The vast majority of academics with families live in the outer zones in London, or commute by rail from the suburbs just outside. London has a very dense and efficient public transport network, and therefore a typical commute time is around 40 minutes, and in most cases less than 1hr.
The price of accomodation remains an issue with younger academics, who arrived in London after the housing booms (1st surge around 2004, 2nd around 2010). Consultancy, enterpreneurship etc do provide good additional income streams for many, and therefore it still all makes sense.
More recently Imperial has been developing some of its own accomodation for junior staff and graduate students, which is made available at subsidised rates.
Why? It's as easy to commute from certain places outside of London as inside. For instance, it takes longer for me to get from where I live in south London to e.g. Kings Cross than it would to get there from Cambridge. The amount of time you save by living more centrally is probably less than 20 minutes.
Having said that, I agree with the sentiment!
The trick is you have to change at Stockwell onto the Victoria Line.
Nb. I did almost this journey every day pre-lockdown and the numbers are accurate for me at least.
But, post-graduates in London (if they have no other source of support) do tend to have a difficult lifestyle. Not recommended.
You don't get paid for being knighted. And these universities have a mostly fixed pay scale it's not like Google where you can just demand whatever you want if you're good enough.
Then again, there exist Business Schools, where due to the different funding model (most income comes from MBAs, as opposed to research grant overheads, and undergraduate tuition fees), full professors can easily make near-£200k in base salary.
[Updated to note: Imperial College quotes a fixed minimum salary of £79,080 for professors in 2019 with performance-related increases - so the Glassdoor figures quoting lower than that cannot be right]
The home.co.uk site quotes the median price of property listings is £600k (is that close to £1m? ok sure). It also identifies that houses priced higher than that are listed for significantly longer, i.e. they count with more weight in this stat despite not selling. Therefore, I understand the median sale price to be lower.
You have a lot to learn about the London housing market and UK salaries.
A friend rejected a job at Imperial because he didn't want to live in a metropolis. Another friend stays at UCL because she can't bear to leave London.
This was necessary because house prices in Palo Alto are in the $2+ million range, which is not affordable to profs, and prevents them from the normal housing ladder investment seen in the rest of the USA.
A lot of the profs use bicycles to ride the mile or so to class.
Damn. I'm sure he appreciates the $3M (elsewhere he joked that he could finally afford to buy a house in London) but the Fields Medal is a much bigger deal in the world of mathematics.