Affordable places outside London
Discussion
Depends what’s important to you.
The answer for a single person in their twenties will be different to a family with three kids.
North, south, east, west, all depends on where you need to be close to for friends, work location.
Is a short commute time preferable to a larger house, or vice versa.
The answer for a single person in their twenties will be different to a family with three kids.
North, south, east, west, all depends on where you need to be close to for friends, work location.
Is a short commute time preferable to a larger house, or vice versa.
Depends what you want from your home town, and what you consider commutable.
Personally I think it's worth living on the South Coast, so anywhere near enough a main road or a railway line maybe?
If you don't value what a place offers, then you won't think it's worth the commute to live there.
There are lots of expensive commuter places inland that personally I wouldn't bother with, but lots of people like them.
Places with too many people commuting to London every day tend to be a bit up themselves.
How big a house do you want or need? If you don't need a big family house, you can afford to have a shorter commute.
Do you need to commute every day?
Do you anticipate doing that forever?
If you want to settle somewhere, you can cope with a long crap commute for a few years, if there is a prospect of WFH or working locally later on.
Personally I think it's worth living on the South Coast, so anywhere near enough a main road or a railway line maybe?
If you don't value what a place offers, then you won't think it's worth the commute to live there.
There are lots of expensive commuter places inland that personally I wouldn't bother with, but lots of people like them.
Places with too many people commuting to London every day tend to be a bit up themselves.
How big a house do you want or need? If you don't need a big family house, you can afford to have a shorter commute.
Do you need to commute every day?
Do you anticipate doing that forever?
If you want to settle somewhere, you can cope with a long crap commute for a few years, if there is a prospect of WFH or working locally later on.
Where in London are you commuting to?
The biggest factor in a painless commute to London is minimising the stages of home to office. I’d be aiming to be able to walk to your home station, decent train to a London terminus and a walk to the office. Any commute involving driving, parking, DLR, tube, bus, whatever has more potential for disruption.
This is why I ask “where in London?”. City or Canary Wharf? Essex, Herts and Kent are likely to offer the best options (or at least towns with direct trains to Liverpool St, London Bridge and Cannon St. will). King’s Cross / Waterloo / Victoria / Paddington / wherever will be best served by other places, so it really depends on where you need to travel to.
The biggest factor in a painless commute to London is minimising the stages of home to office. I’d be aiming to be able to walk to your home station, decent train to a London terminus and a walk to the office. Any commute involving driving, parking, DLR, tube, bus, whatever has more potential for disruption.
This is why I ask “where in London?”. City or Canary Wharf? Essex, Herts and Kent are likely to offer the best options (or at least towns with direct trains to Liverpool St, London Bridge and Cannon St. will). King’s Cross / Waterloo / Victoria / Paddington / wherever will be best served by other places, so it really depends on where you need to travel to.
Ferrari60 said:
On a salary of 80k-100k, which places within commutable distance but outside of London are worth living in.
That's very hard to answer without knowing stage of life, income prospects, location of wider family etc etc. As well as ones tollerante to travel, need for alternatives etc. The reality is that people will commute into the centre of London from 2 hours away in most directions. Personally, I only took jobs that were on one of three tube lines as they were only a few minutes from home and I couldn't be arsed with all that dashing about changing lines. Today, I'll make my way to a provincial station that is an efficiency clustref
k 24/7 and it will eventually drop me into a pet of London that generally is no use to man nor beast so I can't be arsed. 
People commute in from Oxford, Peterborough, Brighton, Southampton and further.
As far as I'm concerned it's all about whether someone can be arsed to deal with the horror of the station drive. I don't mind how long the train wants to take but I do want to be able to walk to and from the station. That train also needs to just take me to a walkable point at the other end, I don't want the hassle of fannying about once there either.
In short, mark on the map where your most likely work area is in London, mark where parents and I laws are if they are needed etc, find the simplest commuting solution and then start looking on rightmove.
The big problem though won't be your salary but your partner's. When looking for civilised enclaves in the remote parts of Englandshire. Places where the streets aren't lined with drug addicts, inbreds and feckless. Places where the schools teach how to print with potatoes not how to survive a stabbing or how to be safe on a swing after vodka and vape. Places where walking for a casual, relaxing supper doesn't involve food in a bucket and running the gauntlet of feral losers. You're not looking for somewhere nice to live but in competition with people with two good salaries to not have to live somewhere s
t. No different at all to London. You're competing to find a location that the scummers haven't been able to infest and ruin, making the lives of all the nice people in that place unnecessarily harder that it should be. As a nation we manufacture vast amounts of feral scum for the purpose of ruining places and the lives of the people who live there so home buying anywhere in the U.K. is about fighting for the areas they haven't yet infested and where it looks unlikely they would ever be able to. Competition is stiff and two salaries tends to be a minimum easy starting point. Edited by DonkeyApple on Wednesday 31st May 08:05
s111dpc said:
Think you need to decide on what you’re prepared to put up with in terms of commute time. That will then inform the likely areas worth looking at.
I commuted from West Wilts to London for about 5 years which was doable but was a hard slog in the winter!
An hour away from getting into central london on the tube is what I would be looking for. I have a family too.I commuted from West Wilts to London for about 5 years which was doable but was a hard slog in the winter!
Ferrari60 said:
An hour away from getting into central london on the tube is what I would be looking for. I have a family too.
You want to be outside of London but still on the tube, or did I read that wrong?Is the type of area important to you, or is it just the commute that is important? For example, living in South Croydon, Bromley, or similar areas can be nice and within commuting distance, but you will be using rail+tube.
s1962a said:
Ferrari60 said:
An hour away from getting into central london on the tube is what I would be looking for. I have a family too.
You want to be outside of London but still on the tube, or did I read that wrong?Is the type of area important to you, or is it just the commute that is important? For example, living in South Croydon, Bromley, or similar areas can be nice and within commuting distance, but you will be using rail+tube.
deja.vu said:
Ferrari60 said:
Nickbrapp said:
Take a lower salary and live anywhere but the south east.
South east London? What areas?
Ferrari60 said:
An hour away from getting into central london on the tube is what I would be looking for. I have a family too.
If you consider somewhere like Rickmansworth. It's an hour away, has a back up mainland train, is on the M25 so quick links to the rest of the U.K. and three main airports then £300k gets you a grotty ex council house from the 60s, a newish build apartment near a grottyish highstreet like Mill End where parking will be a nightmare or a retirement apartment. As the only higher rate taxpayer you would be an absolute king though. Prisoner 24601 said:
Clearly something doesn't stack up here, but the best we can do is either ignore or be kind.
I've assumed he's a relatively recent grad who's got a good but still lives with the parents and is looking for ways to move out. The tried, tested and easily workable solution is the house share with mates in Z3-4 while slapping cash in the bank, having a dead easy commute and generally having a laugh. Follow that with a 2 bed flat somewhere sensible where the second room is rented to a mate to cover a large chunk of the mortgage, eventually swapping them out for the partner and then buy the modest family home with the partner when the first child starts to need to go to a school and you'd like one where the bulk of the students resemble some form of humanity.
Alternatively, you just bang straight into suburbia competing against all the older, dual income families who generally wouldn't be considering a property much under £750k purely to escape the folk who eat supper from a bucket.
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