Be Excellent To Each Other

Ocford is very small, and bits of it are crap. The middle bit is OK, but it is as expensive as London to live in.

Surely the South doesn't need more people?

What a depressing article. The massive bunch of Tory bastards who are undoubtedly our next government are really going to massively fuck things up, far worse than they already are.

I thought the Torys have already disassociated themselves from that report? I believe this group are just the right wing version of the loony left think tanks that Labour use.

Um.

Have they worked out where we're going to PUT these 3 million people in London?

Or how someone up north is going to cope with £850 studio flat rents?

people up north live in caves and eat roadkill from the demon possessed horseless carriages.

I love Manchester. I love any city that has the nads to get the IRA in to redecorate.

What? I expect the Home Counties might have a thing to say about that.

Fuck 'em, and the quad bikes their kids rode in on.

Basically that is a report written by people who don't see other human beings as, well human beings. They see them as "resources". Speaking as someone who grew up in an East Lancs town that is really struggling, what it doesn't need is people to leave. And that is ignoring the fact that they can't migrate. Their houses are generally worth less than 50k and are in low-income jobs. The area has lost Lucas, Michelin, Smith and Nephew and just about managed to hold on to Silentnight and Rolls-Royce*.

The place fucking rioted several years ago and everyone blamed racism. No-one took any notice of the real reason - economic deprivation.


*It is always a source of pride that the 'B' in RB-211 jet engines is the name of the town where I spent many of my childhood years.

Doesn't it all rather ignore the fact that people are free to live wherever they like anyway. Why the fuck would everyone want to live in London? This just seems like a bunch of ignorant little Etonian twats who think that the world begins and ends with London and the South. In other words and for the most part, the Tory party. Fuck them all to hell.

Well, yeah, what with London being surrounded by towns already. The only thing I can think of is some serious building between Reading and Oxford, which is largely farmland.

That'd be the engine that bankrupted the company then?

Up north is ace. I love being able to travel for not very long at all, and find myself right in the countryside with nobody else around for miles.

I like to visit London, but I don't think I'd want to live there. I really hate how busy it is.

As long as any mass migation is to London and the South East rather than the South West and the West Country that's fine by me. We're fine as we are over here, thanks.

Mind you, I appreciate no-one would probably want to bother, as it's all just moobeasties, zoider and turnips

My in-laws live in a place called "North Cave" just down the road so you're more right than you thought.

Mrs A's from Buxton.

Buxton isn't the north.

Living in Kent, I think of Cambridge as being dangerously Northern.

it's north enough for me.

Hey, when it got out of the door, it was a success!

A day in Nottingham was enough of the wild, untamed North for me, thanks.

I live in Manchester, and unless someone offered me a job paying £40k+ I wouldnt move to London.

I think Manchester is a "real city" and agree with the Leeds comments. I'm not fussed on Leeds at all really. People say Manchester is hard to drive around, well, I haven't ever been to Leeds and NOT got lost. Its incomprehensibly shite, IMHO.

My-tuppance-FTFY.

FTFY

I'm in a 3 bedroom flat with the kitchen converted to a 4th and the kitchen now sharing the lounge.

£2080 a month.



Hey, I grew up near Aston Clinton, which gave the world something SO much cooler...



Does that include the fact that £40k isn't as much in London?

Hmm, move down south. It's great!

...and

...and Bradford>>>>>>>>Leeds. Bradford is ace!

...and that report can fuck off and die. "Move all the povs down to London, so they can fulfil their pre-destined life of servitude for rich, right wing cunts like us. No use to us up North where they can live a more simple and happy life. We'll just convince them they'll all become rich yuppies in the city."

Regeneration doesn't work because counsellors keep fucking it up and aiming it at the yuppies. "GREAT, a shit load more 3/4 million pound, city centre apartments in Leeds! Fantastic, that's just what the residents of the Middleton/Morley/Bramley/Holt Park etc need, especially when libraries/post offices/local sport centres/swimming pools etc are getting closed in droves... and the public transport is utterly shite so it's incredibly difficult and expensive to get to all the nice stuff in the city centre. Cheers."

That report has made me angry, and regardless of whether the Tories are associating with it or not, those people are their advisers, so when* they get in power in a couple years time, this is the direction things are going to head. Then living in the North will be a barrel of laffs, can't wait!

*not if

Pretty-much-anywhere-but-London-feex.

I'd rather live in Cumbria than London. It's probably simply due to that being where I grew up; I like fields and mountains and radiation and that. I'm more likely to get horribly stabbed in the town I grew up in than London, though.

Lovely Greenwich FTFY

The Real London FTFY.

Precisely what I did 6 weeks ago and I'm realising what a brilliant decision it was more everyday.

The Brecon Beacons are 519 square miles. We have different defintions of "massive".

I've a friend from Brecon who grew up on a farm, with virtually nobody else for miles. He never shuts up about how wonderful it is. If I could work out & wangle some kind of freelance, work from home via the internet type existence, I'd move to deepest, darkest Wales in a heart beat.

Yeah, I was thinking that, too.

According to Wikipaedia the largest park in London is Hyde Park at 2.5 sq kilometres. Which is smaller than the size of Grim...'s garden.

Indeed. It's akin to saying a bird has plenty of room to fly in its cage.

The parks in London are quite nice, but they're only parks. You can reach the sides in a few minutes. You can walk for a day in the countryside and still be almost no closer to civilisation — ace.

North Yorkshire Moors FTW! My absolute favourite part of this whole pokey little island.

Bleak = Beautiful.

You can be in Epping Forest in 20 minutes, mind.

I spent a lot of time throughout my teen years -- like, most of my weekends and weeks on end during the holidays -- here at a friend's family's farm.. It's not far from the town where I lived but it was very rural there. Spent a lot of time mucking about with air guns, motorbikes, an old Mini, and building a tree house out of 30-odd kg steel lintels we scrounged from somewhere (we had to use a block and tackle to get them into the trees). Looking back, it was exceedingly ace.

Do tell me how.

20 minutes? If you're travelling at 2am, perhaps.

It used to take us an hour to get from Beckenham to, say, Chartwell.

I grew up in a small village in the middle of nowhere, on the border of Staffordshire and Shropshire. Nothing but green for miles around. Rolling fields, animals, the works.

Odd thing, there was nowhere you could actually go in to for miles around, bar the small school playing fields. Sure, you could walk through some fields, but they'd be full of cows, and not exactly suitable for, say, having a picnic or playing a game of footy.

Where I am, in London, next to both Greenwich Park and Blackheath, I find it amusingly ironic that I have a freedom with regards to grassy expanses that I never had, despite previously living in the countryside.

So, whilst the countryside is better for:

1) Utter solitude
2) Animals
3) Rambling

Big parks/commons (which are bigger) are more fun (in my opinion).

Plus I get the bonus of all the history, plus tons of cool pubs, bars, cinemas, restaurants, shops, markets, architecture (and jobs) too.



Apologies for being a London apologist... but I do so very love where I live.

Bradford isn't that bad. Granted there were a few more chavs about than some places but it was fine otherwise. Instead of getting millions to move to fucking London they should encourage more businesses to move north (which is what, 2 hours by train? That is fuck all... many London workers commute longer than that) so all the decent jobs arent all centred in the southeast.

That was in the original article. The report apparantly calls for land currently earmarked for industrial use be turned over to residential instead. This eases price pressure on housing in the south east, and puts industrial land pricing up, which encourages firms to relocate to other parts of the country such as the north.

I am usually wary of such common-sense sounding economics advise though as it usually turns out to be horribly flawed in some subtle manner. In this case, for example, I suspect that forcing industrial land pricing upwards would probably just force a bunch of firms to relocate overseas, rather than making them move northwards.

Clinton Cards?

This. What this country needs is not more fucking people in London. It needs more of what's in London to be distributed about the place. Every other sane country in the world has several cities of great significance dotted about. Here it's just everything automatically defaulting to fucking London, and they expect everyone to follow because it's simply so wonderful and everywhere else is so horrid, don't you know.

America manages with cities that are thousands of miles apart. Businesses more than cope with it - they thrive.

I'd live in Manchester if I could. It was lovely when I went, and some of my favourite people came from there or around there.