London Then and Now: Aerial Shots Show City Grow over Past Two Decades

Why?

Inner London population peaked over 100 years ago.

To be fair I didn't know that either... For some reason I thought 7 was the last zone... 13 years here (almost to the day) and I've learned something new !

Long ago when I moved to London, it was zones 1-6 then A-D for stations outside Greater London. I think changing A-D to 7, 8 & 9 made it simpler; most people aren't interested in what the local government is when they buy a ticket.

Zone 5 was split into two back in 1991.

Zones beyond 6 have existed since at least the late 90s. My vague recollection is that A-C basically meant "the top end of the Metropolitan line" - certainly how it seemed for me as an SW Londoner. Then at some point the letters were changed to numbers and more stations were brought inside over in Essex, Kent, etc. The Wikipedia page for stations in zones 7-9 has a changelog of sorts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stations_in_London_far...

This post really highlights how much of the development in London is infill into already existing Victorian (or earlier) neighbourhoods and how the city is growing without sprawling outwards. The Victorians built the Metropolitan line out almost all the way to Aylesbury anticipating that the city would follow but it really hasn't. When you take the tube to zone 9 you start to go past horses and cows in fields. There are some really nice walks in the Chiltern hills starting from Chesham and Amersham and you don't feel like you're in London at all. We always wonder if people living there even consider themselves as Londoners.

I'm not a Londoner, I only visit occasionally, but I think this may be a psychological response to a big increase.

I used to like going out in London: "everything's so cheap!" Especially, getting a nice beer at a random pub would cost significantly less than a random basic lager in Paris.

But this year, I was shocked to see the price increase. It's now pricier than Paris, even though Paris prices have also edged up a bit.

And since my cash is Euros, I always compared the prices as converted to euros, so this accounted for the conversion rate variations.

Check Indeed, junior SWE jobs in London are listed starting at ~£25k/yr. Yes, £8 is expensive for a pint of lager.

Unless you want going out to be an Instagramable event instead of an after work one, then yeah.

Tax rates matter. It's easy to talk as a yank in a US salary with the tax rates in most states.

UK is insane.

> Aren’t the salaries higher as well?

The killer is house and rental costs.

If you want a flat in central London you'll be paying half (or more?) of your £68k salary on rent after tax. In Canary Wharf you might not even be able to afford rent.

A £68k salary won't bring you close to being able to afford a mortgage, unless you have capital from other means e.g. inheritance.

Salaries aren't increasing at the same rate.

I got a 2.5% salary increase this year. Because of inflation is should be > 8% (ONS has a recommendation). Complained about it and they still wouldn't increase it.

Here's some data corroborating this:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/bull...

As you can see, London rents are increasing at an accelerating rate.

| quality regulations have been reduced (see: Grenfell where that literally killed people.

Grenfell was a horrible tragedy. It was built as social housing in the 50’s or 60’s to a much higher standard (in terms of space and utility) than the so called luxury apartments of Canary Wharf.

The installation of cladding to modernise the building to meet modern energy efficiency standards and the apparent failure to make sure that work was completed within the regulations seems to be the cause of the catastrophic spread of the fire.

London planning is a complete mess. We waste millions on poorly executed projects to modernise social housing to save on CO2 emissions and at the same time we have the wealthy living in Victorian and older houses that are not allowed to install double glazing in order “to preserve the character of the property”.

Net migration of 600k/year also affects property prices.

The terrible thing is how they destroy old house from the inside and build multiple flats with terrible quality at huge prices because renters are pretty much in a dire situation and, stuff like RTO and centralization, makes it even worse for them (commute cost+rent cost+living cost in those areas)

All the while charging extremely high tax rates that get distributed to who knows what, the war on Ukraine, maybe.

I used the beer example as it happened that day. Same goes for restaurant food etc.

£7 a pint in the pub in my Sussex village.

A US pint is 16 fl Oz vs a UK pint which is 20 fl Oz, so add 25% to the US price to do a like-for-like.

> where PanP etc. are.

What are these?

I was not in Tower Hamlets but in the City of London and Southwark, but I'm sure your comment is valid: London is a large area and you can get a better quality of life on the outskirts.

Still, flying from London to somewhere else or taking a train to go outside, the difference in air quality before and after was noticeable.

If you have several million pounds, you can have a nice life literally anywhere. For the same money, you'd have a better quality of life outside London.

> London is an expensive city, you’ll need several million pounds for a decent family home

Just not true. I grew up in a 4 bed house in a zone 4 area where such houses still go for under a million, especially if you're willing to do a bit of work.

It's a perfectly nice area, good schools, parks and trees, 30min train to central, what more could a normal family want?

I'm a similar age to you, live in London and I've never been stabbed, mugged or assaulted in the UK. It's not that bad.

I'm not suggesting to stop building, I'm asking what is the solution to housing unaffordablity?

4) smaller households. You can add 50% more housing, but if more people are spending more of their years single, and desiring to live in their own abode, then increase in demand could easily outpace increase in supply.

The elephant in the room is population growth.

I also know multiple people who hold apartments in Berlin but spend most of their time elsewhere, and keep it “just in case” for occasional visits.

Thus my comment. Let’s cut these “bullshit” jobs and have another French Revolution already.

Yes, because as a populated city it’s very young: it virtually didn’t exist in the 19th century while London was the most populated city of the whole world at the time. Even in the 1930s London had 300x the population of Riyadh. You have to wait until the 1980s to see Riyadh have more than 1M inhabitants.

Sure, but it still doesn't capture the nature of the respective cities.

Open up Paris and London in two side by side windows in Google Maps, at an approximately similar scale, and look at the pale yellow areas (the bits Google considers as retail rather than residential). It looks like there's more of them, spread over a larger area, in Paris than London. Paris is visibly denser than London.

To the degree that the main characteristic of cities is that they are dense population centres, Paris has more of that than London.

London has a lot of high streets which feel fairly generically similar, because they're basically the same across the whole UK - the same shops, the same Greggs, the same Costa Coffees, the same Coral bookies, the same companies.

The main thing that make cities interesting to me is niche shops, restaurants and other experiences which are not sustainable without a large catchment area of potential customers. Density is important to enabling that; a huge spread-out urban area, like the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region, doesn't really deliver it.

I don't know if Paris has the same degree of niche experiences that London has. I lived in London for 15 years, I know it well and always enjoy myself every time I return, but I always enjoy my times in Paris too. Zurich, where I am now, is a very dull place compared to either.