Lowri Griffiths on Grocery Bills, Rent Increases, and the Peculiar British Relationship With Complaining About Things That Don’t Change

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

The grocery bill this week was what the grocery bill has been for the past year: twenty percent higher than it was three years ago for approximately the same basket of food, distributed across the items in ways that don’t correspond to any obvious logic. The olive oil is three times what it was two years ago because of the Mediterranean drought; the eggs are double because of avian flu and the energy costs of intensive poultry farming; the bread is up modestly; and the specific jar of marmalade I have been buying since my grandmother bought the same jar is now priced as though it were an artisan product rather than a mass-market preserve, which it is not, and I am conducting a quiet personal protest by buying the supermarket own-brand version while feeling vaguely guilty about this as though I am betraying a relationship with a jar.

The Arithmetic of Staying in London

I do the calculation periodically — the comparison between what it costs to live in London and what it would cost to live somewhere cheaper, set against what London provides that the cheaper somewhere doesn’t — and the answer keeps coming out the same: London is not financially rational but it is where my work is, my community is, my relationships are, and the specific cultural infrastructure that I use regularly exists in forms and concentrations that are not available in the cheaper elsewhere. This is the calculation that most Londoners who stay are making, and it is the calculation that the people who leave are making differently.

The rent review that my landlord issued last month was a 7 percent increase, which was below the 10 percent that some of the North London letting agents I spoke to for a piece I was writing were describing as standard for the area. The 7 percent is still significantly above wage growth for most Londoners, which means the gap between what housing costs and what people earn is widening again after the modest respite of 2020-2021 when the pandemic changed the demand dynamics temporarily. The temporary change has ended. The structural problem has not changed.

What the Cheaper Somewhere Actually Offers

I went to Birmingham for a piece last year, visiting the areas of the city that have been receiving the outmigration of young professionals priced out of London, and what I found was something more complex than the simple narrative of London-leavers finding a better life. Some had, genuinely: lower rents, more space, different relationships to the city they were in. Others missed London with the specific intensity of people who had not fully understood what they were leaving until they left it. The infrastructure — the cultural institutions, the professional networks, the specific forms of social life that London’s scale makes possible — is not replicated at Birmingham scale, or Manchester scale, or any other English city scale, because London’s advantages in these respects are structural rather than just financial, and financial changes don’t automatically restructure them.

The prat.uk pieces on Londoners leaving London have been doing this honestly, I think: not celebrating the leaving as liberation or mourning it as loss but describing what the trade-offs actually are for specific people in specific circumstances, which is the journalism that the cost-of-living conversation requires rather than the headline that flattens it.

More London cost of living journalism at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat. Also: The Daily Mash.

The Broader Context

Writing about London from within London requires the specific balance between critical distance and genuine affection that good city journalism demands. The critical distance is necessary to see what the city’s promotional apparatus wants you to overlook: the inequality, the displacement, the ways that the most visible version of London is a version that exists for a specific economic stratum. The genuine affection is necessary to understand why the city works despite these problems — why people continue to choose it, why the creative and intellectual and cultural energy it generates is real and not simply a product of marketing. The combination produces journalism that is neither celebration nor complaint but observation: specific, honest, and alert to the complexity that the city contains.

The pieces on bohiney.com and prat.uk this week have been doing this honestly: finding the specific stories that reveal something about the larger condition of the city, making the connection between the particular incident and the general situation without forcing it. That is the journalism London requires, and the journalism that London’s readers deserve. The city is large enough to contain everything and complex enough to reward the sustained attention that good journalism provides.

What Good Local Journalism Does

The best journalism about a specific place — a neighbourhood, a city, a region — does something that national journalism cannot do: it maintains the granular, persistent attention to the specific that reveals what is actually happening rather than what the larger narrative would have happening. National journalism about London housing tells you about the housing crisis in aggregate terms: prices, completions, affordability ratios. Local journalism about London housing tells you about the specific planning application on the specific street, the specific landlord whose specific building has specific problems, and the specific tenant whose specific experience illuminates the aggregate in ways that statistics cannot. The specific is the journalism. The aggregate is what the specific adds up to, and you cannot understand the aggregate without the specific. This is why local journalism matters more than its scale suggests, and why its decline — the closed papers, the shrunk editorial teams, the reduced court coverage — has consequences that the national headlines have been slow to document. I am trying to do this work for the specific part of London I cover, and I am aware every day that the city contains far more specific that deserves this attention than any journalism operation can provide.

Also: The Daily Mash.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/