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Comment by awjr | Hacker News Reader

My mother just recently bought a studio flat in Wales for 31k. Prices are dropping around the country. London prices are forcing people away from living in London. Businesses are moving away. (If you are a young developer, I'd suggest moving to Bristol.)

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I second that! Best city in the UK in my opinion- It has an amazing selection of bars, clubs and independent shops, a buzzing music scene and of course a great tech scene with plenty of meetups etc. Compared to London I would say it's much more friendly, you can cycle from one side to the other in under an hour, escape to the countryside or the coast in under an hour and you never feel trapped in a towering concrete jungle (often felt this in London!).

Almost anywhere in the country is more friendly than London

The data doesn't seem to support that view [1]. The headline claim there is that average property prices across the country rose by 7% last year, with London more than double that and no area showing an annual fall.

It seems like your example of Bristol is only becoming cheaper relative to London, not cheaper in any absolute sense.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...

Agreed; in Scotland, we're now seeing steady, but not excessive, growth in volumes and prices. I'd say it's recovering, not worsening.

You'll severely limit your career and earning potential if you do that, particularly if you're not a founder or otherwise in a position to insulate yourself from pure market salaries.

Dev salaries are not high in Britain as a whole, outside of London.

Depends on whether you measure earning potential in pounds or houses. Someone earning £50k in an area of £250k houses is being paid 0.2 houses per annum. If they can get £40k in an area of £100k houses their spending power has gone up not down.

If only it weren't so necessary to be physically present for the work.

I tend to measure things in disposable income: how much money I have left over after paying the big bills. And this is a fairly absolute measure, rather than relative to living costs, as I spend much of my disposable income on stuff that costs similar amounts no matter where I live.

50k is a mediocre salary, mind.

50k is a 90th percentile salary for the UK as a whole and competitive for non-London non-senior management software dev jobs.

Perhaps the context of this thread has been lost. It started out with me asserting that you get poor return outside of London.

Personally, I think there's little point in living in the UK outside of London. There's far nicer places to live if you're willing to take a hit in salary. (And no, I'm not British.)

What places would you suggest?

My argument was a PPP and quality-of-life one, really. Moving to Edinburgh has worked out quite nicely in that regard.

Somewhere with better weather and better connections to the rest of the world.

I spend most of my money on travel, motorcycles, food and fine wine (in particular, aged fortified wines in the 3-digit price range). Food is the only one particularly affected by PPP. A typical meal out for two costs £60 to £200, depending quality and wine bought. I'll spend more on a special occasion. But living outside London, I'd have a harder time finding great places to eat. My experience from touring the UK is that there are more hearty, good value options especially as you go north, but fine dining gets scarcer.

Travel is really important to me, touring by motorcycle specifically. But the south of England is very flat, and the fastest way to the continent is a train to France. Once you land in France, you have to cross it to get to wherever you're going. Alternately, one can take a ferry and suffer excruciating boredom only marginally worse than a motorway.

Almost anywhere in central Europe would be better for biking - southeast France, northern Italy, southern Germany, Austria - or northern Spain, if I didn't want to leave the country for some of the best roads in the world. More snow in winter, mind, but I could live with that. Certainly, the roads in the UK are among the worst in western Europe, outside of Belgium and possibly Ireland - though Ireland has had a lot of investment, they've built some very odd roads.

I grew up on the west coast of Ireland. My willingness to tolerate rainy days is no longer very high.

Mediocre salary???? Either you live in the square mile bubble, or you're not British.

£50k is what a senior software developer outside London gets.

That's exactly my point: UK software salaries are not high outside of London, and that if you want a good salary, you need to work in London.

There are pockets outside London where demand for developers is very high. Don't be fooled into thinking it's London or nothing for the UK workforce. I'm in Central Scotland, and there's a thriving tech thing going on here.

In my experience jobs outside of London have a much lower earning potential. I went to university in Devon, and there are a fair few tech jobs around there, but even as a senior developer with 10 years experience I wouldn't get much more than £40k. Instead I moved to London, and was getting more than that two years after I graduated.

Sure London is more expensive, but if you don't mind commuting you can live further out of the city for not much more than the UK average - I'd imagine rents between Bristol and Reading are pretty similar, but Reading is easily commutable to London (Bristol isn't bad either, but I wouldn't like to do it every day).

There is also the question of technologies too, if you aren't happy working with legacy Java or .NET systems then you'll have a much harder time getting a job outside of London.

Also where exactly is Central Scotland (I'm a southerner)?

Central Scotland = Glasgow, Edinburgh and places along the M8 (eg Oracle at Linlithgow). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Glen also includes Dundee which isn't quite "central" but has a games cluster centered on Abertay.

It's a good way south of the centre of a map of Scotland, but it's the area where people are concentrated.

In general you're probably right. I guess it's finding the exceptions that are out there that's difficult, and as you say, for someone based in the south of England, the middle bit of Scotland is pretty obscure.

There is a body, IIRC, promoting Scotland and awareness of its growing activity in tech as a place to come and live and work. Perhaps not "Mission Accomplished" quite yet :-)

> Prices are dropping around the country.

> London prices are forcing people away from living in London. Businesses are moving away.

Wouldn't this force prices higher across the country?

As someone living in Bristol, I have to say that there's been a (noticeable) influx of people from London, and that this is what I believe has forced local prices up to the point where many can no longer afford to stay.

Friends of mine, who are local (I am an Essex import), have scattered as far as Darwen and Bournemouth.

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