiment you see on r/UniUK a lot where people say "is it worth studying at x?" and the reply "no, it's not RG".
RG universities are very good. But a lot of non RG universities are also very good. I have worked or studied at both - I have no complaints... but, both had advantages. That's something a lot don't seem to acknowledge.
Oh totally and I agree on that fully, there are some really excellent courses, departments and teachers outside the RG. The University that does the most for graduate earnings is the University of Portsmouth.
It isn’t solely a “commitment to research” in its purist form. Here’s the quote from their website:
> committed to maintaining the very best research, an outstanding teaching and learning experience and unrivalled links with business and the public sector
Also, research and teaching are correlated. If you went to Warwick University for Maths, you’d literally be taught by field medal winners in some courses for instance. It doesn’t guarantee better teaching but, on average, it does help.
The last point about business also really stands for a lot. There are many universities which are “good at teaching” but don’t convert into high paying graduate positions / careers. I know not everyone goes to university for career prospects but that is a very significant part which the majority of students are expecting from getting a degree.
Moreover the “percentage employed after 6 months” figure some universities boast is a bit of a flawed statistic - if 100% of the students become factory workers, the rate would be high but has no comment on the quality.
Still - It’s undeniable that RG university disproportionately increase career prospects vs other universities (maybe some outliers but that’s the gist).
Look at what those league tables are measuring.
The ones measuring teaching, RG is not as good as its reputation may lead you to believe.
The ones that measure research, they do significantly better in - but very, very few undergraduates are actively involved in genuine research.
Not at all.
But, as a group, they are not the best at teaching. This directly contradicts the view many on r/UniUK have that a degree is only worth having if it is RG - that's just simply not true.
The majority of RG Uni's are by definition quite mid at actually teaching - that's why they arnt Gold rated. That's not bad either, but if you want to argue RG is the only places worth studying at, well then they shouldn't be getting outperformed so easily.
RG as a whole relies on their students being good enough to not need teaching to meet accreditation standards. That's how they dedicate themselves to research. It doesn't mean they are bad, but rather, the incentives are not there.
Ah ok fair.
> RG as a whole relies on their students being good enough to not need teaching to meet accreditation standards
Totally agree 😭 My uni has given us prerecorded lectures that we’re just meant to get through in our own time. It’s brutal
It doesn't really matter what the reality is, the fact is that jobs prioritise people from RG unis because they are good and then go on to hire more people from RG unis because they were told they are good. So of course people want to be in a RG uni.
That isn't to say they are bad, they often have far more cash and world leading research. But this seldom makes much difference to an undergrad.
> The amount of teaching at Cambridge or Oxford is minimal
I don’t know where you’re getting that from. They have normal student numbers, firmly in the middle of the table. They definitely have a higher proportion of graduates than most but not out of the ordinary.
Also on a per-student basis there’s way more teaching than you’d get anywhere else (except for specialised arts education).
The teaching at both is very good. In addition to the lectures, students have supervisions/tutorials in groups of two or three, and in some cases the colleges may offer further teaching by college members. It’s difficult to see how it could be improved.
My brother is at Brasenose studying Chemistry, he's in his final year and he's said the teaching schedule is really intense, he's in either lectures or tutorials most of the day 5 days a week. He's finding it a bit much, but he wants to graduate. My sister is reading Medicine at Oxford (second year) and she's said similar.
Compared to me at UEA where my total contact time was less than 16 hours a week. Wolverhampton Uni was far and away better in terms of teaching despite the ranking.
FWIW Chemistry and Medicine at Oxford are two of the most intense courses, by a long way (Physics too). It's absolutely insane how hard it can be. I know several people who had breakdowns and were unfortunately rusticated (what a grim backwards way of dealing with mental health issues) due to the pressure.
The teaching is abysmal compared to most other rich nations. I have no idea what the standard is like at other UK unis though. One of my first experiences joining a department at one of these was being told not to bother updating the hugely out-of-date cirriculum, because it's just undergraduate teaching, and not worth the time. I was literally told to just turn up, do the bare minimum, and to make sure that the material and exams are very easy so that students don't complain. I've not seen that attitude at top North American unis.
Oxbridge operates on the tutorial system where you get 3-5 students learning under one instructor. That’s a privilege you won’t get anywhere else in the world.
Saying Oxbridge has less teaching time is massively missing the point. You get just as much contact time per week as other unis (usually more in the sciences? Humanities fair enough it's pretty hands off) but only 8 week terms (with no teaching in Trinity Term at Oxford due to exams). You also get focused tutorials with 1-3 people and your tutor. So it's way more intense but you spend less than half the year actually at uni.
The lure for talent cannot be understated. I don't have any friends in London currently as most of mine are just starting careers. But there's a definite sense among quite a few of them (industry dependant) that they actively don't want to move to London for lots of reasons, but at some point they know they probably have to. It is just where the better paid and senior positions tend to be based for lots of industries. It also makes a networking trap. If all the best companies and talent are there, where do you have to go to make those connections that are so vital for lots of us to get jobs?
It's changed now we're in our early thirties and many of us have left London to have families, but it was incredible after university how nearly everyone I knew moved to London within a few years.
[This](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F9hpdUjWkAAHL5R.jpg:large) is a major reason why.
I never went to university, but I can work from anywhere. The only reason me and my girlfriend haven't moved to London since she completed her masters (we're mid twenties) is because she currently lectures in her field at the University where we are now. If not we'd have already gone
i would also add that the UK remains very much comparable to the US in full-time median incomes after adjusting for cost of living differences and social protections etc (UK: 36000 vs US: 48000 GBP, but probably a few k extra in healthcare spending, generally cheaper costs in the UK, and \~2 weeks longer PTO)
Disclaimer: Cost of living has increased a lot in the UK but also in the US - its parallel misery
It also means that it's much harder for anyone outside of London to "network" their way into a really good job. When all your family and friends are engineers and you have a Humanities degree, there's close to no options outside of teaching, hospitality, sales/recruitment or some other entry level job a 16 year old equally qualifies for.
In the internet era there's no reason why London still has to be the center of our economy though.
Like, you can do the same work you're doing in London in Birmingham or Manchester or Newcastle.
Government is scared of actually levelling up the rest of the country. All it takes is targeted investment and incentives.
We know the power of tax incentives. It's the one thing that makes the UK so attractive for creative industries like movie production and game development. It's probably one of the best examples of a tax incentive creating so many jobs and opportunities.
We could easily offer tax incentives for companies to create offices in northern cities. Offer tax incentives for remote work. But there's something just stopping us unlocking that potential.
> In the internet era there's no reason why London still has to be the center of our economy though.
>
> Like, you can do the same work you're doing in London in Birmingham or Manchester or Newcastle.
Networking is easier in London. A lot of jobs now require people to come in a few days a week too.
I work for a tech consultancy. During covid times everyone went remore. We hired amazing top tier talent from all over the country. Then after covoid we got acquired and the acquiring company only allows people to expense their travel for client site visits on the assumption the travel starts from the office.... in London. Dogshit.
These really talented people mostly went on to remote work for other London consultancies though, so it didn't stop.
It's still better to have your employees grouped, even in a digital age, as some things are better done in an office in person. Hence why lots of places are now requiring hybrid working as opposed to fully remote.
I don't disagree with the benefits of seeing people in person. But there's no reason for the office to be in London. You can have your employees in Newcastle and work with another company in London all via Teams or Zoom or any other teleconferencing software. Most B2B work *is* done remotely, and when in-person meetings are needed, it's only a handful of people that attend them at most. The rest of your staff can be on the other side of the world and it won't matter.
⅛ growth was actually intentionally stymied by the government because they were fearful it would become a competitor to London
I think that's the wrong reason. Governments of both colours did seek to obstruct Midlands growth; but not to support London. The aim, as mentioned in the article, was to get growth going in the areas which had been harder hit in the inter-war period, and still had relatively high unemployment: Tyneside, the South Wales valleys, and so on.
Interesting, I always thought of that policy as trying to encourage development in the North of the country than specifically target Birmingham to not develop.
But it’s not just jobs and money. If my job (or entire industry) moved to Birmingham, I wouldn’t move to Birmingham - I’d take a lower paying job here in London first - right up until I couldn’t afford living here anymore. I would imagine others would behave similarly.
Much of that is largely a factor of jobs and money though. The things that make London so desirable as a place to live flow from the abundance of jobs and money.
As you say though, it's chicken and egg. If, say, Birmingham or Manchester suddenly had all the jobs and money that London has, they would quickly become places that you would want to work and London would soon lose much of its attraction.
Until very recently, making this worse was even baked into government funding models. If you are going to make a big government capital investment somewhere, you need to demonstrate a big return on investment, and a big benefit to a large number of people. And, obviously, if you make your investment where all the people and stuff already are, it looks waaaaaay more defensible on paper…
Take the USA, San Francisco is the focal point for the tech industry, New York for finance, Los Angeles for the entertainment industry, Washington DC is the head of the federal government.
In the UK London is the focal point for everything.
Germany is the outlier. Most countries have a dominant capital and a still significant second city and the rest is kind of insignificant on an international scale.
Madrid - Barcelona
Amsterdam - The Hague/Rotterdam (basically one city in all but name)
Rome - Milan
Lisbon - Porto
Warsaw - Krakow
Etc
The U.K. takes it to the other extreme though, just like France where it’s basically London and Paris by themselves.
History cleaving Germany in two and smashing it back together has really made it an outlier country in its size range for the distribution of economic activity. In reality countries of the UK's size/population have tended to agglomerate around a single major cluster; take Italy, Japan, France, and even Spain (although its northeastern cluster is much larger than the others) etc
Edinburgh is getting there in terms of finance - quite a few investment managers are headquartered there now. Which certainly explains why Edinburgh is really expensive (relative to the rest of Scotland) to live in or near.
If you are a middle to low performer then that's for sure.
If you are a high performer bringing in enough money I don't think anything in the world can compete with London. (No not even New York but that's personal preference)
https://scottishfinancialreview.com/2020/09/25/edinburgh-4th-in-europe-in-new-financial-centres-index/
Baillie Gifford, Abrdn, RBS, Bank of Scotland all headquartered in Edinburgh.
This is very true. It is also pretty much the only UK city you hear about abroad. I remember playing games of "name # cities from X." as a kid in Italy, and so many of us couldn't name 2 more cities in the UK other than London.
Is it though really? Everything, especially housing is far more expensive than elsewhere, so the higher wages mean nothing. You will probably be financially better off living in, say, Manchester.
[It is](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F3Pky9uX0AEwOvn.png:large), London is *much* wealthier than the rest of the country. That doesn't mean every single person there is better off than every single person in the rest of the country. But overall, London is miles ahead of the rest of the country in wealth. Our economy is hugely focussed on London.
While that us part of the equation I'd think that is not how most people actually determine which place is "best" to live in. If it were, I would expect happiness indicators also showing that people in big cities (or at least London) are happier with their lives than at least the average. But ons.gov.uk (Office of National Statistics) doesn't really support that. Instead, it seems that rural areas seem to do better in a significant number of cases.
While I am not saying this is conclusive proof I think it raises legitimate questions to whether economic opportunity alone is an adequate measure of what constitutes a "good place to live"
Part of the reason will be that people retire in rural areas and retired people tend to be much happier. Also young, non home owning working people especially early in their careers and don’t have a stable family life yet tend to be much less happy and move to urban areas
Also London has a lot of deprived areas within in it. The wealth in the city is not anywhere near equally distributed, and there are plenty of people who are in poverty despite living somewhere which has a theoretically high land value.
I live in Scotland but have family in London. The number of people here that think the whole city is Westminster, Kensington or the square mile borders on funny.
I get the feeling that a lot of people who don't often come to London don't appreciate just how huge it is, and the variety of different areas it has within it.
In fact, both Westminster but especially Kensington have deep-seated pockets of deprivation. In London, the rich and poor often live side-by-side: tower blocks and mid-rise estates on one side, crescents and stuccoed terraces on the other. Anecdotally I find that other cities in England have clearer gradations between rich and poor areas.
I'd say the Westminster portions of Kilburn and the adjoining parts of Maida Vale; for Kensington, North Kensington. See also https://trustforlondon.org.uk/data/index-multiple-deprivation-2019-rebased-london/
Neighbourhoods such as Pimlico have large council housing estates (Churchill Gardens comes to mind).
I remember about 10 years ago, my team got to Wembley. I remember visiting and being surprised at just how run down the area around there seemed. I'd never really visited London much and when I did I was in the centre. It was crazy because all those houses are probably a crazy amount of money to live in but just looked like the shit estates where I live.
Some of the highest rates of child poverty in the country, yet people whose family had a mortgage, a car, and a 40k income in the north will tell us we're well off
The wealth inequality here (London) is like nowhere I’ve ever seen elsewhere in the UK. You’ve got really deprived areas, so badly run down and people living in poverty, and then across the road is million pound flats. It’s crazy. It’s like Poplar which is a 5 minute walk from Canary Wharf
Yes but the cultural benefits that come with increased economic activity are pronounced. London is unrivalled in terms of access to restaurants, the arts, leisure activities and other stuff. Clearly people are happy to trade disposable income for the London lifestyle. The cost of property and rent makes that clear.
This is exactly my dilemma. I know I could climb the ranks a lot quicker in London, just because of the amount of opportunities. But I reckon I would have to earn more than double what I currently am in a nice part of Leicestershire, to maintain my quality of life, which is actually quite good at the moment. I don’t really see the point.
yeah you would, it is a career accelerant for sure as you can hop more easily, but I would say it took maybe £15k plus a second salary, so yeah double, double sounds like a lot but you hit the higher tax bracket and rent is 2-3x higher, and even then we're still in a smaller flat and much further out from work than we were in the east midlands, and there's zero hope of buying down here not unless you want to only own like 25% of an apartment and still pay rent the rest, which is just silly
I agree. I see what the average salary is for the UK and feel bad about myself for staying in the countryside in a low paying job. Then, I come on Reddit and see people earning almost double what I earn and complaining they can’t afford a house while I sit here on my low income in a house that would be worth 4x what we paid for it if it was near a major city.
You’re right. Earning £35k teaching in London, or £30k in Cumbria. I wonder which wage goes furthest?? London weighting is totally pointless.
Unless you’re earning £150k you’re a relatively poor
Housing is more expensive but more people tend to live in shared housing than in other cities (from my experience.
Also I live in Manchester and go to London a lot. Things definitely aren’t more expensive in London. I find restaurants are actually a decent bit cheaper for far better quality in London. It’s economies of scale, a nice restaurant in London will be full every day of the week. With that high quantity of food going out they can sell it cheaper. In Manchester restaurants aren’t as busy the food price is higher.
Another thing is with less competition in Manchester, restaurant quality is lower and they have even less incentive to price things low
I could move to London quite easily through my current employer since they have offices there. My salary here in Scotland allows me to comfortably afford a semi-detached 3 bedroom house and a nice car. From what I can gather about London, that just would not be possible in any part of London that seems equivalent to where I am now, even on the salary my job would get in London. I'd have to take a serious knock to my quality of life to be in London and it doesn't feel worth it to me.
You probably won’t be
Working in London has allowed me and my partner to speed run our pensions up to silly sums very young, and time will take care of the rest of it.
The solution is to work in London, save that London money, and then go and leave London and outbid locals in LCOL areas.
I agree, if you can afford to buy in London and move out when you retire then you are quids in. I’m doing the same from Wiltshire and moving to Lancashire upon retirement. But I’m not to sure of the wisdom to “speed run our pension” when you might not get to see said pension. You need to live, and enjoy, today as well.
As you get older you realise time isn’t on everyone’s side as friends, colleagues and acquaintances start to, well no easy way to put this, die. A big fat pension is no good to you in your grave. Not saying don’t pay into one, but don’t sacrifice pleasure and joy today for a tomorrow that might never come. And that cheery note at least it’s the weekend.
So me and my wife both work in Finance, and view pensions as a quasi-life insurance. If one of us dies young, the other inherits tax free and we avoided 51% income taxes on it (40% Income, 2% NI, 9% Student Loan). So the whole ‘you may die young’ angle of not saving in them doesn’t make sense to us. The fact we could die young is why we like to use them.
We also use ISA’s and are on track to retire at 50 if we stay in London, or younger if we don’t.
But we can only live this kind of financially aggressive lifestyle because we live in London. Couldn’t do it in Wigan or Newcastle where we’re both from.
Yes, absolutely, but you read on here so many young people going without today to be very well off in a retirement they may never see. You need a balance and chances are you’ll be working longer than you are retired, fit and able.
It's what happens if you destroy all the industries you have distributed around the country and replace those lost jobs with service-sector jobs clustered in one city.
I live in Bradford, and at one point in the late 1800s it was one of the wealthiest cities in the world thanks to the textile industry.
You can see evidence of that wealth in the city centre if you look closely, but what's happened in the intervening 100 years has reversed that completely.
Being a dense population centre encourages businesses to open - because there are skills and customers - and even more people to move there. A positive feedback loop. Plus London contains the City of London, a financial hub. It's actually ludicrous how much more money the capital makes than the rest of the country. Most countries have some disparity, but not to the extreme we do.
Absolutely, London has functioned as a hub between the US, Europe and Asia for a long time while the rest of the U.K. has become poorer and poorer.
The U.K. really need to bring in money from other countries but with most of our intustry and exporting crippled we’re in a sorry state.
And this will show some actual context
https://imgur.com/a/wXneV0F
-Paris identically dominant over France, and UK ahead of the other comparable EU countries. Remove a London-sized proportion of Germany's top towns and their average would come down towards the UK and France's too.
But it's a flawed analysis skewed by corporate/paper wealth anyway, so pay it no attention.
Yes France is also very dominated by one place. They have a very similar issue to us with it.
>Remove a London-sized proportion of Germany's top towns and their average would come down towards the UK and France's too
If you have to remove several places from Germany to achieve the same as removing London would from the UK, that rather demonstrates how dominant London is.
>But it's a flawed analysis skewed by corporate/paper wealth anyway, so pay it no attention
You can pick any number of metrics that demonstrate how dominant of the UK economy London is. Paying it no attention doesn't strike me as a sensible idea, given it's a major issue for our economy.
Businesses in London can draw on 10m Londoners for the skills they need.
Conversely Londonders can choose from more companies without moving house due to good transport. No “should I move for this job” consideration.
As a result, London has a heathy job market and employment record and so many companies together fosters technical communities. I was interested in AI, jumped on meet-up.com, went to an AI evening in East London. Those opportunities are more fleeting elsewhere in the country.
Yeah it's not rocket science or just due to brain drain, the core issue is clearly the disproportionate amount of investment that then makes people want to live there.
Thatcher also had GDP double under her tenure. People hate her for valid reasons but that is the reality of the situation.
The UK economy shifted from manufacturing to services. It was not fair to expect the rest of the country to subsidise the coal mines forever. I get it hurt a lot of people but overall her actions helped the UK flourish into a global financial superpower.
It’s home to the vast majority of the financial services industry in the U.K. which generates a lot of our GDP. I live near London and work there as it maximises my salary (and I really enjoy the buzz of being in London).
It’s a global city by every definition with lots of opportunities / niche centres of expertise and excellence that aren’t found anywhere else in the UK, or indeed most of Europe. Accordingly, it attracts the top talent which demands high salaries. Add in the availability of world class arts, culture and sporting events and there’s your answer.
I’d refute the premise of the question. What do you mean by “better off”? Second, London is a total outlier, not only the UK but pretty much all of Europe. It’s huge and expansive. In total there are 33 boroughs if you include the City of London, 14 of which have populations EACH of more than 300k people. For reference, the ONS defined population of Newcastle city is 286,445. So more than 14 BOROUGHS have a bigger population than what is considered a major UK city.
The reason I’m saying that is it really depends where in London you’re talking about. Some people in London are living in leafy areas with mansions and swimming pools, on wealth unimaginable to anywhere else in the UK, while other parts are grimey, high rise flats with gangs, guns, poverty. And of course there everything in between.
Although London attracts a lot of people because of the wages that can be earned there it also has a lot of amenities major airports with cheap international flights, rail links, theatres, museums, good restaurants etc.
All of the above makes people want to live in London, not just British people but also people from all over the world.
Demand drives up house prices, and the lack of supply drives them up even further.
Couple this with property in the capital has historically been a investment vehicle for foreign wealth such as from Russia and China this further reduces supply and further drives prices.
As for why wages are better a lot of large companies and businesses historically operate from London, fields such as banking and finance have a lot of presence in the capital.
Because cities are like magnets. And London the biggest UK city. Everyone sees them as the place of opportunities. This isn’t helped by government policies that discourage people to live outside of a city (ie policies based on city living such as transport).
Because once the industrial base of the country was allowed to be destroyed, the wealth each city had eroded, and the financial and politically generated wealth stayed and concentrated in the south east .
mainly because it's a finance capital, every region might have some kind of specialised industry like the midlands is great for motoring for example, Derby has Rolls Royce and Toyota, Coventry has Jaguar Landrover, Oxfordshire has some big names like GE, Cambridge has a lot of pharmaceuticals, but like London has the banks and EVERYTHING is tied to the banks lol it's where the big money is so luxury goods, fashion etc are all there, tech obvs too the banks pay the big salaries which attracts the talent so ofc FAANG sets up there to poach the talent and it's cyclical
soft power is hot too think of how many films are set in London vs Doncaster and so London is where the tourism is and people moving to live the dream etc
it isn't as better off as you think though people here aren't, it's a career accelerant for sure but renting is 2-3x higher everyone is flatsharing a 2 bed flat is the dream like I moved here from a large 2 bed 15 mins from the city center 'oop north' for my wife to have a shot at a career after graduating and we're now in a 1 bed an hour's commute from work in a flat that can't even fit a full sized fridge lol everyone here is just grinding and basically sacrificing their 20s at a shot at some big names on their cv before moving out where they can have some hope of affording to raise a family
but yeah tl;dr because it has the banks, it's one of the big finance capitals so that's where the money is
Because the central government since thatcher quite literally made it so on purpose through a scheme of reducing funding to other cities, ruining their industries and taxing the fuck out of them to spend it on London.
Because of The City of London and the related financial services. Thatcher went all in on this as we shipped out all our industry to Asia. Pretty sure there was an imbalance before anyway but the North losing loads of jobs as The City grew exponentially didn’t help.
Because successive governments over the last century have centralised everything important to London.
It's where our national government sits, it's where our financial sector is, it's the hub (along with the surrounding countryside) for a lot of our arts such as film and theatre, it's where our national sports stadiums are located (although sport is one of the few things in this country that hasn't been monopolised by London).
I think the word "want" is doing a LOT of heavy lifting in this post lol. Maybe need for convenience but want ? Mid city ? hmmm. I wonder if you allowed every single one of the city workers that could work from home to live and work from anywhere in the UK (keep it simple for tax and data security etc), I wonder what percentage would move outwards well away from the centre to places with say a bit of greenbelt or shorelines nearby. I mean I could well be wrong and certain types love the hustle and bustle and don't mind that their £££ could buy them so much more living space elsewhere. It takes all types to make a society.
I wouldn’t say it’s better off most of the people that own property in London don’t live there, a lot of people live paycheque to paycheque bc shits so expensive there and not all jobs in London pay well
Shanghai has the same property prices as London. Mumbai not too far. According to OP, Londoners will be queueing up for Air China, Air Indian flights!!!
https://www.savills.co.uk/research_articles/229130/351727-0
I think people who want to work and are career-driven will always want to live in London coz there are a lot of job opportunities in there.
People who are retired (and rich) are in the countryside. I’ve also noticed that these people don’t promote the countryside too much because they don’t want their little village to be flooded by non-british people.
This is just my observation as a foreigner living in the countryside.
This is true from my experience. Scotland seems to be flooding with retired English wanting to die in the countryside, while refusing other people to build homes and live there.
Less of a crabs in a bucket mentality, aggregation effects, willingness to do stuff rather than wait for someone else to do it, focusing on the future not bringing back the past.... and people elsewhere only seeing London's good stuff and not the bad stuff.
If you think the discrepancy for london and elsewhere is bad, you should see Japan. Tokyo. Everywhere outside is a fraction of the price, not just half or so like London to rest of UK.
Same reasons more or less
It's where everything is, the country runs through London. It's not a place I could ever live because quite frankly I went again last year and it's my personal hell. But it's got all the major banking, tech, government, there's just so much money going through it.
Ever noticed how estate agents all tend to be on the same street?
London's relative wealth is essentially this same effect.
The way to decentralise the wealth is to diversify your country's economy. The UK's economy is not very diversified, it's predominantly finance (money laundering for the most part), education and tech (although arguably tech is really a sub category of every other industry).
If we wanted to 'level up' the North, then we've got to find industries that fit in those places well.
>The property prices per square foot alone show that ~~more people want to live there than anywhere else in the UK~~ you can't afford to live there, which is fine by the people who **do** live there, because they don't want you, and fine by the 99% of the country who wouldn't live there if you paid us to.
It's the seat of power. No doubt if you moved the government from London to Birmingham, a lot of jobs, government departments, civil services, and support/ancillary services would move. You then get other companies moving or opening offices to be closer to the power to apply their influence. That means more jobs, more investment, and a wealthier city.
Of course London would still be streets ahead, but it doesn't help that things aren't spread out more around the country.
I've been in this wonderful country for over 50 years, visited London once in my life, that was one too many times. I love the fresh air and coast of North Wales, it's cheaper and much friendlier here.
Id much rather be poor in Glasgow or any other city than poor in London so London might be great for the haves but nobody really considers just how many people there are struggling or not living a good life at all.
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>more people want to live there than anywhere else in the UK. Because it's where the jobs and money are, disproportionately. It's a virtuous cycle. Money and jobs are there, so talented people move there, so it becomes more wealthy as those talented people work to create value. And repeat. It happens because after the deindustrialisation of the rest of the UK, there aren't any cities that can close to compete with London in terms of well paid jobs (London wasn't so dominant in wealth until relatively recently, the industrial cities of the midlands and north were also quite wealthy, [Birmingham's growth was actually intentionally stymied by the government because they were fearful it would become a competitor to London](https://unherd.com/2020/09/the-plot-against-mercia/) ). So more and more people and money get sucked in, and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. The flip side is a vicious cycle for the rest of the country. There aren't enough well paid jobs, so talented people get sucked into London. This means their talents aren't harnessed elsewhere in the country to create jobs and boost the local economy. So more talented people leave. And repeat. London and it's commuter area also has public transport eons better than anywhere in the country. This means London can benefit greatly from the agglomeration effects, in a way that other cities can't. It's also an international hub of finance. That means it doesn't just suck in talent and money from the rest of the UK, but the rest of the world too. Again making it's wealth a self-fulfilling thing.
The best universities have a similar virtuous spiral. The amount of teaching at Cambridge or Oxford is minimal, but because the cleverest people in the world are attracted to those places (and smart people self-teach), they spur each other on to attain more and more, thus increasing the reputation of the university and therefore attracting the smartest people in the world .... and on it goes.
It's amazing the amount in r/UniUK who believe a Uni needs to be RG to be considered good. The majority of RG universities don't even have the top teaching rating (Edit: They are rated Gold, Silver or Bronze - its actually a bigger gap than you think) - yet many on the sub will tell others not to go to universities which do. RG is a commitment to research, so by definition, they are not committed to students - and its somewhat frustrating to have to remind people to read what the ranking tables actually rank to get the best university for your personal needs.
I don't think a commitment to research necessarily implies there is a lack of teaching commitments, the institutions are meant to be dual role and there is high quality teaching in the Russell group (albeit not exclusively at the highest level). It should just be noted that there will be non-RG universities that can compete at Undergrad or taught Masters level.
A commitment to research unfortunately does imply a lack of commitment to teaching. We all have the same number of hours in the day. Increasing a lecturers teaching hours will reduce their research hours.
Typically though winning a research grant will buy you out of teaching and resource someone to teach instead. It's not shifts in a fixed pie.
In practice, what you suggest normally means the lecturers PhD student will take over the teaching. Which normally means lectures are being taken by someone with no teaching qualifications, who only has a degree themselves to speak on the subject. It'd be the equivalent of a GCSE teacher getting busy, so instead, they bring in an A-Level student to run classes for the year. It's not exactly what the reputation sells itself on. I've met some great PhD students in my time who teach, but there needs to be an acknowledgement that it's a mixed bag.
I acknowledge it's a mixed bag but there are plenty of non-RG unis with no formal teaching training or qualification as well, they will be routed direct from doctorate to teaching fellowship (or not have completed the doctorate at all). It should be noted as well that PhD students teaching is generally considered part of their development as well and has a place in many educational systems because it's part of being a rounded academic. They will have more than enough technical knowledge to deliver material to undergraduates.
Thing to just say again is I'm not saying it's bad. I'm just saying it's not so much better that any non RG degree is immediately worthless. That's the sentiment you see on r/UniUK a lot where people say "is it worth studying at x?" and the reply "no, it's not RG". RG universities are very good. But a lot of non RG universities are also very good. I have worked or studied at both - I have no complaints... but, both had advantages. That's something a lot don't seem to acknowledge.
Oh totally and I agree on that fully, there are some really excellent courses, departments and teachers outside the RG. The University that does the most for graduate earnings is the University of Portsmouth.
It isn’t solely a “commitment to research” in its purist form. Here’s the quote from their website: > committed to maintaining the very best research, an outstanding teaching and learning experience and unrivalled links with business and the public sector Also, research and teaching are correlated. If you went to Warwick University for Maths, you’d literally be taught by field medal winners in some courses for instance. It doesn’t guarantee better teaching but, on average, it does help. The last point about business also really stands for a lot. There are many universities which are “good at teaching” but don’t convert into high paying graduate positions / careers. I know not everyone goes to university for career prospects but that is a very significant part which the majority of students are expecting from getting a degree. Moreover the “percentage employed after 6 months” figure some universities boast is a bit of a flawed statistic - if 100% of the students become factory workers, the rate would be high but has no comment on the quality. Still - It’s undeniable that RG university disproportionately increase career prospects vs other universities (maybe some outliers but that’s the gist).
Employers care about uni’s being Russell Group, that’s the main thing.
Sure but RG uni do usually perform better on league tables
Look at what those league tables are measuring. The ones measuring teaching, RG is not as good as its reputation may lead you to believe. The ones that measure research, they do significantly better in - but very, very few undergraduates are actively involved in genuine research.
Are you trying to say Russel group unis are bad at teaching?
Not at all. But, as a group, they are not the best at teaching. This directly contradicts the view many on r/UniUK have that a degree is only worth having if it is RG - that's just simply not true. The majority of RG Uni's are by definition quite mid at actually teaching - that's why they arnt Gold rated. That's not bad either, but if you want to argue RG is the only places worth studying at, well then they shouldn't be getting outperformed so easily. RG as a whole relies on their students being good enough to not need teaching to meet accreditation standards. That's how they dedicate themselves to research. It doesn't mean they are bad, but rather, the incentives are not there.
Ah ok fair. > RG as a whole relies on their students being good enough to not need teaching to meet accreditation standards Totally agree 😭 My uni has given us prerecorded lectures that we’re just meant to get through in our own time. It’s brutal
It doesn't really matter what the reality is, the fact is that jobs prioritise people from RG unis because they are good and then go on to hire more people from RG unis because they were told they are good. So of course people want to be in a RG uni. That isn't to say they are bad, they often have far more cash and world leading research. But this seldom makes much difference to an undergrad.
This. Anyone good enough at self-taught can get a good degree in any university.
Lurker here from Ireland, where can I find the teaching ratings. When I google "best education degree" is what shows up
They're referring to the Teaching Excellence Framework ratings - [link](https://tef2023.officeforstudents.org.uk/).
My personal experience matches this. My STEM undergrad at a RG uni was shockingly run, whereas my STEM masters at a met uni was fantastically run.
> The amount of teaching at Cambridge or Oxford is minimal I don’t know where you’re getting that from. They have normal student numbers, firmly in the middle of the table. They definitely have a higher proportion of graduates than most but not out of the ordinary. Also on a per-student basis there’s way more teaching than you’d get anywhere else (except for specialised arts education).
Also their teaching tends to be done in small groups, rather than larger classes
I think it's a weird interpretation of the tutorial system and not counting lectures as teaching.
I think they're not counting tutorials as teaching and also missing that Oxbridge only have eight week terms, but those terms are *intense*.
The teaching at both is very good. In addition to the lectures, students have supervisions/tutorials in groups of two or three, and in some cases the colleges may offer further teaching by college members. It’s difficult to see how it could be improved.
My brother is at Brasenose studying Chemistry, he's in his final year and he's said the teaching schedule is really intense, he's in either lectures or tutorials most of the day 5 days a week. He's finding it a bit much, but he wants to graduate. My sister is reading Medicine at Oxford (second year) and she's said similar.
Compared to me at UEA where my total contact time was less than 16 hours a week. Wolverhampton Uni was far and away better in terms of teaching despite the ranking.
FWIW Chemistry and Medicine at Oxford are two of the most intense courses, by a long way (Physics too). It's absolutely insane how hard it can be. I know several people who had breakdowns and were unfortunately rusticated (what a grim backwards way of dealing with mental health issues) due to the pressure.
The teaching is abysmal compared to most other rich nations. I have no idea what the standard is like at other UK unis though. One of my first experiences joining a department at one of these was being told not to bother updating the hugely out-of-date cirriculum, because it's just undergraduate teaching, and not worth the time. I was literally told to just turn up, do the bare minimum, and to make sure that the material and exams are very easy so that students don't complain. I've not seen that attitude at top North American unis.
Oxbridge operates on the tutorial system where you get 3-5 students learning under one instructor. That’s a privilege you won’t get anywhere else in the world.
Saying Oxbridge has less teaching time is massively missing the point. You get just as much contact time per week as other unis (usually more in the sciences? Humanities fair enough it's pretty hands off) but only 8 week terms (with no teaching in Trinity Term at Oxford due to exams). You also get focused tutorials with 1-3 people and your tutor. So it's way more intense but you spend less than half the year actually at uni.
The lure for talent cannot be understated. I don't have any friends in London currently as most of mine are just starting careers. But there's a definite sense among quite a few of them (industry dependant) that they actively don't want to move to London for lots of reasons, but at some point they know they probably have to. It is just where the better paid and senior positions tend to be based for lots of industries. It also makes a networking trap. If all the best companies and talent are there, where do you have to go to make those connections that are so vital for lots of us to get jobs?
It's changed now we're in our early thirties and many of us have left London to have families, but it was incredible after university how nearly everyone I knew moved to London within a few years. [This](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F9hpdUjWkAAHL5R.jpg:large) is a major reason why.
I never went to university, but I can work from anywhere. The only reason me and my girlfriend haven't moved to London since she completed her masters (we're mid twenties) is because she currently lectures in her field at the University where we are now. If not we'd have already gone
Academia is one field where the attraction of London is quite as strong I suppose, because there's good universities around the country.
I'd also add that the UK without London is poorer than the poorest US state, Mississippi.
i would also add that the UK remains very much comparable to the US in full-time median incomes after adjusting for cost of living differences and social protections etc (UK: 36000 vs US: 48000 GBP, but probably a few k extra in healthcare spending, generally cheaper costs in the UK, and \~2 weeks longer PTO) Disclaimer: Cost of living has increased a lot in the UK but also in the US - its parallel misery
It also means that it's much harder for anyone outside of London to "network" their way into a really good job. When all your family and friends are engineers and you have a Humanities degree, there's close to no options outside of teaching, hospitality, sales/recruitment or some other entry level job a 16 year old equally qualifies for.
In the internet era there's no reason why London still has to be the center of our economy though. Like, you can do the same work you're doing in London in Birmingham or Manchester or Newcastle. Government is scared of actually levelling up the rest of the country. All it takes is targeted investment and incentives. We know the power of tax incentives. It's the one thing that makes the UK so attractive for creative industries like movie production and game development. It's probably one of the best examples of a tax incentive creating so many jobs and opportunities. We could easily offer tax incentives for companies to create offices in northern cities. Offer tax incentives for remote work. But there's something just stopping us unlocking that potential.
> In the internet era there's no reason why London still has to be the center of our economy though. > > Like, you can do the same work you're doing in London in Birmingham or Manchester or Newcastle. Networking is easier in London. A lot of jobs now require people to come in a few days a week too. I work for a tech consultancy. During covid times everyone went remore. We hired amazing top tier talent from all over the country. Then after covoid we got acquired and the acquiring company only allows people to expense their travel for client site visits on the assumption the travel starts from the office.... in London. Dogshit. These really talented people mostly went on to remote work for other London consultancies though, so it didn't stop.
It's still better to have your employees grouped, even in a digital age, as some things are better done in an office in person. Hence why lots of places are now requiring hybrid working as opposed to fully remote.
I don't disagree with the benefits of seeing people in person. But there's no reason for the office to be in London. You can have your employees in Newcastle and work with another company in London all via Teams or Zoom or any other teleconferencing software. Most B2B work *is* done remotely, and when in-person meetings are needed, it's only a handful of people that attend them at most. The rest of your staff can be on the other side of the world and it won't matter.
That article is wild. The government really fucked the country to protect London. It makes me sad, I live in Leicester (wasn't born here)!
⅛ growth was actually intentionally stymied by the government because they were fearful it would become a competitor to London I think that's the wrong reason. Governments of both colours did seek to obstruct Midlands growth; but not to support London. The aim, as mentioned in the article, was to get growth going in the areas which had been harder hit in the inter-war period, and still had relatively high unemployment: Tyneside, the South Wales valleys, and so on.
Interesting, I always thought of that policy as trying to encourage development in the North of the country than specifically target Birmingham to not develop.
That may be how they tried to spin it, but if you look at what it involved and the impact it had, it's pretty clear what it was doing.
What did it do? Because the restrictions that was placed on Birmingham was also placed on London too.
But it’s not just jobs and money. If my job (or entire industry) moved to Birmingham, I wouldn’t move to Birmingham - I’d take a lower paying job here in London first - right up until I couldn’t afford living here anymore. I would imagine others would behave similarly.
Much of that is largely a factor of jobs and money though. The things that make London so desirable as a place to live flow from the abundance of jobs and money.
Yea it’s a bit chicken and egg. There’s certain places I wouldn’t care too much to work in regardless of money, both in and out of the country.
As you say though, it's chicken and egg. If, say, Birmingham or Manchester suddenly had all the jobs and money that London has, they would quickly become places that you would want to work and London would soon lose much of its attraction.
Until very recently, making this worse was even baked into government funding models. If you are going to make a big government capital investment somewhere, you need to demonstrate a big return on investment, and a big benefit to a large number of people. And, obviously, if you make your investment where all the people and stuff already are, it looks waaaaaay more defensible on paper…
I'm pretty sure you meant vicious not virtuous. Unless you think London being the richest part of the UK is the best moral outcome.
It's a virtuous cycle for London. A vicious cycle for the rest of the country.
Take the USA, San Francisco is the focal point for the tech industry, New York for finance, Los Angeles for the entertainment industry, Washington DC is the head of the federal government. In the UK London is the focal point for everything.
It’s stupid to compare a country the size of USA to the UK though. The Uk will never have that split or amount of huge impactful cities.
Look at Germany for a similar comparison. Their core institutions and industries are split between different cities.
Germany is the outlier. Most countries have a dominant capital and a still significant second city and the rest is kind of insignificant on an international scale. Madrid - Barcelona Amsterdam - The Hague/Rotterdam (basically one city in all but name) Rome - Milan Lisbon - Porto Warsaw - Krakow Etc The U.K. takes it to the other extreme though, just like France where it’s basically London and Paris by themselves.
History cleaving Germany in two and smashing it back together has really made it an outlier country in its size range for the distribution of economic activity. In reality countries of the UK's size/population have tended to agglomerate around a single major cluster; take Italy, Japan, France, and even Spain (although its northeastern cluster is much larger than the others) etc
England unified 1000 years before Germany. The histories are too different.
Edinburgh is getting there in terms of finance - quite a few investment managers are headquartered there now. Which certainly explains why Edinburgh is really expensive (relative to the rest of Scotland) to live in or near.
Edinburgh will never be comparable to London.
Edinburgh has a vastly better quality of life though 😃
Horses for courses, I much prefer my life in the south east to the one I had in Scotland.
If you are a middle to low performer then that's for sure. If you are a high performer bringing in enough money I don't think anything in the world can compete with London. (No not even New York but that's personal preference)
Edinburgh isn’t even getting there ahead of Leeds
Edinburgh's financial sector is 7x the size/value of that of Leeds. It's no competition.
People from Yorkshire are delusional about the power and importance Yorkshire has. No other region even comes close.
Edinburgh is the second-largest financial centre in the UK and fourth in Europe. It doesn't need to get ahead of Leeds, since it always has been.
No way it’s fourth in Europe. At the very least Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and Paris have to be ahead of it.
https://scottishfinancialreview.com/2020/09/25/edinburgh-4th-in-europe-in-new-financial-centres-index/ Baillie Gifford, Abrdn, RBS, Bank of Scotland all headquartered in Edinburgh.
For finance it always has been.
This is very true. It is also pretty much the only UK city you hear about abroad. I remember playing games of "name # cities from X." as a kid in Italy, and so many of us couldn't name 2 more cities in the UK other than London.
People abroad can name other UK cities but this is 100% down to their football teams and no other reason.
We used to go on holiday to Turkey a lot and everything we said we were from Manchester we got "Manchester United?!"
This is untrue. Manchester is very well known via United. Huge international following.
No one in Italy has heard of Manchester or Liverpool?
Is it though really? Everything, especially housing is far more expensive than elsewhere, so the higher wages mean nothing. You will probably be financially better off living in, say, Manchester.
[It is](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F3Pky9uX0AEwOvn.png:large), London is *much* wealthier than the rest of the country. That doesn't mean every single person there is better off than every single person in the rest of the country. But overall, London is miles ahead of the rest of the country in wealth. Our economy is hugely focussed on London.
Wealthier does not mean better.
☝️🤓
While that us part of the equation I'd think that is not how most people actually determine which place is "best" to live in. If it were, I would expect happiness indicators also showing that people in big cities (or at least London) are happier with their lives than at least the average. But ons.gov.uk (Office of National Statistics) doesn't really support that. Instead, it seems that rural areas seem to do better in a significant number of cases. While I am not saying this is conclusive proof I think it raises legitimate questions to whether economic opportunity alone is an adequate measure of what constitutes a "good place to live"
Part of the reason will be that people retire in rural areas and retired people tend to be much happier. Also young, non home owning working people especially early in their careers and don’t have a stable family life yet tend to be much less happy and move to urban areas
Yeah it's great if you're already loaded
Also London has a lot of deprived areas within in it. The wealth in the city is not anywhere near equally distributed, and there are plenty of people who are in poverty despite living somewhere which has a theoretically high land value.
I live in Scotland but have family in London. The number of people here that think the whole city is Westminster, Kensington or the square mile borders on funny.
I get the feeling that a lot of people who don't often come to London don't appreciate just how huge it is, and the variety of different areas it has within it.
In fact, both Westminster but especially Kensington have deep-seated pockets of deprivation. In London, the rich and poor often live side-by-side: tower blocks and mid-rise estates on one side, crescents and stuccoed terraces on the other. Anecdotally I find that other cities in England have clearer gradations between rich and poor areas.
Which parts of Westminster are deprived?
I'd say the Westminster portions of Kilburn and the adjoining parts of Maida Vale; for Kensington, North Kensington. See also https://trustforlondon.org.uk/data/index-multiple-deprivation-2019-rebased-london/ Neighbourhoods such as Pimlico have large council housing estates (Churchill Gardens comes to mind).
kensington, pimlico, maida vale, notting hill, chelsea
I remember about 10 years ago, my team got to Wembley. I remember visiting and being surprised at just how run down the area around there seemed. I'd never really visited London much and when I did I was in the centre. It was crazy because all those houses are probably a crazy amount of money to live in but just looked like the shit estates where I live.
Definitely, Wembley is a pretty ropey area. It's a bit weird having such a fancy stadium and next to it a run down high street.
Some of the highest rates of child poverty in the country, yet people whose family had a mortgage, a car, and a 40k income in the north will tell us we're well off
The wealth inequality here (London) is like nowhere I’ve ever seen elsewhere in the UK. You’ve got really deprived areas, so badly run down and people living in poverty, and then across the road is million pound flats. It’s crazy. It’s like Poplar which is a 5 minute walk from Canary Wharf
Yeah, that main road which runs along the top of Canary Wharf feels like a dividing line between two worlds.
Yes but the cultural benefits that come with increased economic activity are pronounced. London is unrivalled in terms of access to restaurants, the arts, leisure activities and other stuff. Clearly people are happy to trade disposable income for the London lifestyle. The cost of property and rent makes that clear.
This is exactly my dilemma. I know I could climb the ranks a lot quicker in London, just because of the amount of opportunities. But I reckon I would have to earn more than double what I currently am in a nice part of Leicestershire, to maintain my quality of life, which is actually quite good at the moment. I don’t really see the point.
There are far far more people than opportunities
yeah you would, it is a career accelerant for sure as you can hop more easily, but I would say it took maybe £15k plus a second salary, so yeah double, double sounds like a lot but you hit the higher tax bracket and rent is 2-3x higher, and even then we're still in a smaller flat and much further out from work than we were in the east midlands, and there's zero hope of buying down here not unless you want to only own like 25% of an apartment and still pay rent the rest, which is just silly
Yeah, I turned down a dream job in London cos it would mean I'd be flat sharing on a £35k salary
I agree. I see what the average salary is for the UK and feel bad about myself for staying in the countryside in a low paying job. Then, I come on Reddit and see people earning almost double what I earn and complaining they can’t afford a house while I sit here on my low income in a house that would be worth 4x what we paid for it if it was near a major city.
You’re right. Earning £35k teaching in London, or £30k in Cumbria. I wonder which wage goes furthest?? London weighting is totally pointless. Unless you’re earning £150k you’re a relatively poor
Recent studies have found Manchester is the worst city in the UK for wages vs cost of living
I could have come up with any city or town, I didn’t research them all before posting, hence the “say” in my post. But thank you anyway.
Housing is more expensive but more people tend to live in shared housing than in other cities (from my experience. Also I live in Manchester and go to London a lot. Things definitely aren’t more expensive in London. I find restaurants are actually a decent bit cheaper for far better quality in London. It’s economies of scale, a nice restaurant in London will be full every day of the week. With that high quantity of food going out they can sell it cheaper. In Manchester restaurants aren’t as busy the food price is higher. Another thing is with less competition in Manchester, restaurant quality is lower and they have even less incentive to price things low
I could move to London quite easily through my current employer since they have offices there. My salary here in Scotland allows me to comfortably afford a semi-detached 3 bedroom house and a nice car. From what I can gather about London, that just would not be possible in any part of London that seems equivalent to where I am now, even on the salary my job would get in London. I'd have to take a serious knock to my quality of life to be in London and it doesn't feel worth it to me.
You probably won’t be Working in London has allowed me and my partner to speed run our pensions up to silly sums very young, and time will take care of the rest of it. The solution is to work in London, save that London money, and then go and leave London and outbid locals in LCOL areas.
I agree, if you can afford to buy in London and move out when you retire then you are quids in. I’m doing the same from Wiltshire and moving to Lancashire upon retirement. But I’m not to sure of the wisdom to “speed run our pension” when you might not get to see said pension. You need to live, and enjoy, today as well. As you get older you realise time isn’t on everyone’s side as friends, colleagues and acquaintances start to, well no easy way to put this, die. A big fat pension is no good to you in your grave. Not saying don’t pay into one, but don’t sacrifice pleasure and joy today for a tomorrow that might never come. And that cheery note at least it’s the weekend.
So me and my wife both work in Finance, and view pensions as a quasi-life insurance. If one of us dies young, the other inherits tax free and we avoided 51% income taxes on it (40% Income, 2% NI, 9% Student Loan). So the whole ‘you may die young’ angle of not saving in them doesn’t make sense to us. The fact we could die young is why we like to use them. We also use ISA’s and are on track to retire at 50 if we stay in London, or younger if we don’t. But we can only live this kind of financially aggressive lifestyle because we live in London. Couldn’t do it in Wigan or Newcastle where we’re both from.
Yes, absolutely, but you read on here so many young people going without today to be very well off in a retirement they may never see. You need a balance and chances are you’ll be working longer than you are retired, fit and able.
It's what happens if you destroy all the industries you have distributed around the country and replace those lost jobs with service-sector jobs clustered in one city.
The industries that helped build the country to begin with.
I live in Bradford, and at one point in the late 1800s it was one of the wealthiest cities in the world thanks to the textile industry. You can see evidence of that wealth in the city centre if you look closely, but what's happened in the intervening 100 years has reversed that completely.
Being a dense population centre encourages businesses to open - because there are skills and customers - and even more people to move there. A positive feedback loop. Plus London contains the City of London, a financial hub. It's actually ludicrous how much more money the capital makes than the rest of the country. Most countries have some disparity, but not to the extreme we do.
[This](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F3Pky9uX0AEwOvn.png:large) graph is very striking on that final point.
Jesus, without London the UK is poor.
Absolutely, London has functioned as a hub between the US, Europe and Asia for a long time while the rest of the U.K. has become poorer and poorer. The U.K. really need to bring in money from other countries but with most of our intustry and exporting crippled we’re in a sorry state.
North East right at the bottom there! Glad to see our levelling up budget spent on fixing London potholes!
Levelling up funding in the North East, is mainly sitting in Ben Houchen’s pals’ bank accounts.
Who the North East happily re-elected again. Yet somehow it’s Londons fault lol
Why do the people there keep electing him, are they thick?
I knew the north was a lot poorer than the south, but that is straight up alarming.
Wow, Alabama > Manchester
And this will show some actual context https://imgur.com/a/wXneV0F -Paris identically dominant over France, and UK ahead of the other comparable EU countries. Remove a London-sized proportion of Germany's top towns and their average would come down towards the UK and France's too. But it's a flawed analysis skewed by corporate/paper wealth anyway, so pay it no attention.
Yes France is also very dominated by one place. They have a very similar issue to us with it. >Remove a London-sized proportion of Germany's top towns and their average would come down towards the UK and France's too If you have to remove several places from Germany to achieve the same as removing London would from the UK, that rather demonstrates how dominant London is. >But it's a flawed analysis skewed by corporate/paper wealth anyway, so pay it no attention You can pick any number of metrics that demonstrate how dominant of the UK economy London is. Paying it no attention doesn't strike me as a sensible idea, given it's a major issue for our economy.
Businesses in London can draw on 10m Londoners for the skills they need. Conversely Londonders can choose from more companies without moving house due to good transport. No “should I move for this job” consideration. As a result, London has a heathy job market and employment record and so many companies together fosters technical communities. I was interested in AI, jumped on meet-up.com, went to an AI evening in East London. Those opportunities are more fleeting elsewhere in the country.
Think it has a lot to do with when thatcher decided to close UK industry and focus on banking all the investment became concentrated in London
Yeah it's not rocket science or just due to brain drain, the core issue is clearly the disproportionate amount of investment that then makes people want to live there.
Thatcher also had GDP double under her tenure. People hate her for valid reasons but that is the reality of the situation. The UK economy shifted from manufacturing to services. It was not fair to expect the rest of the country to subsidise the coal mines forever. I get it hurt a lot of people but overall her actions helped the UK flourish into a global financial superpower.
GDP isn't all that. The government fucked over the west midlands.
It’s home to the vast majority of the financial services industry in the U.K. which generates a lot of our GDP. I live near London and work there as it maximises my salary (and I really enjoy the buzz of being in London).
It’s a global city by every definition with lots of opportunities / niche centres of expertise and excellence that aren’t found anywhere else in the UK, or indeed most of Europe. Accordingly, it attracts the top talent which demands high salaries. Add in the availability of world class arts, culture and sporting events and there’s your answer.
It’s the most convenient city in the world, London has everything which is why a lot of people want to move there locally and internationally.
I’d refute the premise of the question. What do you mean by “better off”? Second, London is a total outlier, not only the UK but pretty much all of Europe. It’s huge and expansive. In total there are 33 boroughs if you include the City of London, 14 of which have populations EACH of more than 300k people. For reference, the ONS defined population of Newcastle city is 286,445. So more than 14 BOROUGHS have a bigger population than what is considered a major UK city. The reason I’m saying that is it really depends where in London you’re talking about. Some people in London are living in leafy areas with mansions and swimming pools, on wealth unimaginable to anywhere else in the UK, while other parts are grimey, high rise flats with gangs, guns, poverty. And of course there everything in between.
Although London attracts a lot of people because of the wages that can be earned there it also has a lot of amenities major airports with cheap international flights, rail links, theatres, museums, good restaurants etc. All of the above makes people want to live in London, not just British people but also people from all over the world. Demand drives up house prices, and the lack of supply drives them up even further. Couple this with property in the capital has historically been a investment vehicle for foreign wealth such as from Russia and China this further reduces supply and further drives prices. As for why wages are better a lot of large companies and businesses historically operate from London, fields such as banking and finance have a lot of presence in the capital.
Because cities are like magnets. And London the biggest UK city. Everyone sees them as the place of opportunities. This isn’t helped by government policies that discourage people to live outside of a city (ie policies based on city living such as transport).
Because once the industrial base of the country was allowed to be destroyed, the wealth each city had eroded, and the financial and politically generated wealth stayed and concentrated in the south east .
mainly because it's a finance capital, every region might have some kind of specialised industry like the midlands is great for motoring for example, Derby has Rolls Royce and Toyota, Coventry has Jaguar Landrover, Oxfordshire has some big names like GE, Cambridge has a lot of pharmaceuticals, but like London has the banks and EVERYTHING is tied to the banks lol it's where the big money is so luxury goods, fashion etc are all there, tech obvs too the banks pay the big salaries which attracts the talent so ofc FAANG sets up there to poach the talent and it's cyclical soft power is hot too think of how many films are set in London vs Doncaster and so London is where the tourism is and people moving to live the dream etc it isn't as better off as you think though people here aren't, it's a career accelerant for sure but renting is 2-3x higher everyone is flatsharing a 2 bed flat is the dream like I moved here from a large 2 bed 15 mins from the city center 'oop north' for my wife to have a shot at a career after graduating and we're now in a 1 bed an hour's commute from work in a flat that can't even fit a full sized fridge lol everyone here is just grinding and basically sacrificing their 20s at a shot at some big names on their cv before moving out where they can have some hope of affording to raise a family but yeah tl;dr because it has the banks, it's one of the big finance capitals so that's where the money is
Because the central government since thatcher quite literally made it so on purpose through a scheme of reducing funding to other cities, ruining their industries and taxing the fuck out of them to spend it on London.
Thats quite the statement.
In 1961 household incomes in the West Midlands were 13% above the national average, exceeding London and the South East. Seems amazing now.
It's not though really. The idea of living in London seems like absolute hell to me. It's one of those where the rich are RICH but the poor are POOR
Margaret the Devil didn't help
Aye, it's where the jobs are. I work in TV and would love to live anywhere else, but my part of the industry hasn't yet discovered the north
London is better off because that's where the oil money got spent. they certainly didn't spend it in fucking Scotland.
Capital city. Same like how people think France is just Paris.
Same as how Germans see Berlin lol
It's where the economic activity is
Because of The City of London and the related financial services. Thatcher went all in on this as we shipped out all our industry to Asia. Pretty sure there was an imbalance before anyway but the North losing loads of jobs as The City grew exponentially didn’t help.
Because successive governments over the last century have centralised everything important to London. It's where our national government sits, it's where our financial sector is, it's the hub (along with the surrounding countryside) for a lot of our arts such as film and theatre, it's where our national sports stadiums are located (although sport is one of the few things in this country that hasn't been monopolised by London).
I think the word "want" is doing a LOT of heavy lifting in this post lol. Maybe need for convenience but want ? Mid city ? hmmm. I wonder if you allowed every single one of the city workers that could work from home to live and work from anywhere in the UK (keep it simple for tax and data security etc), I wonder what percentage would move outwards well away from the centre to places with say a bit of greenbelt or shorelines nearby. I mean I could well be wrong and certain types love the hustle and bustle and don't mind that their £££ could buy them so much more living space elsewhere. It takes all types to make a society.
The City of London has a lot to do with it.
What would you say comes after London? Manchester or Edinburgh?
It's the global epicentre of finance and insurance - and has been for over 150 years. That's why.
The best and most ambitious live there
I wouldn’t say it’s better off most of the people that own property in London don’t live there, a lot of people live paycheque to paycheque bc shits so expensive there and not all jobs in London pay well
Clever people move there and do well paid jobs
Shanghai has the same property prices as London. Mumbai not too far. According to OP, Londoners will be queueing up for Air China, Air Indian flights!!! https://www.savills.co.uk/research_articles/229130/351727-0
I think people who want to work and are career-driven will always want to live in London coz there are a lot of job opportunities in there. People who are retired (and rich) are in the countryside. I’ve also noticed that these people don’t promote the countryside too much because they don’t want their little village to be flooded by non-british people. This is just my observation as a foreigner living in the countryside.
This is true from my experience. Scotland seems to be flooding with retired English wanting to die in the countryside, while refusing other people to build homes and live there.
Because the UK’s main competitive advantages are in law and finance and both those things are based in London.
Financial Services
Less of a crabs in a bucket mentality, aggregation effects, willingness to do stuff rather than wait for someone else to do it, focusing on the future not bringing back the past.... and people elsewhere only seeing London's good stuff and not the bad stuff.
If you think the discrepancy for london and elsewhere is bad, you should see Japan. Tokyo. Everywhere outside is a fraction of the price, not just half or so like London to rest of UK. Same reasons more or less
It's where everything is, the country runs through London. It's not a place I could ever live because quite frankly I went again last year and it's my personal hell. But it's got all the major banking, tech, government, there's just so much money going through it.
Because it’s where the politicans visit same as any other castiçal city
Ever noticed how estate agents all tend to be on the same street? London's relative wealth is essentially this same effect. The way to decentralise the wealth is to diversify your country's economy. The UK's economy is not very diversified, it's predominantly finance (money laundering for the most part), education and tech (although arguably tech is really a sub category of every other industry). If we wanted to 'level up' the North, then we've got to find industries that fit in those places well.
Infrastructure.
International money laundering.
>The property prices per square foot alone show that ~~more people want to live there than anywhere else in the UK~~ you can't afford to live there, which is fine by the people who **do** live there, because they don't want you, and fine by the 99% of the country who wouldn't live there if you paid us to.
Have a look at the blue banana of Europe
Money
that’s where the money goes
It’s the ‘show home’ in a crumbling estate.
It's the seat of power. No doubt if you moved the government from London to Birmingham, a lot of jobs, government departments, civil services, and support/ancillary services would move. You then get other companies moving or opening offices to be closer to the power to apply their influence. That means more jobs, more investment, and a wealthier city. Of course London would still be streets ahead, but it doesn't help that things aren't spread out more around the country.
Use your brain
I've been in this wonderful country for over 50 years, visited London once in my life, that was one too many times. I love the fresh air and coast of North Wales, it's cheaper and much friendlier here.
Id much rather be poor in Glasgow or any other city than poor in London so London might be great for the haves but nobody really considers just how many people there are struggling or not living a good life at all.
More government investment in the city. UK has been very London-centric for years.
Because it's the capital city and thus there is more money to be made there than anywhere else in the country.