Escape London

I was in London this week. I had an excellent time with my friends Apala and Tim. I visited the Tate Britain, walked a lot, and (the reason I was there) spent a day hobnobbing with showbiz types at the Comedy Store. Ah, London.

And yet, for all its charms and history, it has developed an inhumanity not present in other European cities. It’s expensive but also corporate, oligarchic. Paris is expensive too but at least it’s chic and relatively free of Pret- and Cafe Nero-type plagues. You pay to see beauty in Paris but in London you’re really just paying for access to the market, which sucks. There are tree-lined boutique-filled streets in London but they’re the exception, not the rule, and good luck finding a way to live on one of them. They also feel like money unlike similar streets in, say, Berlin or Antwerp or even Rotterdam.

The Guardian reports that London’s creative souls are escaping the big smoke for… Glasgow. Glasgow? That’s where I live!

Other fine cities (Edinburgh, Manchester, Bristol) regularly make it on to Londoners’ great escape wish-lists. It almost doesn’t matter where; the shift is that people have stopped dreaming of getting to London, and now dream of getting away from it.

The way I see it is this: Glasgow is a production city, London is a market city. It’s hard to sell art in Glasgow but it’s easy to make it here.

Dynamic and artist friendly, the cost of living is 48% cheaper than London, with affordable property to rent and buy. As one freelance curator and London-Glasgow migrant told the Times: “It feels like in London you have to be constantly running on this hamster wheel … In Glasgow, there’s more time to be creative.” Creatives getting the chance to be creative? Imagine that.

I have no problem with Londoners coming to Glasgow and other cheaper post-industrial towns. I recommend doing it. The problem with gentrification, of course, is that it pushes the price of everything up.

This is why I had to move house two years ago. We used to pay about £500 to rent a decent flat in Glasgow but its more than double that now. Our last rental (a two-bed flat in the nicest part of town) was £650 when we moved in, increased a couple of times, and we recently saw it back on the rental market for £1,200. The landlord of that flat bragged to us that he bought the place outright for £15,000 in the ’90s to serve as his office and storage unit. And now it’s nothing but pure, undeserved profit for him.

On the other hand, Glasgow suffered badly in the pandemic. My three favourite places closed down. And before the pandemic there was the Art School fire. And before that we lost some great venues like the Arches and McLellan Galleries and the list goes on. My hope is that London’s run-off money will get some of those arty places back on their feet.