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[title]For graduates across the UK, London experience is a post-uni rite of passage. No more Wednesday sports nights, dirt cheap student bars, library all-nighters or immense quantities of pesto pasta. You’ve donated that Urban Outfitters wall hanging, secured a flatshare in Clapham and suddenly acquired a taste for dirty martinis. You’re a young professional now, the city is your oyster.
With its glossy job opportunities and ceaseless offering of new cultural experiences, the capital city has long had a reputation for seducing fresh grads who swiftly leave it behind once they’ve reached their early thirties and are in the market to settle down ‘properly’. But these days, London feels more like a pit stop for twenty-somethings than ever before; a bucket list item Brits are eager to tick it off. And with primary schools closing down and older London folk reporting that they feel undervalued, it’s beginning to have a stark impact on local communities.
According to Trust for London, the Big Smoke has been in a consistent state of negative domestic migration for the last decade, meaning that more people are leaving the capital for other places in the UK than vice versa. Figures published by YouGov last summer showed that 47 percent of 18 to 24 year olds in London plan to leave within the next 10 years. But why is the prospect of ageing in London so unappealing to so many young people, and what’s the knock-on effect of their exodus?
London calling
As one of the aforementioned twenty-somethings, it’s a conversation I’ve had with friends and family numerous times. How long do you think you’ll stay there? You’re not fed up yet? Could you really stay there forever? Of my uni friends that made the move just three years ago, most have served their time and relocated to places like Leeds, Edinburgh and south Wales, one even managing to buy their first house. I’m one of the last ones standing. The assumption is that, like dramatic teenage angst or your first boy band obsession, London is just a phase, something to get out of our systems.
Of course, it’s not just that. Going back to the YouGov survey, unsurprisingly, house prices and general cost of living concerns are the overwhelming forces behind Gen Z’s plans to eventually leave the city. If you were to buy a property here, you’re looking at an average price of £704,002 — more than double the rest of the UK, where the average house price stands at around £264,500. Even then, saving for an affordable deposit while renting in London (now an average £2,121 a month) seems nigh-on impossible.
The price of property here averages at £704,002: more than double the rest of the UK
Thirty-four year old Georgia only managed to do it by living in a £280 a month guardianship property in Brockley for eight years. Though insecure and in disrepair, the cheap rent enabled her to buy a property with her partner when they relocated to Oxford in 2021.
‘For our generation, or among my friends anyway, the goal is to buy a house and that felt out of my reach for quite a long time. I wanted it to be the case that I would settle in London but I didn’t know if that could really happen.’
Although she moved primarily for her partner’s job, Georgia knew prior to that that she ‘desperately needed’ to get out of the guardianship. When she started considering other options in London, she quickly realised that it was slim pickings.
‘Rents had gone nuts so I would have been going from £200 a month to £800 or £900 a month for a houseshare. I was priced out of the city in the sense that I found it really hard to contemplate paying anything like that.’
Slowing it down
On top of the prospect of astronomical living costs, Georgia says that she also came to view the capital as ‘quite a rat race of a place.’
‘The lockdown really crystallised London as this saturated place where everyone was trying to do the same thing and heading to the same places,’ she recalls. ‘It just felt a bit farcical somehow and a bit depressing. I love London so much but the moment I thought about being in Oxford and went to view property here, things moved forward quite quickly’.
Now with a four-month old baby, she admits that it’s hard for anywhere to really match up to London’s fizzing energy. ‘There is a sense of loss being out of London, like you won’t have the same cultural experiences, the same mix of people or diversity of experience. Oxford can offer some of that so I haven’t lost it completely.
‘[London] would be an amazing but exhausting place to raise a child. I’m finding that the pace in Oxford suits me really well. The level of demand with everything you do in London just wears you down.'
Paediatric nurse Harriet is 29 and moved from London to Newcastle in 2021 after a four year stint in nursing accommodation on Russell Square. Like many of her nursing peers, she says, she tells me she moved to London for ‘the experience’, with little intention of staying there long-term. She noticed that the NHS had a far greater turnaround of young staff who came to get London out of their system than where she works now.
London with a child seemed like a logistical nightmare – you don’t really see many prams going round
She and her partner, who is in the Royal Air Force, made the move up north so that she had a solid base and somewhere slower and quieter to bring up kids. Now a mother of two, she tells me that ‘London with a child just seemed like a logistical nightmare’.
‘You don’t really see many prams going round,’ she says. ‘Pre-family life, it was great. [But since moving] we’ve slowed down a lot. I miss the immediate ability to go out and do things like the theatre but with what I have now I don’t wish I was living back there.’
A childless city?
This idea of London, particularly inner London, as a brief pit stop with no place for kids, is starting to catch up with the city’s communities.
Birth rates in the city fell by 17 percent between 2012 and 2021 and in December the NHS announced that maternity services in north London could be pared back due to drop in demand. As would-be parents drift away from metropolitan life, demand for primary school places has also plummeted. One by one, they’ve started to shut down or cut available places across the city — Hackney plans to close four primary schools in September and Camden has seen the same number shut their doors since 2019. London Councils estimates that 8,000 fewer children will need school places in the city over the next four years.
Lambeth is one borough that’s taken a particularly hard hit. Between 2010 and 2020 it saw 6,000 more people leaving than entering. As a result, two secondary schools (one that had been around for over 300 years) have closed and the borough is projected to see the biggest percentage drop in primary school pupils in the whole of England — with numbers predicted to go down by 24.5 percent by 2030.
Ben Kind, Lambeth councillor and cabinet member for children and families, puts it down to several broad factors: house prices (obviously), the impact of Brexit and workers having more flexibility post-Covid. Intertwined with all of that is the ongoing cost of living crisis, which Kind refers to not so much as a crisis anymore but a ‘continuum’.
He explains that current government policy gives funding to schools per pupil and argues that it should instead be based on need. ‘Fewer children starting school in Lambeth means fewer applications to our primary schools,’ he says. ‘Ultimately that drop means that schools face spending more money than they’re getting in and ending up in a difficult position.’
A natural cycle
But London is rich with family-friendly potential: from the Young V&A to its huge green expanses. ‘I want to see vibrant communities and places where families thrive,’ Kind tells me. ‘I’m raising my family here. My two daughters were born here and I’m raising them here so I don’t think it’s London itself that’s the issue. [It’s] a great place to grow up and grow old, there’s a huge amount on offer.’
Kids bring a sparkling energy to cities that all generations benefit from. And it’s in the interests of everyone to keep them around. Last year, Enrico Moretti, professor of economics at the University of California told the Financial Times that ‘demand for improvement in school quality is positively correlated with the number of families with children in an area, while the demand for entertainment — restaurants, pubs, and museums — is negatively correlated with the local number of families with children’. Plus, with children to look out for, people pay greater attention to an area’s security, safety and services.
Anne Power, professor of social policy and head of housing and communities at LSE, explains that the current depopulation may be part of a natural cycle, and if the past few decades are anything to go by, could well solve itself, eventually. London has gone through depopulation like this before, only to recover years later. She says that, actually, young people in the past have stuck around and regarded London as a viable place to settle down, thanks to offerings like social and subsidised housing. Not too long ago, it was facing the exact opposite problem to the one we’re facing now. ‘From 1996 onwards to around 2010, the population of London expanded and they were building schools like there was no tomorrow because there was a big shortage of places,’ Power says.
‘I remember when my children were going to school in the late 1980s, schools were closing because of loss of pupils, then in the 1990s they had to start reopening and rebuilding new schools. London is a very large city with big fluctuations in its conditions and therefore it experiences these big population explosions followed by declines.’
Coming of age
So is building a life and spending your final decades in the capital really that bad? Is the aversion among Gen Z and millenials to such an idea justified? At the other end of the spectrum, there are the people who, back in the day, did decide to make London their forever home. Now, according to a recent Age UK report, only 20 percent of Londoners over 60 consider London a place where older people are valued when it comes to stuff like employment, healthcare and infrastructure. If you look at those aged 60 to 64, that went down to just 13 percent.
Why? Abi Wood, the organisation’s chief executive, says that no age group is immune from London’s extortionate cost of living: ‘If you’ve got a private pension and own your home then London’s a really good city for you. If you’re renting privately or socially, have a long-term health condition and are just living off a state pension, that’s a very different experience.’ Among the most common concerns for London’s older folk was more difficult access to healthcare amidst NHS pressures, crowded open spaces and public transport not serving those with reduced mobility.
Age UK is still pushing for the London mayor’s ‘age-friendly’ policy plans — access to more affordable housing, more inclusive public spaces with level surfaces, accessible crossing and appropriate seating, employment support and less digital exclusion — to be kicked into gear. But Wood promises that London can be a wonderful place to live out our later years. More than half of respondents to the survey expressed positive feelings towards the city overall, and the research found that London’s OAP’s are less likely to be lonely than those living anywhere else in the UK. She’s keen not to let that be overshadowed.
Being in London is important to their identity: they can’t imagine living anywhere else
‘A lot of the feedback we got in our focus groups was around how being in London is important to their identity or how they can’t imagine living anywhere else,’ Wood says. ‘That’s both for people who have lived their entire lives here and people who’ve moved to London at some point in their life and became a Londoner. They just sometimes have concerns over how welcome and supported they feel within [the city]. They don’t want to grow old and feel like the rest of London doesn’t want them there.’
As it stands in 2024, most ambitions among twenty-somethings to make this city a long-term thing seem like pipe-dreams. And with extortionate housing and living costs showing no signs of letting up, the effects are seeping across all generations. Whether London’s fate is to become an eerily childless, anti-ageing city, akin to the likes of Tokyo where there’s only 0.5 children for every adult over the age of 65, or bounces back as it has done in the past, time will tell.