Comment by bluehatbrit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluehatbrit | Hacker News Reader

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> Life is extremely expensive, especially if you are planning to start a family. The UK outside of inner London is a non-place where only the locals can live, with the GDP per capita of an Eastern European country and nothing to do (apart from going to the local pub and taking a train to inner London).

This isn't even remotely true. Have you ever lived outside of London in the UK?

I live a few hours away from London by the fastest train and life is great. Free health care, great neighbours, the software engineer salary compared to many is very good, and there's loads to do. Cinemas, live gigs, local festivals, beautiful landscapes if you like the outdoors. There's just as much in the UK outside of London as there is in London.

There are many people who enjoy living in London, and that's great more power to them but non-London UK is definetely not "a non-place where only locals can live". I've moved around the UK loads and always been welcomed into new areas with friendly neighbours and such.

I’m not saying that a Briton will be unhappy in Manchester or in Coventry, I’m saying that for me, a European that lived in Rome and Berlin and Dublin, these are non-places where nothing happens and where there’s nothing to do. When I say that only locals can live there I’m not referring to xenophobia (even if that’s a thing), but to the fact that in places like Harrow or Newcastle there is literally nothing to do, apart from going to the mall or to a pub that closes at 9PM.

You’ll barely find a pub still open at 11PM in Westminster (where I live), let alone Mortlake or Brentford. And don’t make me start on the beer selection. It’s hard to get a decent espresso in London and there are at best 10 places where you can get a edible pizza, I’d be surprised if there were any in the rest of the country. In Westminster I don’t have a single cinema at walking distance (it’s a 20 minute walk to Leicester Square), and I live in the area with more cinemas and theatres in the entire country. I want to reiterate that I live in what is probably the most expensive and most active area of the country, and compared to Rome or Berlin sometimes it feels like living in the middle of nowhere.

Outside of inner London, the UK is a gigantic periphery, with square kilometres of houses and not even a church or a café in a 10km radius. At best you get a shopping mall and a pub that closes at 9PM.

This is simply not true. One could naïvely say the same for ANY country where it has not been explored.

It can't be all rollercoasters and silicon geography everywhere all the time.

Anyway, the UK has some of the most dense proportion of pubs per capita in the world. (Since that appears to be a concern in your comments)

That's not true of any country and it's not about rollercoaster and silicon geography. It's about having stuff to do that isn't going to the mall or to the N-th replica of a Weatherspoon or of a Young's pub. I've lived in the UK for more than 10 years, and I have indeed explored the country and experienced the nothingness that's the UK bar inner London.

On pubs, I was being generous by picking the most common, say, cultural attraction in the country. And yet, you get a better pub offer (in terms of variety and opening times) in Rome or Berlin or even Dublin. On density, try to re-compute that density at 11PM or check in how many of these pubs you can get a Chimay Rouge or a Franziskaner.

The countryside looks more like a nuclear test site than Tuscany or Latium, to name a few places I'm familiar with.

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