UK: The Great Migration South

As a 25-year old that lived in Nottingham, studied in Newcastle and moved to Oxford to work as a Systems Engineer, this article is interesting, but it can simply be summed up as London and the South in general is where the money is.

I went away to study simply to have some freedom and it was great. I would have happily moved back to Nottingham to live and work, but there were just no jobs in my field. I finished uni with a 1st with Hons. and had some good background (jobs, published parts of some small books etc.) After months of searching, I got only one or two offers in Nottingham and one was for £16k. It wasn't until I expanded my search to the south that I finally started getting better offers and accepted one of £26k + bonus.

Truth is, I was simply open to moving anywhere (like most grads), that means you just send out a load of CVs and see where comes back to you. Because a majority of big businesses are based in the South, there are more large companies that will make you good offers. In the north there's nowhere near as many businesses, so the likelihood of getting a good offer is slim when you're applying to the south as well.

Something annoying is that the higher salaries are usually where higher priced rent/houses are, obviously because the salary will reflect the price of living in that area. In my mind, this means it can only ever get worse: the price of living keeps increasing which means salaries will keep having to rise to match, which means more grads flock to the area making it pricier and decreasing the price (or giving a lower increase rate) to the North as it becomes less desirable.

Maybe eventually we'll all just live in the south and the north can finally just be for farming.

In the excellent A16Z podcast, dotcom veteran Martha Lane-Fox suggested that as England (and kind of UK) had same population as the Tokyo metro area, then we are less a country and more just a large Asian city / metro area.

This probably is a good way of looking at it.

Yes London and the South East are a form of black hole sucking all the people, investment etc from the rest of the U.K. However are we combating this with massive transport investments, with superb connectivity infrastructure and taxation policy.

No of course not. Because any attempt to fix this will cut the value of housing in the south east, impoverishing millions of registered voters.

(Overly cynical, yes. There are attempts to redress the balance but nothing like the scale needed)

Edit: actually I think are major hope lies not in making commute times shorter, but in massively pushing remote working as a viable option. Taxation and investment policy should focus on this. Everything from domestic housing regulations onwards should have this clear goal.

I wonder how much the answer to "where do you want to work" correlates with the answer to "where do you think salaries are the highest" or "where are your lifetime savings (taking promotions and cost of living into account) the highest"... My guess would be - a lot!

Furthermore, I would dare suggest that correlation implies causation... the other way around! I.e. if the companies outside of London started offering higher salaries or better career opportunities, more people would work for such companies. The same solution applies to the alleged shortage of software engineers that (some) companies experience.

I think as much as where you want to work is where you want to live. I know they seem as if they go hand in hand but longer term I think where you want to live is a stronger determinant. That factor is sadly not always rational and IMO depends a lot on the massive mindshare cities like London have.

For example, in Silicon Valley new workers are expressing a preference for San Francisco over San Jose and its neighboring towns. Here in the UK we also see the massive draw a very diverse and culturally rich city like London has over say Birmingham which whilst a great city just cannot compete as far as mindshare goes for new graduates.