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Death Of London


spygirl

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Keep up at the back ...

London may have gone into a covid-accelerated decline

The shift could reverse three decades of ascendancy

https://www.economist.com/britain/2020/05/23/london-may-have-gone-into-a-covid-accelerated-decline

BEFORE IT WAS blown off course by covid-19, Boris Johnson’s government had big plans to reshape the economic geography of Britain. Poor parts of the Midlands and north of England would get lots of infrastructure investment, helping them to close the productivity gap with London. The country would be “levelled up”.

The idea always seemed a little far-fetched. British governments have been trying to boost productivity outside London for decades, with not much success. And it seems less and less likely that the government will be able to focus on grand new designs as opposed to hasty repair jobs. But something else might happen, to spare Mr Johnson’s blushes. Rather than levelling up, Britain could be about to level down, as London sags.

London was not always the great success it is now. After the second world war the government, which had already pinched the capital with a thick Green Belt, deliberately pushed businesses and citizens out to “new towns” in the Home Counties. Manufacturing declined, as did the docks that had once provided jobs and prosperity. By the 1980s the city’s population had fallen by a quarter from the 8.6m it had hit in 1939. London’s schools and services were famously awful.

After the Big Bang deregulated financial services in 1986, the logic of agglomeration reasserted itself and London took off. The creative industries and, in recent years, a thriving tech centre have joined the staples of banking, asset management and business services. Schools, policing and transport have all been transformed. People have flooded in from all continents, making London the world’s most global city.

Yet some warning signs have been visible for a while. Although London’s population has continued to grow, over the last decade that has been driven by international migration and the birth rate. Between 2008 and 2018, 550,000 more Britons left London than moved to it. People complain of high costs and anxiety. One league table in which London scores poorly is the Office for National Statistics’ rankings of well-being and life satisfaction. Since 2015 migration from the capital has helped reduce the differential between London’s house prices and those in the rest of the country (see chart).

ut London’s house prices remain double those elsewhere. After housing costs are accounted for Londoners are, on average, worse off than residents of the rest of southern England or Scotland. The chairman of PWC, a professional-services firm, has argued that graduates are turning their backs on London. Whereas 60% of graduates working for the big four accounting firms used to be based in the capital, in 2018 60% of new starters were outside.

The London office-cost premium is even higher than the housing-cost one. Prime square footage in the capital costs three times as much as space in other southern cities and seven to nine times as much as elsewhere in Britain. According to a legal recruitment firm, a company can save about £20,000 ($24,500) a year by moving a lawyer out of central London, after office costs and salary are taken into account. “Northshoring”—usually referring, confusingly, to places such as Birmingham that are far from northerly—has become something of a buzzword in the industry. HSBC chose to move its British retail banking headquarters to Birmingham in 2017. Amazon, an internet retailer, picked Manchester for its major British corporate site in 2018.

If the coronavirus crushes property values and office rents, London might become a little less offputting. Perhaps some graduates will be tempted back from Leeds or Manchester. But covid-19 and the extreme social-distancing measures used to combat it pose a new and more profound danger to the capital, for they threaten two factors that have been central to its success: fun and foreigners.

London’s triumph is at least partially based on it being a fun place to live. “People come here not only because you can get paid well but because you can have a good time,” says Douglas McWilliams of the Centre for Economics and Business Research, a consultancy. The bars and cafes of the East End have been an important driver of what Mr McWillams once dubbed the “flat white economy”, where people with interesting hair bounce ideas off each other while drinking trendy beverages.

It is hard to have a flat white economy when you have to maintain two-metre distancing while queuing for your caffeine. Restaurateurs fear that being forced to operate at a lower capacity will drive many of them out of business. Theatres are facing disaster. As a hedge-fund manager puts it, “London without the culture and the restaurants is just a more expensive Frankfurt with more congestion.”

Covid-19 might combine with Brexit to cut international migration. Although foreign candidates for London jobs will score better on Britain’s new points-based immigration system than those for jobs elsewhere in the country, because the jobs are better paid, the signal has been sent: Britain is not keen on mass immigration. Universities fear that foreign student numbers could fall by 20-50% in the year ahead. For London, with its more than 100,000 foreign students, that is a problem.

Like all great cities, London could also suffer from changing assumptions about work. Many firms now expect that some people will keep working from home even after the danger of coronavirus has receded—if not every day then several days a week. As firms learn to make do with smaller offices, workers might prize bigger homes outside London where they can have an office. The trade-off between space and commuting time looks different if you only have to go in two or three times a week. But if this happens, it will probably benefit commuter towns in the south-east rather than the northern and Midlands towns that Mr Johnson wanted to help.

Lisa Taylor of Coherent Cities, a consultancy, remains optimistic. “The next two years are going to be very tough,” she argues. “But a different city could emerge on the other side. One where land use has changed, where we have more co-working and co-living spaces.” She reckons that a greener, less congested London could take its inspiration from cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam. But those are hardly world-beating metropolises.

London is unlikely to slip back into the dismal state it was in before the mid-1980s. It is likely to remain richer and more productive than the rest of Britain. It will remain Europe’s most powerful magnet for talented immigrants. Still, its pulling power is likely to wane. If that happens, Britain’s economy will probably suffer. But a less centralised country, in which opportunity was more evenly distributed, might be a better place in other ways.

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Covers points i made earlier.

Pop of London had been falling from 1950s to early 80s. Experience of living in London was getting shittier n shittier.

Then in early to mid 80s, along came big bang and boosted jobs and wages in finsec.

People poured in.

Then there was the whole consumption / happy shopper thing that started i nthe late 80s. So people poured in for shopping n shit.

The finsec started to flag in the early 2000s as the weight of housing costs weighed on London residents.

So .... IO mortgages, which were chronic in London from 2002. IIRC London has 80% of resi IO mortgage. These are typically for 15-20 years so there will be wave after wave of IO mortgages needing paying back. Dont say sell and pay up mortgages, there are too many in London.

Then the whole Labour - Lets invite scum to London, started.

The number of non nationals  dependent on some or all welfare in London is beyond a joke.

Chuck in the death of consumption, or least moving to online.

No ones buying shops of Oxford street, which is pretty horrid these days. Its all warehouses on the M1.

And MMR, which discount regular spend i.e. season ticket, which have risen above wage inflation for ~10 years.

 

 

 

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2 hours ago, spygirl said:

Keep up at the back ...

London may have gone into a covid-accelerated decline

The shift could reverse three decades of ascendancy

https://www.economist.com/britain/2020/05/23/london-may-have-gone-into-a-covid-accelerated-decline

BEFORE IT WAS blown off course by covid-19, Boris Johnson’s government had big plans to reshape the economic geography of Britain. Poor parts of the Midlands and north of England would get lots of infrastructure investment, helping them to close the productivity gap with London. The country would be “levelled up”.

The idea always seemed a little far-fetched. British governments have been trying to boost productivity outside London for decades, with not much success. And it seems less and less likely that the government will be able to focus on grand new designs as opposed to hasty repair jobs. But something else might happen, to spare Mr Johnson’s blushes. Rather than levelling up, Britain could be about to level down, as London sags.

London was not always the great success it is now. After the second world war the government, which had already pinched the capital with a thick Green Belt, deliberately pushed businesses and citizens out to “new towns” in the Home Counties. Manufacturing declined, as did the docks that had once provided jobs and prosperity. By the 1980s the city’s population had fallen by a quarter from the 8.6m it had hit in 1939. London’s schools and services were famously awful.

After the Big Bang deregulated financial services in 1986, the logic of agglomeration reasserted itself and London took off. The creative industries and, in recent years, a thriving tech centre have joined the staples of banking, asset management and business services. Schools, policing and transport have all been transformed. People have flooded in from all continents, making London the world’s most global city.

Yet some warning signs have been visible for a while. Although London’s population has continued to grow, over the last decade that has been driven by international migration and the birth rate. Between 2008 and 2018, 550,000 more Britons left London than moved to it. People complain of high costs and anxiety. One league table in which London scores poorly is the Office for National Statistics’ rankings of well-being and life satisfaction. Since 2015 migration from the capital has helped reduce the differential between London’s house prices and those in the rest of the country (see chart).

ut London’s house prices remain double those elsewhere. After housing costs are accounted for Londoners are, on average, worse off than residents of the rest of southern England or Scotland. The chairman of PWC, a professional-services firm, has argued that graduates are turning their backs on London. Whereas 60% of graduates working for the big four accounting firms used to be based in the capital, in 2018 60% of new starters were outside.

The London office-cost premium is even higher than the housing-cost one. Prime square footage in the capital costs three times as much as space in other southern cities and seven to nine times as much as elsewhere in Britain. According to a legal recruitment firm, a company can save about £20,000 ($24,500) a year by moving a lawyer out of central London, after office costs and salary are taken into account. “Northshoring”—usually referring, confusingly, to places such as Birmingham that are far from northerly—has become something of a buzzword in the industry. HSBC chose to move its British retail banking headquarters to Birmingham in 2017. Amazon, an internet retailer, picked Manchester for its major British corporate site in 2018.

If the coronavirus crushes property values and office rents, London might become a little less offputting. Perhaps some graduates will be tempted back from Leeds or Manchester. But covid-19 and the extreme social-distancing measures used to combat it pose a new and more profound danger to the capital, for they threaten two factors that have been central to its success: fun and foreigners.

London’s triumph is at least partially based on it being a fun place to live. “People come here not only because you can get paid well but because you can have a good time,” says Douglas McWilliams of the Centre for Economics and Business Research, a consultancy. The bars and cafes of the East End have been an important driver of what Mr McWillams once dubbed the “flat white economy”, where people with interesting hair bounce ideas off each other while drinking trendy beverages.

It is hard to have a flat white economy when you have to maintain two-metre distancing while queuing for your caffeine. Restaurateurs fear that being forced to operate at a lower capacity will drive many of them out of business. Theatres are facing disaster. As a hedge-fund manager puts it, “London without the culture and the restaurants is just a more expensive Frankfurt with more congestion.”

Covid-19 might combine with Brexit to cut international migration. Although foreign candidates for London jobs will score better on Britain’s new points-based immigration system than those for jobs elsewhere in the country, because the jobs are better paid, the signal has been sent: Britain is not keen on mass immigration. Universities fear that foreign student numbers could fall by 20-50% in the year ahead. For London, with its more than 100,000 foreign students, that is a problem.

Like all great cities, London could also suffer from changing assumptions about work. Many firms now expect that some people will keep working from home even after the danger of coronavirus has receded—if not every day then several days a week. As firms learn to make do with smaller offices, workers might prize bigger homes outside London where they can have an office. The trade-off between space and commuting time looks different if you only have to go in two or three times a week. But if this happens, it will probably benefit commuter towns in the south-east rather than the northern and Midlands towns that Mr Johnson wanted to help.

Lisa Taylor of Coherent Cities, a consultancy, remains optimistic. “The next two years are going to be very tough,” she argues. “But a different city could emerge on the other side. One where land use has changed, where we have more co-working and co-living spaces.” She reckons that a greener, less congested London could take its inspiration from cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam. But those are hardly world-beating metropolises.

London is unlikely to slip back into the dismal state it was in before the mid-1980s. It is likely to remain richer and more productive than the rest of Britain. It will remain Europe’s most powerful magnet for talented immigrants. Still, its pulling power is likely to wane. If that happens, Britain’s economy will probably suffer. But a less centralised country, in which opportunity was more evenly distributed, might be a better place in other ways.

As I remember, London in the late 80s was much more civilized than now and the NHS seemed to work pretty well. Tube travel was OK ish and most people spoke English as a matter of course.

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2 hours ago, spygirl said:

The bars and cafes of the East End have been an important driver of what Mr McWillams once dubbed the “flat white economy”, where people with interesting hair bounce ideas off each other while drinking trendy beverages.

I just puked my breakfast up. Spunk over half your salary on rent to a slum landlord for a single bed in a shared house well into your 30s....but it's worth it to be a player in the "flat white economy"...gotta have those daily LatteFrappeMochachinos to be someone in this life. 

Edited by gibbon
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2 minutes ago, gibbon said:

I just puked my breakfast up. Spunk over half your salary on rent to a slum landlord for a single bed in a shared house well into your 30s....but it's worth it to be a player in the "flat white economy"...gotta have those daily LatteFrappeMochachinos to be someone in this life. 

Everyone's probably seen this but just in case, here is the soundtrack

 

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MrLibertyRedux
22 minutes ago, Loki said:

Everyone's probably seen this but just in case, here is the soundtrack

 

No I hadn't seen this.

Superb!

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32 minutes ago, gibbon said:

I just puked my breakfast up. Spunk over half your salary on rent to a slum landlord for a single bed in a shared house well into your 30s....but it's worth it to be a player in the "flat white economy"...gotta have those daily LatteFrappeMochachinos to be someone in this life. 

They're the failed offspring of the middle class, for them it's either 'creative' or 'social administration'.

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A tremendous # on the lung
17 minutes ago, MrLibertyRedux said:

No I hadn't seen this.

Superb!

It's nearly 10 years old! But still totally relevant

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Austin Allegro
2 hours ago, A tremendous # on the lung said:

It's nearly 10 years old! But still totally relevant

The bit that cracks me up is that they come from Cambridgeshire. They're always from very white, English, traditional places which is why they get so turned on by 'diversity' and anything that's 'edgy'. Some of us who had no choice but to grow up amongst 'diversity' are not so enamoured of it.

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goldbug9999
9 hours ago, Stuey said:

 that shit. 

See what I did there ?

anyway ... london is toast, all those company offices also drive massive amounts of trade for local food vendors in particular, even the likes of pret is surely dead.

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I saw all this decades ago and moved and prepped accordingly.  I now have the ideal place I'm prepared to sell turnkey to a London refugee for £5m while I go on to stage B!  You can run but you can't hide.

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23 hours ago, gibbon said:

I just puked my breakfast up. Spunk over half your salary on rent to a slum landlord for a single bed in a shared house well into your 30s....but it's worth it to be a player in the "flat white economy"...gotta have those daily LatteFrappeMochachinos to be someone in this life. 

The way to win in London used to move there, get a job, get a house, then leave when you had kids and commute it.

Even then, it didnt work all the time. When I started in the earl 90s I kelp bumping into people in their 30s whod gone bankrupt via the mortgage and losing their job.

The commuting in is less likely as the trains are so full and soo expensive relative to wages,  that the commute is no longer viable for the masses.

Chuck in MMR that removes commuting cost from the mortgage amount and its game over.

 

 

 

 

 

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20 hours ago, Austin Allegro said:

The bit that cracks me up is that they come from Cambridgeshire. They're always from very white, English, traditional places which is why they get so turned on by 'diversity' and anything that's 'edgy'. Some of us who had no choice but to grow up amongst 'diversity' are not so enamoured of it.

I remember a poster on TOS islam topic responding to one of mipuris scum posts with 'Maybe its because Im from the home counties but Ive never met many muslims ...'

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3 minutes ago, spygirl said:

The way to win in London used to move there, get a job, get a house, then leave when you had kids and commute it.

Even then, it didnt work all the time. When I started in the earl 90s I kelp bumping into people in their 30s whod gone bankrupt via the mortgage and losing their job.

The commuting in is less likely as the trains are so full and soo expensive relative to wages,  that the commute is no longer viable for the masses.

Chuck in MMR that removes commuting cost from the mortgage amount and its game over.

 

Missed the biggie - inside London you bought the flat, tapped out but making money on the way up, then once moved out bought another house in commuter belt, tapped out putting money into that, then leave, sell up with house funded pension and cash pile for buying in the shires for timely retirement. If that no longer holds then it really is game over. 

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1 minute ago, spygirl said:

I remember a poster on TOS islam topic responding to one of mipuris scum posts with 'Maybe its because Im from the home counties but Ive never met many muslims ...'

I imagine they are still "experts on Islam" though.:Old:

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stop_the_craziness
1 hour ago, MrPin said:

I imagine they are still "experts on Islam" though.:Old:

If you listen to Radio Four at all, it's impossible not to become an expert on Islam.  A couple of years ago (when I still listened) I used to have a competition with myself whether I would hear some form of Islam-related angle on the 10 minute drive between my house and my work.  I usually did.

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1 minute ago, stop_the_craziness said:

If you listen to Radio Four at all, it's impossible not to become an expert on Islam.  A couple of years ago (when I still listened) I used to have a competition with myself whether I would hear some form of Islam-related angle on the 10 minute drive between my house and my work.  I usually did.

It became an obsession about twenty years back, along with Carbon Dioxide. A mere distraction for the masses.. Before then, if somebody said I won't have a beer, as I am muslim, there was no more to be said about it.

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sleepwello'nights
On 03/05/2020 at 13:04, gibbon said:

Things ain't gonna change that much. If you got a job at a software developer/code monkey at a so called "progressive" company, a job which begs remote working or at the very least one man offices for uninterrupted concentration..you'd think employing expensive developers you'd want to maximise their productivity...yet they still pack us into noisy open plan office like sardines.

Here's facebook for example:

Can Facebook Fix Its Own Worst Bug? - The New York Times

Look at the fucking state of it. It's shit like the above, my own version of hell, full of soy boy passive aggressive SJW wankers, why I could never go back to corporate IT.

Why don't they write some software to computerise automate it?

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1 hour ago, onlyme said:

Missed the biggie - inside London you bought the flat, tapped out but making money on the way up, then once moved out bought another house in commuter belt, tapped out putting money into that, then leave, sell up with house funded pension and cash pile for buying in the shires for timely retirement. If that no longer holds then it really is game over. 

That was the theory.

Anyone trying that 88-96 came unstuck.

Since early 2000s more n more people working in London have been forced into extortionate rentals.

90% of under 45s are renting, so have zilch equity.

The poor sods whove 'bought' have HTB, so are fucked.

The people who are going to suffer from io btl includes OO who are going to have to sell at very low prices as the  nice family have zilch equity to trade.

UK housing has been a  clusterfuck since 2001ish. The chickens are slowly starting to roost.

 

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2 hours ago, spygirl said:

UK housing has been a  clusterfuck since 2001ish. The chickens are slowly starting to roost.

 

When the mortgage lobby persuaded the government to deregulate mortgage lending from the 3.5 single 2.5 joint income maximums, claiming , and I still recall the interviews in the MSM from cunts like that guy at John Charcoal, that this was only so people like Drs and bankers who expected a big growth in income could buy bigger at the start and that it wouldn’t change anything for most people. 
 

oh how they lied. But the outcome was far, far worse than even our worst nightmares could have imagined back then.

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Austin Allegro
On 31/05/2020 at 11:33, stop_the_craziness said:

If you listen to Radio Four at all, it's impossible not to become an expert on Islam.  A couple of years ago (when I still listened) I used to have a competition with myself whether I would hear some form of Islam-related angle on the 10 minute drive between my house and my work.  I usually did.

There's usually a hint of excitement in their voices whenever they say things like 'the Prophet Muhammed' or 'Friday Prayers'.

Incidentally, why is he (PBUH) always 'the Prophet Muhammed'? I've never heard the BBC announcers say 'The Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ'.

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Frank Hovis
2 minutes ago, Austin Allegro said:

There's usually a hint of excitement in their voices whenever they say things like 'the Prophet Muhammed' or 'Friday Prayers'.

Incidentally, why is he (PBUH) always 'the Prophet Muhammed'? I've never heard the BBC announcers say 'The Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ'.

I think it's in order to differentiate him from the mass murderer and child rapist of the same name who was around at the same time.

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