Nearly exactly five years ago, after my wife and I left our first flat in London, I wrote a post explaining the reasons we left. I thought it would be a good fit to explain why, five years later, we left London altogether and now effectively live in the suburbs.
So first of all, I have to say I don’t regret moving to London: my social life had definitely improved over there compared to Dublin (not least because I met my wife), I find myself a lot more comfortable in England than Ireland for a number of reasons (including but not limited to the slightly later store openings even here in the suburbs), and while my career at the previous employer suffered, I find myself in a fortunate position right now and I cannot really be complaining about that.
There are of course reasons why we needed to leave that specific apartment, and reasons why we decided to look outside of London — and the order of these coming up is… less than obvious. We decided we would be considering leaving London nearly two years ago, when my dayjob moved my office from a nice building a couple of minutes away from Tottenham Court Road, to a large building nearly 20 minutes away from the Piccadilly platform at Kings’ Cross. It might not sound like a significant change, but for living within London, that meant doubling my daily commute, had I stayed in-office — which meant I actually decided to try and “go remote”, to figure out if my displeasure in doing so during lockdown was due to the lack of office in-person time, or due to the lockdown, and the fear of COVID’s effect on diabetes. A year later I convinced myself the latter was the case, and we started looking outside of London — had I found that either my career or mental health were taking a hit by this situation, we would have been looking for a flat closer to the office.
Okay, but why outside of London? The answer is to be found in the current mess of a housing market that the UK in general, and London in particular, is in.
For starters, we completely excluded the idea of buying a flat like the ones we’ve been living in — we have a number of friends in the development we used to live in, and the way they appear to have been continually fighting with the company that is supposed to maintain and manage the development itself, which changed three times while I’ve been living there! Both FirstPort and Pod Management have been absolutely horrible to work with, both as a tenant (by first person experience), and as a landlord or leaseholder (second hand.) The worst part is that once you buy a flat, you’ll always be attached to the building and the company managing it, there’s no way out, and no real alternative short of the entire building agreeing to replace the company.
This wouldn’t be terrible if a building was all full of owners-occupiers: everybody living in the building has aligned incentives to pay as little as possible while ensuring the building is safe, usable, and good looking. But that’s effectively impossible in London, where domestic and foreign investors have been buying sometimes multiple units in the same building, for the rental income. Even without considering for short-term lets, the situation as it was in our old building was ridiculously skewed: the landlords have little-to-no incentive in maintaining the building operational – since even with the new renters rights bill, they can hide behind the property management company a fair bit – while the tenants have little-to-no incentive to ensure costs are kept reasonable — to give you a practical example, in our old building we had a communal garbage disposal area, and it was not uncommon for people to throw furniture and electronics in there; the property management company would often send reminders that the council fines the building every time this happens, and those fines end up raising the service charge bill, but that service charge is only paid by leaseholders, and landlords can’t revert it to the tenants. Even for leaseholders, when the provided alternative is to call a waste disposal company, or deliver the items to the council-managed waste disposal site, it is cheaper to fly-tip: a fine split between 50 people is still cheaper (to the individual) than a full waste disposal bill.
This actually felt like admitting defeat, for me — I have a personal belief that high density housing is the only solution we have, in the long term, as a society. But the current state of high density housing in London had me face many of the downsides of the setup, and eventually it broke me. And it didn’t really stop there: when we left London we spent a few months in a smaller flat in a building that was (supposedly) built to rent. This actually gave us a bit different perspective, and while having a single entity owning, managing, and leasing the units aligns the incentives a lot, it turns out that it wasn’t quite enough to make it worthwhile on a long-term basis. Though that might have been because of a quality issue with the building itself.
Speaking of personal defeats, moving to the suburbs means I’ll eventually have to give in, and get a driving license, despite my love for public transport in general. While our city provides some level of public transportation, from our estate to the centre there’s only one bus an hour during the day (busses are more frequent in the morning due to commuters and schools, but in general I don’t often go out during those times), and if you’re trying to go grocery shopping, or need to get somewhere at a specific time for an event, your only option is to use a car — either your own, or a ride-share.
In the meantime, I’ve resisted the call of four wheels by grabbing myself an electric trike (not a bike!), with cargo, so I can go shopping, grabbing a coffee, picking up or returning a parcel, and so so and so forth. This is only possible because, around Milton Keynes, we have a ton of shared pedestrian and cycle paths that are large enough for the trike (which is roughly as wide as a two-seater pram, not by chance since it is marketed to sit two children in it), making it safe enough for me to go around, despite being a less than confident cycler. The trike itself is worthy of a blog post by itself, since it’s not something that most people would think about, particularly here in the suburbs.
As an aside, much as I loved London’s public transport, and the significant improvement that the Elizabeth Line brought onto it, I have to admit that things were pretty much falling apart in the area we used to live. The 65 bus, which was our primary bus when living there and used to be fairly reliable, was shambolic when we left last year. One of the weekdays, just before we left, we had to wait for over an hour to take the 65 up to Ealing, which is longer than it would take to walk, and the only reason why we didn’t walk was that we had a parcel to send back that was too bulky to walk with!
One of the things we did expect to miss from London is the large amount of different things to do: events, concerts, shopping, food, and so on. Turns out this wasn’t as drastic as we thought it would be, either. Our new home is positioned almost exactly half-way through between London and Birmingham, making it quite possible to attend events on either city without extensive planning – we visited MegaCON Live in Birmingham earlier this year on a day trip, having decided to do so just two nights before – and for some of the venues (including, as it turns out, my own office) the trip is faster, though more expensive, than what we used to make from West London. There are also a number of events happening within the city itself, and we turned out to have a wider social circle in here than we used to have in London, for a number of different reasons.
Food selection was similarly a story that didn’t quite match our fear: while there is a smaller selection of venues in this city, the options that are available surprised our expectation significantly. And for those things that we can’t easily manage to find locally, we’re building up a list of small, independent companies that sell food in either ready-to-cook or kit form, including Matsudai Ramen (which we had the opportunity to try in Cardiff) and The Lincolnshire Smokehouse. So while it does take some time adjusting, life is not that difficult outside of the capital.
And for those wondering why we had to leave the flat we were living in, in the slight rush we did, when we did — the answer is that by February, we had spent four months without a working heating system. The building we lived in has a whole-building HVAC system, working both as “comfort cooling” in the summer, and heating in the winter, and it had been a bane of the residents for years. Some floors had no air conditioning for multiple summers, in a building that is all-glass all around, whose balconies reach the 60°C. And last summer, it was our turn, the air conditioning didn’t work for most of the summer, and in the worst heat wave in our memory we had to take a few days to just leave the house to avoid passing out from the heat. Eventually, they appeared to fix this, just in time for it not to be necessary at all — but I say appeared because it turned out that the refrigerant leak wasn’t actually found and fixed, and indeed by October there was none left for the HVAC to warm up the flats.
Why did it take over four months to deal with this? The first problem is that, despite identifying fairly quickly that the issue they were facing was a leak of refrigerant, they had no way to identify where such leak was. They suspected the valve on the compressor at first, and it wasn’t until November when they were sure the problem was in one of the flats… but couldn’t figure out which one without having access to every one of them. As it turns out, nobody in the designing phase of the building thought that it would be useful to have per-flat cut-off valves for the refrigerant. This is important not just for the diagnosing, as by January we knew which flat was affected (not ours), but we (together with other four flats) were held hostage of a contract dispute between the flat’s leaseholder and the property management company on who was supposed to pay for the repair. Not a good situation to be in.
This alone wouldn’t have been horrible if our landlord would have at least agreed to a reduction in rent, or paid for an alternative heating option, but while we attempted to negotiate that, he eventually decided he didn’t care for us to get to the end of our agreed lease, and let us leave early without having to pay for the early termination. For the record, the property management only offered to lend us an oil-filled heater — but nobody offered to pay for the additional cost of running it, compared to the existing heat-pump heating that we were supposed to have available.
So that’s the cliffs’ notes version of the reasons why we left London for a new built village in the largest city of Buckinghamshire, and are now enjoying a life that is not actually quieter, though definitely less stressful, at least for the time being.
