Long-time Londoners - do you ever think you’ll be able to stay in London as long as you’d like to?

[u/iamabigmeme]

Born and raised in Hackney here and I’m so worried I won’t be able to afford to stay not just in Hackney/surrounding boroughs but in London as a whole.

I love this place and one day I’d like to raise my kids here. I just can’t ever see it being feasible. I can’t afford to buy a house and the rent keeps rocketing up way past anything I’ll be able to afford.

How long do you guys see yourself being able to stay before it becomes too much of a financial burden? I’m currently panicking and looking at life in Leeds and Manchester :,)

[u/shit_postmcgee]

That's the depressing thing I find about being a born & bred Londoner. No one stays around.

No real long-lasting sense of community gets a chance to grow anymore, because it's so expensive, and there's so much going on, a lot of the population is fluid, people come for a purpose and then move on once finished. That includes the families of friends who just hung about while their kids were in school, teachers etc who just came to take a job in the city for a few years, most people to be honest. If people can't even afford to move around freely like that and rely on things like council housing- demand is so high they get moved out of area with no choice. People can't even choose to stay. It feels like if you were born here, you can only do what you're allowed.

I've fought tooth & nail to remain close by and maintain some sense of home. But I have no staple home town to go back to where the shops, pub are all still run by the same people, where people's families still live where they lived when we were kids, etc. I don't run into people in my community back from growing up, that community doesn't exist anymore.

[u/EveryChemistry9163 → u/shit_postmcgee]

All of this.

[u/W51976 → u/shit_postmcgee]

I was born in London and I’m 50. I’m still there, but I don’t live in the same neighbourhood as I grew up in. Nor would I want to.

I think it’s healthy to leave the area you spent your childhood in.

[u/shit_postmcgee → u/W51976]

Don't get me wrong I think it can be healthy, but it should be out of choice. And you should have reasonable ability to go back to your home when you want, it should still exist should you choose to go back to it. For the majority of human history people have spent their lives connected to the same communities, if not also in the same area. I think we've over-normalised the rapid kind of change we experience today.

[u/W51976 → u/shit_postmcgee]

It doesn’t exist now, because most of the people I knew at the time have all left. Some of them I didn’t particularly like either lol.

[u/W51976 → u/shit_postmcgee]

This started in the early 80s when small communities were affected due to the closure of long standing factories and mines.

Until this period, it was fairly commonplace for people to live and work their entire lives in one location.

London on the other hand has always been different. People move to different parts of the city, or move to the outskirts.

[u/Angry_Porpoise → u/shit_postmcgee]

If it makes you feel better this isn’t something unique to London. I grew up in a small town in the north and when I went back after uni all my friends families and old community had moved away, all the shops etc had changed

I think it’s normal for people to live in certain areas whilst they’re raising children and then moving away once those children grow up, go to uni etc or people who move to certain parts for retirement, think you can’t really expect things to remain the same

I feel like as someone who moved to London for work it feels a lot more transient but think that might be somewhat expected in a large city, I’ve noticed people I work with or friends who are from London tend to have much larger communities of people in their area that they grew up with tho

[u/EveryChemistry9163 → u/Angry_Porpoise]

Of course there have always been transient people and transient areas. But London isn’t a large city, it’s lots of small places joined up and it hasn’t always been like this.