At this point, harping on about London rent and house prices seems almost as futile as trying to pin down your deadbeat landlord to finally deal with that leaky bathroom tap. Rents continue to spiral and the average property price recently hit an eye-watering £410,000, so it's no surprise that people are leaving the capital in their droves.
In fact, the number of people fleeing London has reached a five-year high, with net departures to elsewhere in the UK reaching 93,300 people in the year to June 2016 – an increase of more than 80% on five years previously, according to Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures.
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There was a net outflow of people in all age groups apart from those in their twenties, but it's thirty-somethings who were most likely to up sticks and look for somewhere cheaper to buy a home and build a family, reported The Times.
Where is everyone choosing to build their post-London lives? Well, it depends on how well-off they are, according to Savills, which analysed the ONS figures. Unsurprisingly, those who live in the capital's richest boroughs are more likely to gravitate towards more affluent areas, with those fleeing Kensington and Chelsea tending to opt for Cambridge, Westminster escapees heading to Oxford and those from Hammersmith and Fulham opting for Elmbridge in Surrey, The Times reported.
Over-25s from Islington, another wealthy borough, are most likely to move to St Albans in Hertfordshire, which allows them to buy a house for £173,000 less than in London. Meanwhile those leaving Ealing gravitate towards Slough, where the average home is £241,000 cheaper than London, reported The Guardian.
Lucian Cook, a director at Savills, said that while a large part of the London exodus is down to "more affluent households looking to move up the housing ladder,” those leaving the capital are from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds and include renters who simply can't afford to live there anymore.
These groups are more likely to move to coastal Kent and Sussex, Cook added, “and I suspect they are perhaps going to be slightly less affluent households going into those markets, to locations like Hastings and Thanet.”
The mass exodus of affluent Londoners to other desirable areas is driving up prices, too, and in some places growth has even overtaken that in the capital. Cook told The Times: “It’s no surprise some of the areas that are quite popular [with departing Londoners], the Cambridges, Oxfords, Bristols and Baths, have also seen pretty strong house price growth. They’ve also become little Londons."