London is, as Samuel Johnson said, as varied and exciting as life itself. It’s the sort of city nobody really wants to leave. People are, nonetheless, departing — in their tens of thousands. Last year, London’s population fell for only the third time in four decades, driven by an exodus of thirty and fortysomethings, especially those with children.
A capital this prosperous and vibrant should be a magnet for talent and creativity. But what sort of magnet city repels its most productive residents?
This isn’t because of high New York-style local-government levies. Council taxes in central London boroughs are often lower than those further out, and definitely lower than in many of the Home Counties around the capital. Nor is it because of the crime wave that countless Americans on social media imagine we’re suffering. No such wave exists. London is safer than ever, unless you’re holding an iPhone on Oxford Street.
So why are people leaving? Simple: Because they cannot afford to live in a decent house. To start with, London has largely stopped building new homes. According to the Centre for Policy Studies, fewer than 5,000 will be finished in 2027 and 2028, undershooting any of the previous 80 years.
But this isn’t all about building stats or house prices. Many people in their 30s and 40s could possibly tighten their belts and shell out even more. The bigger problem is that what you get for your money turns them off.
The housing on offer is boringly cookie-cutter at best; and too often awful and depressing. The fiftieth time you’re shown an “upmarket” three-bedroom flat with tiny windows, or a “desirable” terraced house with cramped rooms and Victorian plumbing, you begin to think the city has it in for you personally.
Everyone knows why London constructs too few houses: Planning requirements are restrictive. New builds are monotonous and uninspiring because there isn’t a big enough mix of British housebuilding companies, and — as my colleague Matthew Brooker has explained — those same planning rules make it overly difficult for buyers to choose their own designs.
Who would pay thousands a month for an interchangeable 800-square-foot flat when (for the small price of an interminable commute) you can live outside the city? And so Londoners in their prime working years are moving in droves to parts of the country that are really not set up to receive them.
Last month I was in Grantham, the home of Margaret Thatcher and Isaac Newton — a place the New Statesman has called “the mean, mode and median of Middle England.” This should be a sleepy country town of sturdy shopkeepers like Thatcher’s father, inhabiting a different world from the big city. But, as the late-evening train from King’s Cross pulled in, it was crowded with exhausted commuters. Thirty miles north, in Lincoln, I met people who several times a week spent five hours of their day travelling to London and back.
I myself live in the darkest reaches of the upper Thames Valley, dependent on the vagaries of a still-unelectrified branch line of the Great Western Railway to get me into the metropolis. Even here, house prices are already at levels you’d associate with Zones 2 or 3 on London’s tube line. The crucial difference is that what you get for your money is more varied, more attractive — more liveable.
The average commute in a metropolitan city globally is about 50 minutes. And, sure, exiles to the shires would love to be somewhere that gets us nearer that time. We’re city people by nature. But London has no place for us.
Even so, had it not been for the pandemic, we might never have realized there was anywhere else to go. The other two times in the past four decades that London’s population fell were, of course, the years dominated by Covid-19. In those years, house prices in towns more than an hour beyond the capital increased by far greater than the annual national average of 13%. The Bank of England said this was the fastest jump since 2004, and half of the rise came from families’ desire for more space than they had in the city.
This great migration will reshape how we work, and alter profoundly the towns we chose and the city we left. Once you’re used to an extra hundred or so square feet, and cheaper private schools and childcare, it’s hard to justify living in London again. That’s one reason why companies’ constant attempts to force people back to the office seem to founder.
Small towns across the UK are being changed by the influx of new and different residents, both for better and for worse. Nail salons and Australian coffee bars are replacing pubs and betting shops on high streets. Some newcomers wind up renting because other ex-Londoners are paying so much for homes.
Even the countryside around them is changing. Where I live, every second field has an exasperated sign taped up warning newcomers that dogs off their lead will kill sheep (and sometimes that they may be shot). What you read about the dangers of London isn’t real, but the countryside’s dog-on-sheep violence is. The government had to pass new legislation last year removing any cap on how much dog owners can be fined for irresponsibility around livestock. Relations between locals and middle-class arrivals are easily strained.
Worst of all, however, the exodus will reshape London. The world’s greatest urban conurbation is slowly hollowing out. No city can survive as a home just for young renters and geriatric landlords. If Britain wants to protect its diminishing claim to being the center of the world, it had better offer Londoners houses as exciting and attractive as the city they love.
This report is auto generated from the Bloomberg news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.