The Great London Exodus

Why thousands of young people are abandoning the Capital for a simpler life in the North

Later this year, like so many other young Southerners, I will reverse the path of my great-grandparents by packing up my bags and moving from the Big City into the provincial muck.

The Londoners of London are like the Israelites of Egypt. But God will not come, and we are forced to save ourselves. The city has become too crowded, too expensive and too bloated to sustain itself. This is true of most of the country, but I maintain a vague hope that the cancer which creeps out from the Capital will not reach the North or Midlands until my grandchildren are expired or expatriated on the continent. 

It is quite impossible to criticise London without some half-well-read person bringing up Doctor Johnson's quote, that the man who is tired of London is tired of life. I will not argue that Johnson’s London is much different from ours, nor deny that I am tired of life. The Georgian period, with all of its internal contradictions, excess, vitality and sin, is probably the historical period with which we share the closest cultural bonds. It is as entertaining as it is exhausting, as enticing as it is repulsive. It is an age ripe for good and poor satire, in which the poor and popular satirists say “Things have gotten so ridiculous that they have come to satirise themselves!”

But Doctor Johnson was a rich man, and I pay eight hundred pounds per month to sleep in what was once a bathroom in East Acton. London has always been the best place to be rich, and the very worst to be poor. I do not pretend to exalt early industrial London, but it was at least a London in which a Phillip Pirrip could be mercilessly satirised by a Trabb's boy, in which the great and the vulgar could rub shoulders on the same street.

Pip is mercilessly satirised by Trabb’s boy in Great Expectations.

If David Copperfield is the biography of Dickens’s life, Great Expectations is the biography of his soul. He carried the self-consciousness of being a parvenu to his death, but he had at least risen from being a debtor’s son to the most recognisable name in the anglosphere. I would feign hope for so much for myself, but I had at least expected to obtain at the very least that upper Station of Low Life which my parents enjoyed, and which tenaciously refuses to fall into my inheritance.

I am not convinced that one can make one’s fortune in London any longer. The most industrious people I know are Eastern European immigrants, whose work ethic can hardly keep up with their burgeoning taste for designer clothing and fast cars. A letter, intended for my Polish neighbours but erroneously delivered into my mailbox several weeks ago, demanded payment of an outstanding six-thousand pounds. Thinking it would be too embarrassing for both parties if I were to deliver it to the correct recipients, I burnt it. 

It has become increasingly difficult to determine who is monied and who is destitute in London, given that the former dress as beggars and the latter drive sports cars on finance. The richest of all are notable by their absence, their existence only evidenced by the large empty properties which house not people but capital investment. Their nationalities are a secret to nobody, but to mention them would be to assure oneself of an unfavourable place in the next History of Britain, which will be written variously in Arabic, Russian and Mandarin.

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I recently visited Manchester in anticipation of my departure, my intention being to scout out a neighbourhood in which to live. The savings I have made from working briefly as an office clerk and the slow trickle of epigram money which I enjoy means that I can live quite comfortably, even luxuriously, in the North for a full year without having to debase myself with any sort of labour, besides the voluntary, intellectual labour which I undertake here.

I instead used the little time which I had afforded myself to go to have a pint and a bit of grub in a local bar. Northern cuisine has come on leaps and bounds from the largely chip, bread and lard diet for which it was once famed. Perhaps it has enjoyed some gastronomical enrichment from the Southerners who have already moved here and who have themselves learned much from the Spanish, French and Italian population of London. I enjoyed a red pepper and halloumi panini while overlooking the acceptable Brutalist architecture of one of the North’s major cities. Brutalist buildings in London, which tend to be juxtaposed with the more aesthetically-pleasing traditional architecture, always look jarring and ugly. Here in the North, where there was little beauty to begin with and therefore little to contrast with, Brutalist architecture achieves a sort of totality, an aesthetic unity which makes it much pleasanter to the eye.

I told the waiter, whose accent unfortunately I found next-to impenetrable, that I had enjoyed my meal very much, informing him that, as I was from London and accustomed to good food, he could take my compliment to the bank. "Shall ah tally'er oop then?" he asked amiably, by which he meant "Would you like the bill?".

True to their reputation the people of the North are friendlier than those of the South, and more disposed to engage strangers in conversation. I have a theory that this has something to do with the lack of industry in the North — an unindustrious person being more inclined to spend time making idle conversation than an industrious one — but I also rather suspect that it has something to do with a language barrier being lifted. Any two people who find themselves obliged to speak to one another in London are likely to be communicating in a Lingua Franca, English, which is the native tongue of neither party. This third language exchange tends to exhaust both speakers and inclines them to terminate the conversation as soon as possible. Indeed, I have known foreigners who, having moved to London in order to improve their English, have found themselves almost exclusively in conversation with people who are (or ought to be) doing precisely the same thing. I would not be surprised that the English of even the native Londoners, who must necessarily strip their speech of idioms, turns of phrases and other linguistic oddities in order to be better understood by the non-native population, should have lost some of its colour over the years. 

I am not sure that I found anything which has especially convinced me that I would like to spend the rest of my days in the North, but the price of housing in London has already decided on my departure for me. Perhaps when Northerners eventually find themselves surrounded by cold, uncommunicative alien persons who have come to live with them, not out of any love for the culture, but out of strict economic necessity, they will begin to understand how us Londoners feel. 

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