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London’s millennials have been conned Will lockdown show the graduate precariat what little value lies in their metropolitan lifestyles?

With nowhere to go in London, will the urban graduate leave for the provinces? Credit: Guy Smallman/Getty

With nowhere to go in London, will the urban graduate leave for the provinces? Credit: Guy Smallman/Getty


April 9, 2020   6 mins

Having fled London a decade ago, I was bloody annoyed by Matt Hancock’s threat to ban all outdoor exercise if people in busy city parks refused to stop sunbathing. Why should I miss out on my rule-abiding, socially distanced runs down deserted country lanes simply because Londoners were refusing to take the downsides of city life along with its benefits? Especially given the capital’s persistent smugness about the superiority of its worldview and lifestyle?

But then I stopped to imagine what lockdown must be like if you live in a flatshare.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that two of the London parks first to close, citing visitors’ disregard of social distancing, are in areas popular with young sharers: Victoria Park in Hackney, and Brockwell Park in South-East London. (Brockwell Park has since reopened.) After all, it’s one thing to obey social distancing rules if you have a house, a partner you get on with, even a garden. But what must it be like for those young aspiring members of the London ‘metropolitan elite’ jammed cheek by jowl into dingy flatshares most of which don’t even have a sitting room?

This demographic has grown steadily in recent decades. Half of Britain’s school-leavers today go to university. On campus, they absorb the liberal worldview of the urban knowledge-worker class, even as the salaries associated with a ‘metropolitan elite’ lifestyle ascend ever further out of reach. (Even before coronavirus, the median graduate starting salary had not increased in five years, and the average has fallen since 2011.)

The result, I argued last November, is a socially-liberal, economically aspirational graduate precariat, clinging to the big-city dream while scraping a hand-to-mouth existence in cramped, expensive shared housing. David, a youth campaigner in his twenties who moved to London after university to help found a new charity, describes life on the bottom rungs of the capital’s graduate rat-race as a split between a professional life full of excitement, and a domestic one where comfort, security and even intimacy were hard to come by:

“It was all flashy and big and exciting, and I felt like one of the destined few, right at the centre of things. I was meeting all these charity chief execs and building this amazing network. But at the same time I was sleeping on a friend’s sofa, and commuting an hour each way across London on crowded Tube carriages. It was this weird split between a slick professional outside appearance, then this miserable life at home.”

Millions of young graduates tolerate a similar state of affairs, in the expectation that in due course things will improve. There’ll be a flat they only share with a partner, a better salary, maybe even the distant dream of buying a home.

Now, these millions have had the exciting, slick, public-facing side of their lives abruptly cancelled by lockdown, and are stuck instead with the no-frills private one. Crowded, overpriced houseshares. Flatmates they may not especially like. Nothing much to do. No wonder the first warm weekend of spring tempted some to bend the lockdown rules with a spot of sunbathing in the park.

Though they may be on the bottom rung, these millions still identify culturally with the ‘Anywhere’ sociocultural group, as David Goodhart framed it — the ‘open’, highly educated, mobile and cosmopolitan group which contrasts so starkly with the more ‘closed’, place-bound, conservative and lower-class ‘Somewheres’ found in the provinces.

It’s a worldview with history. In 2006, Tony Blair framed the new politics as ‘Open’ versus ‘Closed’ — with openness, obviously, as the future. In his view, politicians should drive openness while reassuring the wary ‘closed’ plebs that this path as not just beneficial but historically inevitable. The moral weighting of the binary is clear. Who wants to be seen as closed, inflexible or narrow-minded?

Studies also suggest that ‘open’ personality types are more likely to gravitate to cities, as my colleague Ed West points out in his recent book. So London is bound to lean more liberal, more rule-bending – and, in a world that valorises ‘open’ traits, more sure of its own worth than the more culturally ‘closed’ provinces. More smug, in a word.

Meanwhile, it has been argued that a ‘closed’ suspicion of strangers had evolutionary utility for much of human history, as it helped to limit the spread of pathogens to which a community might have no immunity. But now we’ve vanquished all the highly infectious diseases that might be spread by human hypermobility, haven’t we? So the shires’ worldview is vestigial, like the appendix, and we can and should all embrace a new, counter-evolutionary openness and enjoy the fruits of the resulting globalisation.

Except. A few weeks into the pandemic, it should be clear to even the most dedicated advocate of openness that there are some upsides to having a nation-state government with control of its currency and borders, and domestic capacity in key areas such as food production, medicine and precision engineering. (Ideally more than Britain has at present.) Even the Financial Times has suggested that some economic orthodoxies of recent decades might be due a rethink.

I would like to resist the temptation to be smug on behalf of the ‘closed’, rule-following provinces so long dismissed as obsolete. Rather, I want to invite today’s young urban flat-sharers to question the view I still secretly held as I loaded the removal van on my way to the shires, that leaving the capital is an admission of failure.

For as I watch my daughter run through the lawn sprinkler, and imagine lockdown in the poky London flat we left behind, I have no regrets at all. And I wonder if maybe, just maybe, we could help heal the sociocultural split in our country not by trying to persuade Somewheres to be more like Anywheres but by asking instead what more ‘open’ and ‘closed’ approaches to life could bring to one another.

“There are all these un-priced bits of working in London”, David told me. “The crowds, the smell, the pressure and lack of a personal life. I just decided that’s not what I want.” So he packed up his Anywhere skills and experience, and moved Somewhere. “I’ve been in Poole now for three years,” he says, “and my quality of life is so much better even though my salary has dropped by two-thirds.”

Along with having time for healthy eating, exercise and getting married, David told me how great it felt to bring valuable skills from the capital, with which he could make a real positive impact. In the last decade, I’ve seen something similar take place in my own small town, as other London escapees have settled here. Many have started businesses, formed clubs or otherwise thrown themselves into community life, bringing energy, skills and fresh insights to the community. “The biggest problem we have,” David says “isn’t the concentration of wealth but the concentration of talent.”

Before coronavirus blew everything up, public policy was just beginning to tackle the question of the gulf between dynamic cities and ‘left behind’ provinces. Boris Johnson’s December 2019 election campaign talked repeatedly of ‘levelling up’, a framing that suggests that with a bit of subsidy and jollying-along, the Somewheres can all be induced to be more Anywhere and then everything will be alright.

But that does nothing to challenge our centrifugal economy, in which urban hubs act as pyramid schemes, with a gravitational force both economic and cultural that pulls in everyone with an iota of energy and ambition. Once dragged to the hubs, people must then scramble over one another in a race for the top of the pile. Talking of ‘levelling up’ just creates more pyramids.

Instead, we need to give greater weight to the benefits of provincial life — fresh air, friendly relations with your neighbours, a slower pace of life, room to settle and raise a family — not just for retirees, but also the young. Even the ‘closed’ mindset, it turns out, has some benefits when you need longstanding neighbours willing to look out for you during a crisis. “Everyone knows that coastal towns are the most under-developed parts of the UK,” David says. “I see think tanks wondering about how to improve them. But the most obvious solution is: move there.”

In The Matrix, the hero Neo discovers that the life he thought he was living is an illusion created by intelligent machines, to pacify humans who are being farmed as living batteries. Today, with the illusion of a glittering urban future abruptly switched off by lockdown, millions of young graduates may feel rather like Neo: opening their eyes to discover themselves stacked in battery pods and not, in fact, about to take over the world after all.

These millions might consider whether it is time to vote with their feet. After all, theirs is the talent and energy. Theirs is the future. Lockdown will come to an end one day. When it does, we’ll have a chance to re-evaluate how we do pretty much everything. Perhaps it’s time for young graduates to bin the polluted, hypercompetitive metropolis, and the over-reliance on ‘open’ values, and make a difference instead in the clean air, affordable housing and friendly communities of Britain’s towns.


Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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Walter Lantz
Walter Lantz
4 years ago

Being a child means every option is on the table.
That’s the joy of childhood.
Being an adult means having to make life choices based on your needs and wants tempered by your abilities.
You can’t have everything.
The David anecdote is a perfect example of transitioning from childhood dreams and expectations to hard adult choices.
David is now happy because he is satisfying his own personal priority list.

IMO, millenials, or whatever the current tag is for the younger generation, are really just suffering from stunted emotional growth.
I don’t blame them entirely because they’ve been lead to believe, mostly by doting parents and coffee bar communists, that not only can you have it all, the inability to tick every life goal box somehow represents a failure of the system.
You aren’t young and naive – you’re a victim. (I believe the neo-liberal corporate kleptocracy is the Voldemort du jour)
But don’t worry, we will rise up and fix it.

They aren’t victims.
They’re just not adults yet.

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
4 years ago

‘David, a youth campaigner in his twenties who moved to London after university to help found a new charity,’

Talk about a non-job. No sympathy whatsoever. Ah…upon reading further I see that David saw sense and got out of London. But we do not learn whether or not he left the non-jobbing behind.

Sandy Markwick
Sandy Markwick
4 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

Founding a charity seems quite impressive to me. Do please provide a list of real jobs that have your approval.

Drahcir Nevarc
Drahcir Nevarc
4 years ago
Reply to  Sandy Markwick

Law, accountancy, medicine, the armed services, the church, engineer, banker, plumber, electrician, fire brigade, police, sales & marketing, retail, manufacture, import & export, farming, university lecturer, university admin, gym instructor, sport, sport admin, archeologist, lab technician, actor, dancer, modelling, musician, grocer, delivery driver, haulier, shelf stacker … need I continue?

Sandy Markwick
Sandy Markwick
4 years ago
Reply to  Drahcir Nevarc

Thanks for your list of jobs. They’re all great in my eyes. It doesn’t really address my point though which was why the previous contributor was so dismissive of someone setting up a charity a ‘non-job’.

croftyass
croftyass
4 years ago

Not sure much has fundamentally changed- I graduated from a London University & started a professional training contract in 1979-for the first 5/6 years I lived in the outskirts of London in a room in a shared house whilst I run up a sizeable amount of debt.Eventually my earning increased but I was 30+ before I could buy a property and thatw as only because my employer lent me the deposit.

Joe Smith
Joe Smith
4 years ago

During a career in IT my Golden rule was never to look for a job inside the M25, no matter how much it paid. Although I occasionally had the misfortune to go into London for a meeting. In a lot of ways I’m an anywhere person but considered London to be a no-way-I’m-working-there place.

Sandy Markwick
Sandy Markwick
4 years ago

Is there anything smugger than those having left London for the Shires or small town life looking down in Millennials?

To paraphrase this nasty article: “Look at us and how clever and talented we are to have left the rat race. We have book clubs and artisan crafts and an excess of talent – and we don’t have coronavirus the way you city souls do. How dare Millennials be so arrogant as to sleep on sofas and commute long distances for no money.”

Should we all upsticks to the country and write columns for Unherd?

Rob Paing
Rob Paing
4 years ago

It seems to me everyday we find new ways to classify people, open verus closed, millenials versus genX, anywheres versus somewheres. In our ever finer dichotomy of society we are not valuing the individual, but resorting to a lazy and dishonest mental short-cut to classify them and dismiss them with all kinds of implied qualities (smart versus dumb, globalist versus bigoted, leavers versus remainers). We forget that individuals are infinitely more complex than these clever tags.

Drahcir Nevarc
Drahcir Nevarc
4 years ago

“The result, I argued last November, is a socially-liberal, economically aspirational graduate precariat, clinging to the big-city dream while scraping a hand-to-mouth existence in cramped, expensive shared housing.”

You’re talking about my kids. This middle-aged white conservative male thinks that millennials should go en masse to parks and, while scrupulously observing social distancing protocols, sunbathe to their hearts’ content, and tell any copidiots who harass them to keep their far king distance.

Lucas
Lucas
4 years ago

Not everyone is a nimby

Dave Smith
Dave Smith
4 years ago

Always lived in the shires as my family have for generations. Glad to say all my children do as well. Today I went to pick up my weekly supplies at the local farm shop. The whole yard was full of clearly London millenials on bikes all with those stupid helmets they wear. ignoring as they felt they had the right to all social distancing and yabbering away at each other. I live in an area where the richer ones have second homes ( or daddy does) . This puts the farm and the workers in peril and as the whole area is now under much more police surveillance puts the farmer himself under pressure he does not need. .
My small town does not want then here. Not now and not ever really.

Mark Corby
Mark Corby
4 years ago
Reply to  Dave Smith

No doubt your ‘small town’ is the beneficiary of far too generous farming subsidies? No doubt it also gleefully accepts the largesse handed out by ‘daddy’ and his pampered offspring?
Yet, both you and it remain chippy and envious. You should banish the green eyed goddess and count your blessings. The perpetual whining of the shires, most notably by such organisations as The Countryside Alliance is one of the most unattractive features of modern Britain and its chemically saturated landscape.

Tony Hay
Tony Hay
4 years ago

I think it’s s shame that a thought provoking article has elicited so many antagonistic responses. I don’t agree with everything in the article but the general thrust, identifying a clear and damaging societal split, is spot on. And I’d like to come to Boris Johnson’s defence regarding the author’s pooh-poohing of his aspirations for ‘levelling up’ the country. I think he’s referring to a general economic levelling up between our major population centres as much as between town and country but it strikes me he is on the same page as the author and deserves some credit for this ambition. Let’s hope he manages to turn it into a set of successful policies.

Christian James
Christian James
4 years ago

The English have long tended to celebrate the provincial and rural over the metropolitan. And smug metropolitan-hating parochialism and swaggering philistinism have long defined the shires, compelling many a bright young thing to escape to the big city. Some of those bright young things may return, as the provincial ‘somewhere’ is held up as a seedbed of community, meaning, the good life and authenticity against the emptiness and shallowness of city life. It is a persistent motif of a return-to-nature, back-to-basics counter culture, disenchanted with the excesses and false promises of liberal, urban civilisation. Yet can this somewhere be found in a hinterland, which is more a myth than reality? Is this ‘somewhere’ merely another car-dependent nowhere, an elevated suburbia of renovated cottages, identikit housing estates, out-or-town shopping centres, industrialised food production and farming, dingy towns, inadequate infrastructure, all repackaged by a bogus heritage culture and imported artisanal pretension? Life in the sticks may be an interesting counterpoint to frenetic, big city life, yet there needs to be some critical balance against London bashing and back-to-somewhere delusion and proselytising.

Russell Hamilton
Russell Hamilton
4 years ago

Yes, move to a small town, there’s no chance of finding small-minded, disapproving people who will never accept you as anything but a blow-in. And you won’t miss the bookshops, concerts, diverse restaurants, fashion choices and just being with other young people like yourself. It will be so easy to find a good music teacher etc. …..

D Alsop
D Alsop
4 years ago

why would you not be able to go to a concert just because you moved out of the city? fashion choices? everyone shops online so same choices unless you like weird clothes from Camden Market. Bookshops? Believe it or not people outside of cities also read as well, lots of towns have great independent bookshops. Same with food and believe it or not, there are young people outside of cities, shocking i know!

The best bit of moving out of London? Hell of a lot less crime, do i miss the high levels of crime and constant threat of danger? Not on your life! There is nothing trendy about the constant fear of someone pulling a knife on you, throwing acid in your face, stealing your phone/wallet/bike etc It is certainly no place to bring up a young child that is for sure.

Be trendy or be safe? No brainer for me really

JR Stoker
JR Stoker
4 years ago

I did just that; 40 years in London and finally got out. To deep rurality, but with a wonderful classical and modern music scene (and music teachers – starting right next door), lanes and barns full of artisans and creatives making all sorts of wonderful things, good food and much cheaper and less pretentious, and even bookshops. And publishers, writers, bookclubs… Amazing, there’s life out here, culture, creativity, and friendly people.