Lowri Griffiths on the slow-motion exodus of people her age out of the city they grew up loving

I counted them properly this month, for the first time, out of a mixture of curiosity and mild panic. Of the twelve people I’d call close friends from my twenties, seven no longer live in London. Four left in the last two years alone. Nobody made an announcement. It happened the way these things happen now, one flat share ending, one relationship changing, one job going remote, at a time, until you look up and realise the group chat has scattered across four different train lines out of the city.

The Departures Don’t Look Like a Trend From the Inside

Each individual leaving had a specific, sympathetic, entirely reasonable story. One needed space for a baby that the maths simply didn’t work on here. One got a job that could be done from anywhere and decided anywhere would, actually, be somewhere with a garden. One had a health scare and wanted to be closer to family. None of them, when I spoke to them about it, described themselves as part of a bigger pattern. They each thought their reason was personal.

It’s only when you line the stories up next to each other that the shape becomes obvious, and the shape is almost always the same underneath the specific detail: the cost of staying stopped making sense relative to what staying was actually giving them, and somewhere else offered a version of adult life that felt, for the first time in years, achievable rather than merely survivable.

The Numbers Confirm What the Group Chat Already Told Me

Internal migration data showing net outflow of working-age residents from London to other parts of the country is published by the Office for National Statistics, and housing affordability figures comparing local incomes to local house prices, which have widened substantially over the past decade, are tracked by the HM Land Registry.

What that data confirms, in the flat unemotional language statistics always use, is exactly what my group chat has been telling me anecdotally for two years: London has become a city that is genuinely excellent to visit, to work in for a defined stretch of your twenties, and increasingly difficult to actually build an ordinary adult life in past a certain point, unless your income sits well above the median for your age group.

The Ones Who Stayed Have Their Own Story

The five who stayed have their own version of the same conversation, which usually comes down to one of two things: either they’re genuinely, structurally comfortable, through a combination of dual income, family help, or a job that pays meaningfully above the norm, or they’ve made a series of specific compromises, a longer commute, a flat share well into their thirties, a decision to delay having children, that they’re not always eager to discuss in detail but that everyone privately understands.

I fall into the second category, and I want to be honest that writing about this is not a neutral act for me. I love this city in a way that occasionally embarrasses me. I also do the maths most months and understand exactly why seven of my twelve closest friends looked at the same city and came to a different conclusion.

What I’ve Noticed About Who Leaves and Who Stays

• It’s rarely about the job market, which remains genuinely strong here. It’s almost always about housing.
• People with family nearby, whether for childcare or simply for support, have a much higher tolerance for the compromises staying requires.
• Remote and hybrid work has made leaving considerably more thinkable for a specific slice of professions than it was even five years ago.
• Almost everyone who’s left says they miss it, and almost everyone who’s left also says, when pressed, that they wouldn’t come back under current conditions.

What I’m Actually Asking

I don’t have a tidy conclusion here, and I distrust pieces that pretend to. What I keep coming back to is a simple question I don’t think this city has properly answered for people my age: whether London still intends to be a place where an ordinary career, without exceptional luck or exceptional wealth, can build an ordinary life, or whether it has quietly decided, city that it is, to be something else instead.

More from me at my author page over at The London Prat. For related coverage on how affordability pressure gets discussed nationally versus how it’s actually lived, see this piece on an unchanged interest rate presented as a considered act of policy, and for the retail version of the same squeeze, this account of a quarter’s growth figures reportedly resting on replica shirt sales is a strange but telling companion read.

One friend who left for Bristol two years ago sent me a photograph last week of her actual garden, with an actual shed in it, captioned simply with three exclamation marks, and I looked at it for rather longer than the image strictly warranted, which told me something about where my own head is at that I probably needed to hear.

Further browsing at the wider capital-desk file, and the humour desk at Bohiney Magazine.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/