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by arethuza 3702 days ago
Well, as an Edinburgh resident I'm personally mystified as to why anyone would want to live in London! :-)

[NB Of course there are perfectly good reasons for wanting to live in London - just never appealed to me!]

3 comments

London is a handful of very pleasant millionaire villages - Primrose Hill, Hampstead & Highgate, Ken + Chel etc - surrounded by terraced Edwardian worker slums.

There's also been a new build boom in the East. Some areas were almost affordable for a while.

The big advantage compared to the rest of the UK is networking potential. Even the biggest competing cities - Manchester, Birmingham - are an order of magnitude less happening. And places like Leeds and Swindon have almost nothing at all.

The UK has really screwed the proverbial pooch here. Compared to traditional industry, Internet and creative businesses have huge potential for almost no infrastructure spend, and can create jobs almost everywhere.

Aggressively promoting startups across the country should have been a no-brainer. But... that's not what we got.

The other smaller startup city is Cambridge, which in some ways is even worse - less dense housing and a complete lack of decent transport links in of any kind, because all our transportation centers on London.
As a Londener - London sucks !

Would love to Live in Edinburgh - but the world's laundered money doesn't flow through Edinburgh :(

Finance seems to be a big employer here - obviously not on the scale of the City but proportionally (Edinburgh isn't that big) it's a fairly high percentage of jobs.
Yes, although they're "back office" and all the sexy high-paid trading, quant, actuarial stuff is stuck in London.
Don't think I've ever seen "sexy" and "actuarial" used together :-)

What do all the actuaries do in Edinburgh then - I've seen to have known loads of them over the years! Or is pensions/life stuff not on the "sexy" side of things?

Good point, there's Sun Alliance etc here. I get the impression that they have the "good" but not "stratospheric" pay rates? i.e £50-£150k.
Where's your "here" - Edinburgh? :-)

Of the places I know employ actuaries in Edinburgh: Standard Life, Scottish Widows, Royal London... and there are quite a few consulting actuary companies around as well.

Slightly ironic, isn't it? Edinburgh is basically to Scotland what London is to England - just not quite to the same extreme.
Maybe politically and financially, but Glasgow (i.e. Greater Glasgow) is much larger than Edinburgh.