There are plenty of areas within London that comes out better. Croydon, for example. Zone 5. Still expensive if you need to get in to zone 1, but property is far cheaper, helped by an unwarranted bad reputation (Croydon is safer than most of the central boroughs of London, for example, and incomes are above the London average).

A large part of the issue is that younger people are chasing the top jobs in London without being willing to deal with typical London commutes. I have had plenty of co-workers who insisted on living in zone 1 or 2 because they could not bear the idea of moving out to a place like Croydon, despite knowing I was paying less on a 3 bedroom house with a garden than the typical cost of a studio in the areas they have chosen to live in.

In fact, I pay less on my mortgage now for that 3 bed house with a garden than I used to pay for one room in a flat share in zone 1 when I first moved here 14 years ago. Sure, it takes me 45 minutes to get to a central London train station. But I'm 20 minutes walk from one of the largest commercial centres in the UK (Croydon has the 3rd or 4th largest shopping area in South East England).

I have a hard time feeling sympathy for most of these people. Sure, there are lots of people that genuinely struggle in London, but the high prices in large parts of London largely reflect that people willingly put an extremely high premium of being within minutes of a central tube station.