> Now it is honestly too expensive, £8 a pint in pub near work, it makes going out less fun.

Aren’t the salaries higher as well? In Paris a pint is €7 on average (~£6) but according to Glassdoor the average SWE salary is only €53k/yr vs. £68k for London.

> Aren’t the salaries higher as well?

The killer is house and rental costs.

If you want a flat in central London you'll be paying half (or more?) of your £68k salary on rent after tax. In Canary Wharf you might not even be able to afford rent.

A £68k salary won't bring you close to being able to afford a mortgage, unless you have capital from other means e.g. inheretence.

To be fair, though, that is a prime-ish location, not much different to trying to live in Manhattan or the nice bits of SF.

Big cities are big enough that you can have vastly different ideas of what it means to "live in New York" or "live in LA" - I had friends in both who would say they lived there, but were a minimum an hour from the central business district.

Yeah. You get people who live in Bromley who say they live in London, just because it's a London Borough.

I gave up answering where I lived years ago, now I just reply with the name of the nearest international airport; people are much more likely to know where LA is than any of the hundreds of smaller cities in and around its metro area.

As somebody who lives well outside London, my mental model of "in London" is "within the M25" :-)

Real Londoners use this.

Salaries aren't increasing at the same rate.

I got a 2.5% salary increase this year. Because of inflation is should be > 8% (ONS has a recommendation). Complained about it and they still wouldn't increase it.

That's the one kind of inflation which didn't bother me too much. I still go out just as much I just drink less. That's healthier.

The property situation makes me far more angry. The UK construction and property industry completely lacks market discipline and regulation (see: Grenfell, the utter crappiness of most newbuilds).

Then there was the restriction of homebuilding - deliberately engineered by successive governments in order to jack up property prices and extract a parasitically greater % of people's incomes via rents.

When the Tories talked about being Singapore-on-Thames I wished they meant build thousands of nice HDB apartment blocks and get tough on corruption but alas it seems what they actually meant was Moscow-on-Thames - make London an even bigger haven for oligarchs and dial up the corruption with more no bid contracts for the NHS.

Here's some data corroborating this:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/bull...

As you can see, London rents are increasing at an accelerating rate.

thanks for the stats. Most often, rental stats are for new leases but actually those are numbers also for current renters (" The index not only measures the change in newly advertised rental prices, but reflects price changes for all private rental properties, including for existing tenancies."). 5% rent increases last year...

| quality regulations have been reduced (see: Grenfell where that literally killed people.

Grenfell was a horrible tragedy. It was built as social housing in the 50’s or 60’s to a much higher standard (in terms of space and utility) than the so called luxury apartments of Canary Wharf.

The installation of cladding to modernise the building to meet modern energy efficiency standards and the apparent failure to make sure that work was completed within the regulations seems to be the cause of the catastrophic spread of the fire.

London planning is a complete mess. We waste millions on poorly executed projects to modernise social housing to save on CO2 emissions and at the same time we have the wealthy living in Victorian and older houses that are not allowed to install double glazing in order “to preserve the character of the property”.

Yes, the fact that you can draw a direct line between recent watered down regulations designed to bring in more profit for the construction industry and 72 people being burned alive just makes it that much worse.

London planning isn't an accidental mess. It's a deliberately engineered mess designed to let property/land owners and construction companies act as a parasite on the productive economy.

Net migration of 600k/year also affects property prices.

The UK could very well easily up with net emigration and still have rising rents.

New York in the 1950s ran a very high level of immigration (GIs returning from the war) and had the strongest rent controls it ever had. Neither property prices nor rents rose very much.

London only passed the population threshold it reached in 1939 in 2015 - LONG after rents and property prices had been jacked up to eye watering levels.

Building social housing isn't hard, it just requires a government that operates on behalf of the working classes (who want a roof over their head) rather than land owners (who will try to stymie that process in every way they can in order to jack up rents).

Well, yes, I guess we could grow our population indefinitely until we tarmac over all of the UK to house them.

Land usage is horrendously inefficient in the UK and that is largely by design. Immigration might exacerbate rent rises all other things being equal but as I said it could just as easily happen with net migration too.

With Singapore you could argue that immigration is a key issue with their rising rents because proportionally it's so much higher than the UK, they make very efficient use of land and they are very much more space deprived.

In the UK it's not an issue with immigration because other variables override it.

That is unless somebody is really in the mood to indirectly take the issue to a xenophobic or a racist place on behalf of a few populist property oligarchs looking for an easy scapegoat.

I'm not sure what distinction you are drawing between "immigration" and "net migration"? Net Migration is just all the people that have immigrated (moved to) to a country minus all those that have emigrated (left) a country. That is the figure of 600k for the UK currently.

>> In the UK it's not an issue with immigration because other variables override it.

Care to name some? I guess you could say that UK housing is "inefficient" but again, I'm not sure making people live in tower blocks just so that more people from other countries can move here is all that fair of a solution, or if it is what people are proposing at least make it explicit and have it as a party policy that people can vote on.

TBH property oligarchs would favour high migration because of the effect it has on property values and rents.

>I'm not sure making people live in tower blocks just so that more people from other countries can move here is all that fair of a solution

The only forcing going on in London is handing over between 30-50% of your paycheck just to have a roof over your head.

Nobody would have to be forced to live in an apartment. You just have to build them and people will rent or buy them.

As I said, unless you want to take this to a racist place it's not an issue of immigration. Not in the UK anyway.

>TBH property oligarchs would favour high migration

Yes, thats why the Tory party effectively used xenophobia to garner votes while simultaneously increasing net migration to the UK. It was all about throwing a racist bone to their voters who were heavily swayed towards UKIP before betraying them.

Not wanting high net migration is not xenophobic though, however much you throw out your ad hominem attacks.

> 600k/year

That makes it sound as if it's 600k each year. It isn't - that's the figure for 2022. The figure for 2019 is 180k. Supposedly, the 2022 figure is inflated by official programmes encouraging immigration from Hong Kong and Ukraine.

2021 was 488k.

I look forward to the figure for 2024 being -800k or so to even things out but I won't hold my breath.

The terrible thing is how they destroy old house from the inside and build multiple flats with terrible quality at huge prices because renters are pretty much in a dire situation and, stuff like RTO and centralization, makes it even worse for them (commute cost+rent cost+living cost in those areas)

All the while charging extremely high tax rates that get distributed to who knows what, the war on Ukraine, maybe.

I used the beer example as it happened that day. Same goes for restaurant food etc.

Yeah, who could ever afford a £8 ping on a SWE salary. /s

I'm not a Londoner, I only visit occasionally, but I think this may be a psychological response to a big increase.

I used to like going out in London: "everything's so cheap!" Especially, getting a nice beer at a random pub would cost significantly less than a random basic lager in Paris.

But this year, I was shocked to see the price increase. It's now pricier than Paris, even though Paris prices have also edged up a bit.

And since my cash is Euros, I always compared the prices as converted to euros, so this accounted for the conversion rate variations.

If you want cheap european beer just go to south europe. It will be cheaper than the water they charge you for.

Check Indeed, junior SWE jobs in London are listed starting at ~£25k/yr. Yes, £8 is expensive for a pint of lager.

I'm sure you _can_ find salaries that low but it's not typical. I started on £30k 6 years ago, and that company was infamous for underpaying grads! Most other junior developers I knew (at other companies) were on ~£40k or so.

£8/pint is also way more expensive than normal. I was out in Shoreditch last night, paid £6.70 for a pint of Brewdog, and that was more than I'd usually pay.

I can find $10 pints nearby, but I can also find $1 can nights, all within a mile or so of each other.

This is around what you can get in Warsaw.

Unless you want going out to be an Instagramable event instead of an after work one, then yeah.

Tax rates matter. It's easy to talk as a yank in a US salary with the tax rates in most states.

UK is insane.

-healthcare, etc, etc

Healthcare is terrible. It's mostly a scam with lots of propaganda and lack of perspective by British citizens. I'm not kidding. It's a system where the NHS will just push you forward and the insurance will cover fuck all and try to get you to the same NHS doctor.

It's the same nanny state style as some other European countries where they will try and sell you nothing over the counter because "you might abuse it" but they have a drinking and illegal drug culture to rival the best of them.

The US sucks if you're in the lower end of the spectrum without insurance but with insurance you actually get treatment. There's other countries where it's a pleasure to have private healthcare if you're middle class but many in europe definitely aren't. They'll just try to discourage you unless you're having an "my leg is detaching" type of emergency.

There's a reason why there's ads in the tube to "go to turkey to fix X health problem".

We should stop comparing having a health net for the jobless in a country with the US and typical quality of life/healthcare situation for a professional.

Edit: If I felt things worked, and people would eventually be able to afford houses and get into a better situation high taxes would be fine, but it's high taxes and policies that still benefit the richest/landlords/corporates/big pharma. It's corruption and classism. He former is widespread in many countries but the pretense otherwise is what is annoying.

For non-Londoners, it’s worth pointing out that £8 for a pint is exceptionally high. In most smart pubs in central london the price for a regular pint is approx £5-£6.50. And you can get pints for approx £3 in centrally located Wetherspoons (a common pub chain).

£7 a pint in the pub in my Sussex village.

$15 AUD in my local Aussie pub(7.50 pound) A little off topic but just wanted to chime in because it's crazy here.

Sussex villages are full of wealthy commuters. I wouldn't expect to find anything cheap in such a place.

Unfortunatley we are seeing prices like this in the US as well. I live in Denver, CO and a pint here typically runs between $5-$10 depending on the place.

A US pint is 16 fl Oz vs a UK pint which is 20 fl Oz, so add 25% to the US price to do a like-for-like.

Spent months in London over the last year and didn’t realize this… thanks.

UK Pint == Imperial Pint. USA disapproves of imperial measure, for historical reasons.

A fluid ounce is based on avoirdupois, which isn't "imperial", so it didn't have to be abandoned. I think pints, quarts and gallons, all being based on the pint, are the only measures that differ significantly between the US and the UK.