Are young people, especially creatives, as excited about London, as driven to live in it, as people like me once were? The answer appears to be a very firm no, and, for the first time, I get it.
Yet another creative exodus appears to be under way, this time from London to Glasgow. Estate agents are reporting a significant spike in interest from Londoners. Prices have risen by 28% since 2019. Glasgow is a magnet for the alternative sensibility. Dynamic and artist friendly, the cost of living is 48% cheaper than London, with affordable property to rent and buy.
As one freelance curator and London-Glasgow migrant told the Times: “It feels like in London you have to be constantly running on this hamster wheel … In Glasgow, there’s more time to be creative.” Creatives getting the chance to be creative? Imagine that.
Other fine cities (Edinburgh, Manchester, Bristol) regularly make it on to Londoners’ great escape wish-lists. It almost doesn’t matter where; the shift is that people have stopped dreaming of getting to London, and now dream of getting away from it. And these aren’t the old and knackered, who feel they’ve completed their stint in the metropolitan salt mines. These are young and youngish creatives. They’ve been burnt out, priced out, bummed out and now they’re getting out. If Greater London were on a dating app, people would be swiping left.
So much for London weighting; welcome to another round of London cooling. The reasons such exoduses keep happening are as obvious as they are dispiriting. Home ownership is increasingly out of reach. Renting is exorbitant: average London rents are almost double the national average. Public transport is risibly expensive. Going out: ha ha, forget it. When it comes to quality of life and work-life balance, you’d probably need to explain the concepts in a TED talk.
This is the real London for too many of those with any kind of arty disposition. Financial pressure acting as a spreading stain across their life. The kind of anxiety that drowns creativity in a bucket. It makes living the counterculture dream very hard. Too hard. Let’s be real: it makes it impossible.
Once upon a time, I’d have thought, suck it up, buttercups. What do these people expect from life in the Big Smoke: a rolled-out red carpet and all the chargrilled samphire they can eat? But that’s me not getting it. That’s me conflating my own experiences moving to London in the late 80s (with “experience in fanzines”, and confused ideas about what comprised music journalism) with what’s happening today.
For a start, we had squats. In my youth, it was entirely possible to live in London rent-free. Alternative types often didn’t even consider renting. It was: break in, move in, no biggie. Then, there was the vibrant dole culture (sometimes dubbed the dole-ocracy) of 70s/80s/90s renown. Look at any list of artists from these eras, and chances are they spent a considerable period signing on and/or living in squats or housing associations. Vigorous hair-crimping may or may not have been involved.
Together, squatting and dole-ocracy formed twin pillars of creative freedom, producing a vibrant subculture that arguably became the culture. However, in 2012, squatting in residential buildings (even empty, boarded-up ones) was made illegal. And, these days, people are forced off benefits into soul-sapping grunt work: sometimes several jobs just to survive (so much for all the glitzy-sounding guff about “portfolio careers”). Basically, they’re exhausted before anything else can happen. This is what I’ve come to appreciate: however hard things were back then, however skint people like me were (and, lord, were we ever skint), it’s not equivalent. It’s not even close.
It’s not my intention to be elitist. London is costly for all, not just creatives. However, creatives are a distinct breed in one crucial respect: they expect to be broke – well, ish. They factor in being fairly skint for a good while. They merely ask for the chance to create and reasonably survive.
When swathes of London became unaffordable, they quietly moved out to then unfashionable areas in east London. (Then out further, until they ended up in places like Hastings.) Everywhere they went in London, subsequent generations ended up priced out. The point being, once you start driving out such hardy, adaptable (masochist?) types in droves, you know the situation has become untenable, that the London game is up.
Other things have made me grieve for London (Brexit popped some big balloons), but somehow this (creatives feeling they have no choice but to give up) feels flatter, deader, more final. For generations like mine, living in London was an intrinsic part of the dream. Cities need these kinds of people in the mix. Creatives not only thrive in city culture, creatives make city culture thrive. It’s a symbiotic relationship going back centuries.
Now, London seems intent on exhausting, bankrupting and crushing its creative community, driving more and more people out. By doing so, it has finger-clicked awake a generation, broken an important spell. If London isn’t the foremost destination city, then what is it? Just a big dirty patchwork of overpriced boroughs? London has to get back to being more than just the capital – to being the great, sparkly, yellow brick road to the rest of your life.
• Barbara Ellen is an Observer columnist
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