Part two of my trip down to London last weekend.
But no this isn’t about Grand Central.
This is about prices down there and how the hell anyone can cope with them?
After going to the Dons game, my friends and I frequented a Public House establishment in Clapham to have one or two shandys.
Going to pay I always have a moment in London where I have to gear myself up for the price. I think to myself now that anything under £6 in London is reasonable.
The verdict was in the price for a Pint in London in Clapham and it was £6.85!
£6.85?!? What?!? The guy serving me saw the colour drain from my face and said “Bruv, what do you expect? You’re in Clapham!”
Once I had accepted that this was the price and put my card down to pay (contactless makes things so easy and yet so hard at the same time). I calmed down…slightly and it got me thinking.
How do people afford to live in London?
One of my friends Nathan (one of my young, cool friends who used to work in Parliament) told me he used to work for an MP and lived in London. This wasn’t long ago and the most they can pay a Case Worker is £22,000. How can you afford to do anything on that kind of money?
It puts into perspective for me some of the jobs I deal with. I haven’t looked for anyone in London paying in the £20k’s…thank god. But even if you are on £30,000 and young in London. Life must be so tough. You’ll more than likely have to live in a flat share. Nathan informed me he was paying slightly over £500, bills all in on a flat share, but this has increased substantially in the last few years from when he lived in London, 16% he reliably informed in the last year. Please note; I’m not going to reference this, pub/in this case coffee chat is good enough reference here…I’m not a journalist!
Please note we went to a Café in Tooting where we had some pancakes and coffee for breakfast. How much? £15 for the pancakes and coffee. I yearned to be back in gods own country.
A quick look on Rightmove (yeah I can reference things!) shows the cheapest flat in Clapham Junction at £1,195 pcm. That is £14,340 per year. That is after tax earnings, not to mention the cost of food, insurance, pension, so on and so forth. It just seems ridiculous to me that in order to stay afloat people will have to earn at least £30,000. But that is the bare minimum. From there how do you even think about saving money for a house deposit? It must be so so tough.A quick google and at the moment house prices are 9.1 times the average earnings in the UK at the moment according to the Office for National Statistics. This does not account for properties in the capital. Having a look at data from Shroders, in the 90’s it was around 4 times (see the link below).
Maybe I’m a little detached having lived in Yorkshire for so long. I keep my costs to a bare minimum if I can. But if you are young, single and sociable living in London can you really do all the things I did in London at the age of 23 ten years ago and able to go out and live your life as you do in your twenties having a good time and having a reasonably comfortable standard of living? I’m not too sure.