Many places outside of big cities are depopulating, have few decent jobs and services, and are still pretty expensive. If you are from the areas, have a family or an already decent career it might work, but for the majority it isn't a solution. And if people would actually would start moving somewhere else instead the same things would happens there.

> if people would actually would start moving somewhere else instead the same things would happens there.

Not really. Unless everyone moves to the same place. We need to diversify from London. Having everything centred there is madness.

It would probably in many places though. The reason cities like London are more "successful" these days despite being completely unsuitable for modern industries at face value is because they can handle the growth. Adding a couple a thousand people is a rounding error in big cities, but would be the entire liquid housing market in smaller ones. Maybe you are right, maybe people just aren't aware. But it doesn't seem like the most obvious explanation. People, including Britons, have been moving to Berlin for decades now in search of more affordable living.

Edit: I am being rate limited so I will respond here instead.

> Except for the lack of affordable housing?

Sort of. Affordable housing is more a problem of uneven distribution of opportunities than costs as such. If you are part of those who do get to take part in those opportunities this is less of a problem since you are effectively in the same situation as living in a richer country. Of course you also miss out on opportunities that would be enabled by affordable housing, and a lower cost of living. But since most more affordable location can't take advantage of that as their own cost of housing is usually relative to their local opportunities it becomes a game of who is the biggest which large companies in large cities win.

> ...because they can handle the growth.

Except for the lack of affordable housing?

On the US side, I've learned that the infrastucture for each industry is clustered in specific cities.

If you want to participate in that industry, you need to live in one of those cities or have the luxury caveat of remote workability.

Want to work in tech? Good luck buying a house for cheap - anywhere that property values are languishing will not have useable broadband internet providers.

Got a chemistry degree? There's a short list of cities to move to, where you specialize in either medicine or petrochemical plastics. The option to do either rarely exists in a single city.

There are still a lot of places in the UK outside of London that have plenty of jobs and are far more affordable.

I live in Nottingham. There are tonnes of tech jobs here in the Midlands, and housing is quite affordable.

And yet the tech scene in Leicester is awful in comparison :(

> stay the hell away from London

Will somewhat agree living in London, but I'd also throw Oxford into the mix as somewhere to avoid. I found the relative cost of living noticeably worse in Oxford (salary vs living costs) than compared to London.

Essentially the main point being: really evaluate the cost of living, salary, lifestyle matrix before committing. Lots of other places in the UK offering much better options right now.

Oxford is different because of geography. In most places where housing is too expensive the core problem is politics. That's not easy to solve, but it's universal. But in Oxford the biggest obstacle is that the obvious place to put more houses is in fact a swamp.

For students it works out OK (so long as numbers don't grow too much) because the very wealthy people who paid for Oxford's university to exist built somewhere for students to live right inside the university too, in effect their housing costs are subsidised - until they graduate. Then though, either they need to move far away ASAP or they're going to be spending most of their income on rent.

> Oxford's university to exist built somewhere for students to live right inside the university too

For those it's true, but also forgetting there's more than one university in Oxford. There are plenty of places on the East and North sides of the city where denser housing could have been placed, but it comes down more to politics around NIMBYism and preservation, more than geography.

Serious question: How many other real universities (not places with one office above a coffee shop offering correspondence courses to the gullible) are there in Oxford? I spent some of my teens playing pinball in the student bar at one of the Oxford Brookes halls (Harcourt Hill maybe?) -- and already by the point you're counting Brookes you're stretching the point, it wouldn't be named that if Oxford wasn't famous. It's not quite "London" Stansted Airport, but it's barely in Oxford.

I worked at Brookes for several years, I can definitely attest their campus is in Oxford (Harcourt Hill is miles out, as is Wheatley, but their main campus for the last decade or so is right next to South Park in Headington). It's not a stretch to say they're properly in the city and now have a claim to having "Oxford" in the name - and large swathes of the student body now live in the city proper.

If you want to take the naming thing, then consider Kidlington Aerodrome is called "London Oxford Airport"...

Unfortunately the UK economy is very London centric. And the deck is very much stacked in London's favour due to the sheer numbers who live in London compared to the rest of the UK - (greater than 1/8th of all people in the UK live in London).

I moved to London from a UK regional capital, and personally I've had the opportunity to improve my earnings much further than would be achievable at home for my particular branch of Tech.

All my peers are well aware that the rent is breathtaking - however most of us with home ownership aspirations are not intent on living in London indefinitely, owning or renting in the commuter towns in the south east are far more achievable on a good IT salary.

You've increased your earnings, but if you run the numbers it's very unlikely you're actually better off unless you have a property appreciating at London speed.

Over my career (I did contract in London around y2k) I have more in my pocket each month - after expenses - by staying outside the SE. Rent or mortgage, commuting costs, the price of everything else - food, beer, tickets. Sure, I could earn £x extra and have to spend all of it and more on rent and getting to work.

The capital accumulation on the house would have turned it into making economic sense, and only that. Which only becomes real once you move out of the area.

Not sure I really follow the "cost of beer" thing. One of the merits of high income high expenses is that "luxury" spending is relatively affordable in the long run, because your discretionary income is a larger absolute number.

On the other hand your time becomes more expensive. But since most medium income medium expenses locations means less opportunities to do other things with other people that isn't always a good trade-off. Unless those other people are your family, in which case it tends to make sense.

But that was my point. Even with the London loading of salaries, which is miles away from the SV salary differentials you see bandied around on here sometimes, the London absolute number is usually smaller for most jobs. Banking is the one exception for some roles.

To invent some undoubtedly wrong numbers out of thin air: Earning £35k in Leeds or Manchester leaves a few hundred more to spend on luxuries and nights out than £50k working in a similar role in London. By the time you accounted for the huge extra expense on mortgage, season tickets to get to work, services and even ignore the price of a pint, you have less in absolute terms to spend than your "poor" Northern friend. I simply couldn't get it to add up the few times I tried. Now had the opportunity been to be a quant, I might have taken the opposite view... :)

I could have saved for deposit in the North, taken mortgage the day I moved there, accepted a markedly worse quality of life and lower money left after expenses for twenty years, to move elsewhere at the end with a nice nest egg. That's just a contributory pension with no tax relief.

That could certainly be the case as some housing markets now seem to require initial capital to make sense. But I wonder if part of it isn't accepting a specific deal (or life)? Which is probably a good idea, but not something everyone can do. At least my impression is that most people who move to big cities do so because they want to establish themselves in life.

The question is whether average person trying to do so is going to have better success in Leeds than London. Or if it is going to be mostly the same thing but with less opportunities. Once you know roughly what you want to do, or what position you are in, medium size cities tend to make more sense. But I don't think that is controversial.

I think many young people argue if they are going to have to change jobs every few years, commute some distance, have high rent or whatever else that affects their quality of life they might as well do that somewhere where they at least think it might count for something. Whether in the future or right then.

As an anecdotal example the cost of a pint of beer in London can be 3 to 4 times as expensive as what I'm used to in the South West. For other basic necessities I agree with you however.

The South West feels so old now. We were in Dorset a couple of weeks ago and I'm convinced I didn't see anybody younger than myself and I'm 55.

That’s why you need to move to places with better income to cost of living ratios.

I'd disagree if you have a job where you will earn most by far in London. You can live really cheap if you share a flat and you dont need a car, so you'll save much more in London than other places. When you have a family things are very different.

I don't live in London, but I live in my country's biggest city. All the jobs are here, so I can either live in the city or outside the city, with a 2-hour commute. It kind of sucks either way, but that extra hour a day, I spend with my daughter and that makes me happy.

This basically amounts to advising them not to live in a city (which is fine). But some people do like living in cities, and London is really the only option in the UK if you want to do that. No other city in the UK is anywhere close to London in terms of culture and economic opportunity.

Yes, rents in Manchester and Birmingham are lower. But you're going to get paid less, you have to live in a second tier city, and in the long run you have fewer career opportunities.

You can get a far better quality of life in most other cities on the standard developer salary than you can in London. I know multiple colleagues who have moved out of London, taken a large salary cut but ended up with a far higher quality of life and more disposable income despite it.

Also the idea that other cities are second-tier is incredibly biased. Sure London has some things that the RUK doesn't but there are also plenty of things you can't get in London (fresh air for one). It's a different lifestyle, not a 'second tier' lifestyle. Also other cities are cities, they might not be mega cities but that's not the definition of the word.

Lastly the career opportunities part depends. Yes there are less opportunities but there are also far less people vying for them. Smaller pond but bigger fish. If you're a careerist looking to become the top 1%, London is probably your best bet in the UK, but it's perfectly possible to work in the top 10% outside of London.

Talking about quality of life is usually a coded way of talking about not really living in a city. Yes, London is relatively noisy, dirty, cramped, etc. The only way you can get less of that in the UK is to also have less of the benefits of living in a city. I mean, there's no other city in the UK that even has a proper public transit system. Not liking cities is, as I said, a personal preference, and perfectly fine.

You really need to use a term other than city to describe what you're describing. I live in a city, Edinburgh, as do the various folk who have mentioned living in Manchester etc. Their not mega sprawling metropolises like London but their still cities. You're confusing the discussion by using the term improperly.

Edinburgh has a population of 489,000. You can call it a city if you like, but it's not comparable to London in any way.

It is a city. You're inaccurately redefining the term city to meet a very narrow definition, which is confusing the discussion.

Please provide your definition of what a city is.

You can define the word how you like. London and Edinburgh aren't on the same scale.

> This basically amounts to advising them not to live in a city (which is fine). But some people do like living in cities, and London is really the only option in the UK if you want to do that.

I'm gonna call bollocks on that :)

I agree with the rest to an extent. You're going to be paid higher (well not everybody, but most HN readers would be) and have all the other advantages of London. Fine. But you need to take the downsides with that and stop moaning.

When I was emigrating to the UK I considered everywhere. London was one of the first places I crossed off my list.

>But you need to take the downsides with that and stop moaning.

This is the whole problem with the UK. Many of the current problems with London are fixable. People need to keep moaning about them in order to get them fixed.

Tbh I think the "easiest" single thing which would improve the UK immensely would be to ditch FPTP and bring in some type of PR voting.

What I will give your argument of moving is that once you have something to fix it usually already have become a feature for someone else. It is usually not realistic to fix much of anything so much as moving in another direction from a different position. I just don't see any places really doing that. Not that it would necessarily be visible, but people are looking. While certainly having slightly different criteria Nomad List for example doesn't feature much in the UK. https://nomadlist.com/

If we had a PR voting system and the PM resigned. What would happen?

Would a general election be called?

It's a bit farcical that the country will have a PM that was not the leader of the governing party at the last election.

Granted with the Brexit mess they could arguably have some legitimate reasons for not calling it straight away but it seems that they've all ruled out calling it at all, AFAIK.

> If we had a PR voting system and the PM resigned. What would happen?

Ireland has a form of PR (single transferable vote), they've had plenty of instances of the Taoiseach (PM) being replaced and not going to a general election straight away.

That or turn London into a city state :)

As long as the City of London is independent of that!

Not sure I understand... you're gonna call bollocks on the idea that someone can have different likes and dislikes from you?

London is not the only city in the UK. That's what I'm calling bollocks on.

Ah my bad, somehow I omitted the fact they said London is the only city! Yeah that is a little weird, plenty more to the UK than just London :)

My anecdotal evidence suggests that the London premium in salaries does not, anywhere near, compensate for the increased housing costs and/or commute time. Obviously, YMMV