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Interesting as I'm considering a move out of London now I've been made redundant (after 36 years ffs - I'm 60 y'know). My sister lives in Sheffield and I know Chesterfield from work meeting visits and my Mum lives in Leicestershire so I sort of feel comfortable in that M1 corridor I suppose.
But I've always been wary of actually living up there (London centric snobbery ?).
I'm currently drawing up the pros and cons and why do I need to be in London anymore ? Sell this tiny flat in Woolwich and get a little house with a garden and still have surplus cash. 2 hours into London when I want to which could mean more 'use' of London than I presently get as I just go into an office in EC1 and then go home again to SE18 (which could be any old hellhole in the whole country).
This is just me but the reasons that made me want to be in London are not really there anymore.
The kids live in Wales and Glasgow bar one son who is bogged down in Lewisham ffs so I'm slowly getting unglued to Londons famous London.
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not4sale
There's still things that I miss about London but I don't think I could move back there now.
It's not that there aren't the same sort of things to do in Sheffield, they just aren't there in the same sort of volume. It does mean that you end up going to the same places a lot more because they're pretty much the only ones doing a certain thing. But that isn't such a bad thing though. I feel that I build up more of a relationship with places and venues and more invested in them. Sheffield has also got a pretty diverse cultural cross section as well so I don't feel as if I miss that either.
I think what I couldn't give up now is the amount of space that I feel that I can take up as a person. I don't feel as if I'm constantly elbow to elbow with everyone else in the city. Sometimes that was an oddly nice feeling in London, but often enough I felt too constrained and couldn't move how I wanted to. I feel less pull to be out in the odd times and the quiet hours which were necessary to take up the amount of space sometimes needed to enjoy your surroundings. I also like that in 20 minutes I can ride to almost all of the parts of town that I'm usually interested in and from my house I can be out in proper fields and cows countryside in under 10. On the occasions I wanted to ride out of London it felt like a long slog only to experience a brief taste before having to turn tail and slog back in.
I think what I miss most of all is the scale and the centrality of it and the hustle. There's no experience quite like slipping through a busy Camden market watching so many things balanced on a knife edge or the great leaps of faith at opportunity as some new business attempts to ride the wave of a tenuous emerging zeitgeist into permanence.
But when it comes to the choice, I'll take the space and the closer community of people who aren't from that far away. And if I can't have both, I'd rather have the great outdoors that's on my doorstep then the great indoors that's on yours. I'll never stop loving London, but I love it here more.