Nearly every part of England and Wales saw an ex-Londoner move in with trend causing social tension in some areas

The urge to quit London is so widespread that only a handful of the remotest corners of England and Wales did not see at least someone from the capital arriving to start a new life last year.

According to the most recent official figures, analysed by the Guardian, 292,000 people left the metropolis in the year to the middle of 2016, up 14% on a decade earlier and the highest level since 2006.

The trend is being driven by people leaving London’s relatively expensive housing market but also by financially squeezed councils sending homeless families out of the capital – in some cases hundreds of miles away – because they cannot afford to buy housing stock in London. There are warning that incomers from the capital are causing social tensions in some areas.

People arrived from London in every part of England and Wales except three areas: the remote Isles of Scilly 25 miles off Land’s End, Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria and Torfaen in rural South Wales.

Among the most popular escape routes were Brighton and Birmingham, whose populations were swollen by a combined 12,100 people from the capital last year.

Other popular destinations included Bristol, which welcomed 4,210 people from London, and Manchester which attracted 4,150 incomers from the capital.

Most people leaving London went to nearby areas in the home counties. Dartford was the most likely destination for Londoners with 4,260 people moving to the Kent town in the year to June 2016, according to official figures collated by Barratt Homes.

The need to escape the capital’s often unaffordable housing market is a prime reason for departures. At £482,000, average London house prices remain more than double those in the rest of the UK – £223,000.

However, not everybody has a choice. Councils are sending homeless families out of the capital to cheaper properties at the rate of more than 2,000 a year. In April, May and June this year, London boroughs made 524 placements outside of the capital.

They included two families moved 280 miles north to Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Sunderland, another two families to Merseyside, five to Bradford in West Yorkshire and 32 to the West Midlands. More than 200 families were sent to Kent and almost 100 to Essex, according to figures from London Councils.

A significant number of the total number of leavers are thought to be people who graduated from university in the 1990s, moved to London and bought homes when they were cheap and are now in their 40s with families and considerable equity.

The trend is causing social tensions with incomers branded “DFLs – down from London” by locals who resent the impact on house prices when property-rich arrivals outbid each other. This has been the case in the Sussex town of Lewes, to which 740 Londoners moved last year, and in the picturesque north Kent fishing towns of Whitstable and Herne Bay, with 3,700 Londoners moving into the area that includes Canterbury.

“The effect on places within commuting distance is gentrification and rising housing prices to London levels in the most sought after parts of those places,” said Danny Dorling, professor of human geography at Oxford University. “This then ripples out to most of the rest of Brighton, Reading, Cambridge, even Hastings. Migration from London has already reduced many communities to shells of what they once were. Creating a sense of community again will take a long time and requires two or three generations to be able to stay in one place. The immigrants who have the greatest effect on life in England are internal immigrants, English-born affluent people with a large deposit.”

Sir Steve Bullock, London Councils’ executive member for housing, said finding cheap enough housing for tenants in the capital was increasingly difficult as “good quality affordable housing is extremely scarce in parts of London, especially for people on low incomes”.

“London boroughs are under pressure to find homes for a growing number of vulnerable people – there are more than 50,000 households living in temporary accommodation in the capital.”

The wider internal migration data reveals some notable well-worn longer migration routes. People leaving Hackney were more likely to head to Bristol than anywhere else, while people leaving Kensington and Chelsea were most likely to end up in Oxford. And you are more likely to bump into a new DFL from Lambeth in Brighton than from any other London borough.

One thousand one hundred and fifty people moved to Hastings on the south coast, 2,380 to Southend in Essex and 1,300 went to Exeter. One thousand nine hundred moved to Cornwall.

Laura Boon, 36, moved to Canterbury from Crystal Palace last year with her husband, Tom, a hospital doctor, and their two daughters aged seven and eight. After 16 years in the capital they bought a four-bed detached house just outside Canterbury for about half the price it would have cost in south-east London.

“That was one of the main reasons to move,” she said. “If we’d wanted to live in a comfortably sized family house and afford a social life in London we would have needed two very healthy incomes.”

Boon works as a freelance graphic designer and wanted to retain flexibility to look after their children so they could not afford to stay in the capital.

“We are getting a lot more fresh air,” she said. “We are close to the city but on our doorstep are woods, fields and rivers paths and the beach is only 15 minutes away. We have more space at home and we are not under each other’s feet as much. But I miss our friends in London.”

“I needed the peace. In London you don’t get time to switch off”

Nichola Naylon swapped her hectic London life for the serenity of the Llyn peninsula in North Wales three years ago. A decade in the capital had taken its toll, financially and emotionally, so when a new job didn’t work out she decided to up sticks and move north.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nichola Naylon in her Pwllheli kitchen.

“I wanted a complete break and a complete change of scenery. I needed the peace and the quiet. Looking back I think I was probably classed as depressed,” she said.

Naylon, 37, runs her own pottery business from a studio near Pwllheli, a pretty coastal market town in north-west Wales. She shares a six-bedroom house with her mum, while renting out the flat she owns in Bow, east London, to supplement her income.

The social scene and variety of restaurants are the only things she misses in London but, she said, it was difficult to “maintain that life and existing” on her £27,000 salary. “London does have all those amazing things but I wasn’t on an amazing wage. You get up, go to work, you’re on ridiculously busy tubes, in a ridiculously hectic city and you don’t get time to switch your mind off and step back and realise what’s happening and where your life’s going. Those 10 years can pass by in a whirlwind.” Josh Halliday



“London kind of broke me … Moving is the best decision I ever made”

Lisa Rushforth lasted 18 months in the capital before, in her own words, “it kind of broke me”. “I say that half-jokingly but spiritually and financially, it did.” Rushforth, 37, moved to London in 2014 to work for her brother-in-law as an audiobook producer while trying to build a freelance career as a translator and interpreter. Soon, she said, she was “haemorrhaging money”. Her earnings were dwarfed by the £2,000-a-month rent for a flat in Ladbroke Grove, which she shared with a friend.

“I got to the stage where I honestly thought I might have a nervous breakdown because I was just burning the candle at both ends every day of the week. “It was exhausting,” she said. “Like trying to go down the up escalator.”

Rushforth moved to Ilkley, near Leeds, after 18 months in London and lives in a three-bedroom terrace house currently on the market for £230,000. “If you took my house and shoved it in Notting Hill you’d be talking millions,” she said. Like many exiled Londoners, the social scene is one the things Rushforth misses the most – but also the free cultural events and the city’s vast green spaces. Still, she said, moving to West Yorkshire is “the best decision I’ve ever made”.

“The pace of life is crazy and it sweeps you up in this whirlpool of social life, work, never being home. You never see your own house in the daylight, no matter what time of year it is. You’re meeting people left, right and centre and losing money like I don’t know what,” she said. Josh Halliday