London's Burning ...

Nelly Gay

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I have lived in London for 30 years and don't even remember such general levels of dissatisfaction.
Transport is poor, housing costly , schools bad, hospitals dire, crime at record levels, immigration soaring, asylum problems, ad nauseum.
Happy Christmas !
 

dong20

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I have lived in London for 30 years and don't even remember such general levels of dissatisfaction.
Transport is poor, housing costly , schools bad, hospitals dire, crime at record levels, immigration soaring, asylum problems, ad nauseum.
Happy Christmas !

I agree with you on all but the first, though transport is certainly expensive, slow and often overcrowded there's plenty of it!!
 

Rikter8

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List some typical prices your paying.

Rent in the US (michigan) in the big citites starts at around $1000 us per month.

Gas here in the northern regions is around $2.30us /gal

Welcome to the world of 2006.
 

D_alex8

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List some typical prices your paying.

Rent in the US (michigan) in the big citites starts at around $1000 us per month.

Gas here in the northern regions is around $2.30us /gal

Welcome to the world of 2006.

Double the rent price for London, and still expect it to be mediocre housing at that price, or way out in the suburbs. Multiplying $1000 by three or four is more realistic if you want something more central and/or nicer in London.

Gas in the UK is currently around 90 pence per litre, which equates to around US$6.64 per gallon. :rolleyes:
 

Rubenesque

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For £1000 pcm in North London you can get a small 1 bedroomed flat.

Where I live you can get a 3 bedroom house with a garden for about £500 pcm. And I'm only about 40 mins by train from London, no wonder we have so many comuters
 

dong20

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Double the rent price for London, and still expect it to be mediocre housing at that price, or way out in the suburbs. Multiplying $1000 by three or four is more realistic if you want something more central and/or nicer in London.

Gas in the UK is currently around 90 pence per litre, which equates to around US$6.64 per gallon. :rolleyes:

It's bonkers though rental prices have fallen a tad over the last year. It also depends on your defintion of mediocre I guess. Property prices have begun to pick up again strongly the last six months especially so rental values will surely follow. A lot of people got their fingers burned, or at least singed over the last five years purchasing buy-to-lets.

I live on the edge of Zones 2/3 and I could make a killing by renting out and living out of town.

I had a related discussion with the member formerly known as BronxBombshell about this. Fuel is between 82p and 98p though in central London one can pay as much as £1.20 or, possibly a little more.:eek:
 

StMonkey

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I have lived in London for 30 years and don't even remember such general levels of dissatisfaction.
Transport is poor, housing costly , schools bad, hospitals dire, crime at record levels, immigration soaring, asylum problems, ad nauseum.
Happy Christmas !

sorry for not having anything useful to contribute, but....

wow that sucks!
 

Nelly Gay

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List some typical prices your paying.

Rent in the US (michigan) in the big citites starts at around $1000 us per month.

Gas here in the northern regions is around $2.30us /gal

Welcome to the world of 2006.

I paid £1,300 a month for a studio flat in Fulham, SW6 ie a room, transport is £5.90 for a daily travel-card, cinema tickets £17.00 for Leicester Square Odeon, a two-bedroom house in W2 costs £1,500,000. A Dr's visit is £250,
dentist many hundreds.
Believe me, Michigan is cheap by comparision.
London is now the most expensive city in the world .
 

dong20

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I paid £1,300 a month for a studio flat in Fulham, SW6 ie a room, transport is £5.90 for a daily travel-card, cinema tickets £17.00 for Leicester Square Odeon, a two-bedroom house in W2 costs £1,500,000. A Dr's visit is £250,
dentist many hundreds.
Believe me, Michigan is cheap by comparision.
London is now the most expensive city in the world .

You must live in a different London to me :rolleyes::

  • If it was in the last 3 years you were robbed. :eek:
  • A 1 day travel card is anything from £4.90 (Z1-2 Off Peak) to £12.40 (Z1-6 peak) using Oyster that is. I pay £5.20 per day Z3-Z1 peak.
  • The price of a Terrace in W2 ranges from 750k - 1.6m
  • I don't pay for doctors appointments, no one does unless they choose to.
  • Dentists are often rip off merchants but the cost depends on what's done and whether one can find an NHS dentist ; checkup £15, filling £41 Private £40-100 for a checkup, £50-300 for a filling typically £100 or you have a health plan for say £5 pcm.
  • The Odeon Leicester Square costs £12.50 unless you're in the Royal circle when it's £17.50 and that's the most expensive.
London is in the top 10 for expense sure, maybe even in the top 5 but it's not number one. But it's fair to say most places are cheaper by comparison.
 

D_Humper E Bogart

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I'm thinking that ~£5.00 hour is minimum wage with many people turning down £7.00 hour apparently.

Oh yeah, I am a Londoner as well, heck, live in an area with more live Muslims then in Iraq (which is why no American would ever know where I live, straight off the bat.)

Yeah, London is expensive, I feel that the capital is just rip-off central and is more biased towards shoppers and the priviledged, hence the central london traffic congestion charges do not stop the hordes of taxis and BMWs from driving dangerously.

Consider that London is very diverse, if you're willing to risk a higher probability of dying unnaturally, there are some areas with more reasonable pricing, but anything with "West" in it's description is more suited to toffs than people.
 

dong20

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I'm thinking that ~£5.00 hour is minimum wage with many people turning down £7.00 hour apparently.

Oh yeah, I am a Londoner as well, heck, live in an area with more live Muslims then in Iraq (which is why no American would ever know where I live, straight off the bat.)

Yeah, London is expensive, I feel that the capital is just rip-off central and is more biased towards shoppers and the priviledged, hence the central london traffic congestion charges do not stop the hordes of taxis and BMWs from driving dangerously.

Consider that London is very diverse, if you're willing to risk a higher probability of dying unnaturally, there are some areas with more reasonable pricing, but anything with "West" in it's description is more suited to toffs than people.

I think London's biggest problem is simply that it's overcrowded and it's Victorian infrastrucure can't cope. I have mixed feelings about the Olympics; on the one hand it's possible some long overdue upgrades may be done but on they other there's a real risk it may also cause our infrastructure to collapse to our eternal embarrasment. Aside from the cost of course.
 

D_Humper E Bogart

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Yeah, I fear that too, I mean, it's in Hackney AND Stratford? I'm of the opinion that the only way it'll be safe for the athletes to leave the compund would have been to nuke the area beforehand.

The whole city is like an aged body that is having some drastic cosmetic surgery and is still suffering the effects of bad habbits at youth.
 

SpeedoGuy

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Pardon my ignorance, but what does an average citizen earn per hour?
Middle of the road, or Middle-class.

That's what I meant about exploring more realisitic evaluations of living costs versus income. These kinds of discussions often devolve into apples/oranges comparisons because of the variation in currency values the effect of wage inflation in large metro regions.
 

Nelly Gay

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I'm thinking that ~£5.00 hour is minimum wage with many people turning down £7.00 hour apparently.

Oh yeah, I am a Londoner as well, heck, live in an area with more live Muslims then in Iraq (which is why no American would ever know where I live, straight off the bat.)

Yeah, London is expensive, I feel that the capital is just rip-off central and is more biased towards shoppers and the priviledged, hence the central london traffic congestion charges do not stop the hordes of taxis and BMWs from driving dangerously.

Consider that London is very diverse, if you're willing to risk a higher probability of dying unnaturally, there are some areas with more reasonable pricing, but anything with "West" in it's description is more suited to toffs than people.

London must be expensive when Madonna says property prices were outrageous.
I gather minimum wage is about £5.35 an hour ?
You need £35,000 to actually "live" in London.
Many people canot actually afford to work so become trapped in a cycle of benefits !
A lot of the W12, W2, W14 postcodes have large population of wealthy Arabs ...
 

D_Humper E Bogart

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I live in an area with poor arabs/bengalis etc. Yep, good old E1,2,3,4....
Property prices are pretty nuts considering the murder rate, but they are cheaper than the West Side, if only because of that murder/crime rate.

Imagine what a Muslim Bronx would be like, say.
 

Cobalt Blue

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Public transport in London is now the most expensive in the world. The streets are filthy. Westminster City Council (the local authority responsible for maintaining the infrastructure of central London) is only interested in collecting revenue from car-parking fees in town - they tacitly encourage people to drive into the West End by constantly advertising freephone numbers for information on how to bring your SUV (known here as Chelsea Tractors) into the city. Cycle-lanes are non-existent or a green stripe painted in the potholed gutter, so cycling is akin to playing Russian Roulette. The myth of the capital being a vibrant 24-hour metropolis persists, even though most bars close at 11pm. The underground shuts down soon after midnight.
I like to watch tourists' faces as they emerge into the historic Piccadilly Circus to find that it is a dirty, traffic-clogged roundabout dominated by a huge cathedral-like Burger King. Similarly, Westminster City Council saw fit to allow an enormous McDonald's to be built in the precincts of Westminster Cathedral, the HQ of the Catholic Church in England.
When the congestion zone is extended westward in February, the urban motorway which is Vauxhall Bridge Road > Park Lane will be exempt from the charge, encouraging traffic to cut through the heart of London toll-free. Because of the 'canyon effect' of the city's buildings, traffic pollution is now higher than in L.A.
Oh, and don't even mention the Olympics: already billions of pounds over budget, the daily escalating costs (paid for by Londoners of course) of this white elephant will pale into insignificance as the planners realise that there is no earthly way London's transport infrastructure will be able to cope with even 5% of the increased traffic generated. Oh, and did I mention The MI5/MI6 estimates of the number of Muslims in-country planning more terrorist attacks? As Londoners say:

Islamophobe(n.) A person who objects to his or her transport being blown up en route to work.
 

eddyabs

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In total agreement here with Nelly Gay. London is a shithole.....culturally it is a fantastic city, the museums are free and astoundingly good, it has a truly cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic community, but rents are atrociously high, the property market is rising currently by around 6-8 percent a year (way over inflation), the public transport is in dire need of attention, commuting in or to London at rush hour is akin to many a person's idea of Hell.

The NHS is struggling to cope, underfunded, mismanaged, there are threats to close large hospitals that serve major population centres in Cities and large towns....and to merge them with other existing hospitals...which is sheer madness as presently these hospitals are straining at the seams already.
When I want to see my GP (I live in Brighton a small city) I have to wait generally for 3 days to see her.

My partner Patrick is from Guadeloupe (French Caribbean) and he has had to go back there for 3-6 months as he injured his back at work....he was given 4 months physiotherapy when there was no diagnosis given on his back injury! Fucking insane...then after waiting 6 MONTHS to have an MRI scan on his back, he arrived at the MRI clinic only to be told that 'we forgot to call you, the machine has broken down!'. We came to the conclusion that the best thing was for him to go back to Guadeloupe, a small carribean island that has an amazing health service (it being a department of France). Within 3 weeks he has had 2 scans with results, laser therapy and a course of massage. We are hoping to reunite by Spring, but forced to spend Christmas apart.

I can't tell you how ashamed this makes me feel about the state of our country. I am a patriotic man, I love England, I am a country lad and spend 4 days a week back at my parents working for the family business in the forest...it is beautiful, but at the same time we are being crippled by extortionate business taxes, council taxes, water, electricity and gas bills.

This Labour government gift wraps everything, but if you take a peek beneath there is deep deep rot.....I travel around and the people of this country are generally depressed, immigration is way out of control....economically we are booming, but it seems that hardly any of this boom trickles down to public and service spending...most of it is blown away on a war that the majority of this country never wanted to partake in. Blair told the nation (after two million marched against the war, the largest peacetime protest in this country's history) that if the UN said no to the war with the US against Iraq, we would by no means go to war. The UN said NO...Blair..sorry...BLIAR...tripped us nonetheless down that dark road to war.

Blair and his cronies of spin par excellence need to be lined up and hung for robbing our country of it's sense of pride, of culture, and for sending it to the dogs.
 

Nelly Gay

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The NHS is struggling to cope, underfunded, mismanaged, there are threats to close large hospitals that serve major population centres in Cities and large towns....and to merge them with other existing hospitals...which is sheer madness as presently these hospitals are straining at the seams already.
When I want to see my GP (I live in Brighton a small city) I have to wait generally for 3 days to see her.

My partner Patrick is from Guadeloupe (French Caribbean) and he has had to go back there for 3-6 months as he injured his back at work....he was given 4 months physiotherapy when there was no diagnosis given on his back injury! Fucking insane...then after waiting 6 MONTHS to have an MRI scan on his back, he arrived at the MRI clinic only to be told that 'we forgot to call you, the machine has broken down!'. We came to the conclusion that the best thing was for him to go back to Guadeloupe, a small carribean island that has an amazing health service (it being a department of France). Within 3 weeks he has had 2 scans with results, laser therapy and a course of massage. We are hoping to reunite by Spring, but forced to spend Christmas apart.

I can't tell you how ashamed this makes me feel about the state of our country. I am a patriotic man, I love England, I am a country lad and spend 4 days a week back at my parents working for the family business in the forest...it is beautiful, but at the same time we are being crippled by extortionate business taxes, council taxes, water, electricity and gas bills.

This Labour government gift wraps everything, but if you take a peek beneath there is deep deep rot.....I travel around and the people of this country are generally depressed, immigration is way out of control....economically we are booming, but it seems that hardly any of this boom trickles down to public and service spending...most of it is blown away on a war that the majority of this country never wanted to partake in. Blair told the nation (after two million marched against the war, the largest peacetime protest in this country's history) that if the UN said no to the war with the US against Iraq, we would by no means go to war. The UN said NO...Blair..sorry...BLIAR...tripped us nonetheless down that dark road to war.

Blair and his cronies of spin par excellence need to be lined up and hung for robbing our country of it's sense of pride, of culture, and for sending it to the dogs.[/quote]

At last someone who has actually had experience of the appalling NHS at its' very worst speaks.
These Pollyannas who blithely state that the NHS is free and people choose to go privately live in Tony Blair-land .
People HAVE to pay privately for treatment or they will get appointments in 2008 which will be cancelled without telling you.
I have gone privately since the 1970s because the "free" NHS is useless .
Tony Blair didn't wait in casualty for 6 hours when he had his little coronary ?
Ditto, Maggie who when she fell, was treated with kid-gloves at the Chelsea & Westminster Hospital !
NHS dentists in London are few and far between and offer limited treatment regimes.
Reality checks, all round .