[muyuu]

Firstly Nottingham is fine and there's plenty to do there. But you have places like Bristol, Bath or Manchester where life and especially housing is much cheaper than in London and they have a lot to offer. Personally I like Liverpool as well, Edinburgh, even Newcastle, but for some reason they are not popular and they are deemed as insecure (when in reality, living in a dump in the East end in London is definitely more insecure than living in a cheaper place up North, South-West, Wales, etc anywhere but London and the South-East).

This "London or bust" mentality is not only ignorant - there's a lot to the UK other than London - it's financial suicide for people on low salaries.

> I remember at the beginning of my career I was living in London on a £25K salary for two years and I was just fine. Don't be elitist.

Firstly, I don't know when this was but now you are definitely poor on that salary here in London. And if you have the choice to make a similar salary elsewhere then it's absurd not to do it because of some "The Secret of my Success" pipe dream. You can always move to London later in your career.

Secondly, I'm not saying people shouldn't be allowed to make absurd decisions. I'm just calling them what they are.

The rent differential alone is higher than the pay differential let alone all the remaining living costs. At the same time, many jobs don't pay more than in other places and yet there are flocks of people coming to do these. Their hardship is the direct result of their poor decision making.

[Mvandenbergh]

£25k is only £2k less than the median wage in London. I don't know if a definition of "poor" that includes 50% of the population makes a lot of sense.

[muyuu]

Yeah that's because a lot of people have decided to live in hardship just to remain in London.

Poverty is not (or should not) be a comparative thing to what other people make but a relation of income and living costs.

Around 30-40% of the population struggle to make ends meet in London. Appalling, I know. Another 20-30% just get by without much trouble. The rest have extra to save and spare.

I suspect it's similar in San Francisco and New York but I don't know these cities enough to make a proper comparison.