Every year, thousands of graduates leave the north to live in London. Two writers reflect on their own journeys south; one who found a new community and another who couldn’t resist the pull of home

Promises of a “northern powerhouse” have been challenged by figures that show a decade-long north-south brain drain, with up to 310,000 graduates leaving the north to move to southern cities, despite the fact that nobody can afford to rent a box room in the south, and pints are 27 times more expensive. According to Lord O’Neill, former Tory treasury minister and one-time chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, the only cities in the UK attracting graduates are London and Bristol. He is campaigning for more business initiatives and greater investment in east-west rail links between Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool.

The northerner who left –

Rebecca Nicholson

Just over a decade ago, I slid down the drain myself, moving from the motherland (north Lincolnshire – it’s the north, and I’ll fight you about it) to London for work. My family live there, so I go back often. I used to call it going home. But recently, after visiting, I asked my sister for a lift to the station so I could “catch the train home”, which was a jolt. In that moment London and I finally made it official. It was a surprise as it was only ever supposed to be a temporary fling. Somehow I haven’t quite managed to ever call it off.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sheep grazing in hills, near Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire. Photograph: Michael Mahovlich/Getty Images/Radius Images

London is so vast and varied that any experience of it is unlikely to be universal. Some of it reeks of wealth and privilege, some of it is trapped in cycles of poverty that should put the rest of the city to shame; these two sides may brush postcode borders, but rarely meet. My own London’s grip has loosened and tightened over the years, but it keeps a hold on me. I have loved it and loathed it, sometimes on the same day. I moved there two weeks after I graduated to do an internship at a long-dead magazine. I was broke but people saved their train tickets for me to claim back as “expenses” and I stayed on friends’ sofas. I had the best summer of my life. That summer extended into years. All the parties and nightclubs and gigs I had read about in those magazines, the bright and brash nights that had seemed like untouchable fantasies in my hometown, were real.

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Now that I’m a bit too old to go out much without days of suffering what can only be called an aftermath, it seems strange to look back and think that, apart from work, nightlife was the main draw, but when you’re gay, the lure of a city is strong: you go to find your tribe. In fact, if you are different in any way, the city can be welcoming like that. Most of those clubs in which we danced away our 20s have been torn down and replaced with Foxtons flats and chain restaurants. Younger generations have found their own fun, but what keeps me here is different now: my friends, my friends’ babies, having a local, the fact that, after many years of not talking to whoever lived next door, I now know many of my neighbours. People can talk about London as lonely and isolated, and I know that this side of it exists, but what has made it a keeper for me at this point is finding a raggedy impersonation of a community.

I am, however, clear-eyed and non-native enough to know that it’s a disgrace that so much is concentrated here: no wonder the country has no idea what its own face looks like when the majority of its politics and media are fixed in one place. London is not Britain; it’s a version of it buoyed by money. Calls for its independence in the aftermath of Brexit, while perhaps not entirely sincere, show the arrogance of this disconnect. And yet, in electing a Muslim mayor while much of the world shifts so far to the right that a “register” of Muslims become a possibility, I feel enormous pride in my city. It’s complicated.

I daydream about moving back to the north all the time, and have done for years. I look at property websites and can scarcely allow myself to imagine living anywhere with more than one bedroom. The word “garden” takes my breath away. Yet here I am, still not quite managing to go, starting to call London home.

The northerner who came back –

Helen Pidd

When I left home in coastal Lancashire in 1999, I had no intention of ever returning. The north of England held little interest for me. I preferred the accent, but that was about it. I was blasé about the nightly sunsets over Morecambe bay, the Cumbrian fells in silhouette, and hated the fact we lived so near the Lake District that my parents made us go walking there most Sundays.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Autumn in the Lake District. Photograph: Kimberley Coole/Getty Images/Lonely Planet Images

I knew I would live in London one day, and I did, on and off, from 2004 until 2013. I thought about staying on in Edinburgh after university, but I was offered a job when I graduated and so down I went. I never even considered stopping halfway. All the national media was in London; it was where the bands I liked played; where you could get fed after 8pm somewhere other than a chippy; and it was a good few degrees warmer, too.

It was in London that I started to identify as a northerner. I would bang on about how much nicer people were where I came from, how much cheaper everything was, while quietly despairing on every trip home that Lancaster, my nearest city, didn’t even have an H&M or a Wagamama. Trends took a year to reach Lancashire; when one of my oldest friends described my outfit as “very London” I was chuffed to bits, even though I knew she meant it as a diss. Equally, I quite liked the assumption from ignorant southerners that I was working class because I said bath instead of baaarth.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest How anyone stays sane when commuting by tube? Photograph: Forest Woodward/Getty Images

Then I got really into riding my bike. I had always cycled to work at the Guardian – I still do not understand how anyone stays sane when commuting by tube – yet as I approached 30, I started to miss open space. I rode to Brighton and resented the first few hours battling through London traffic. I started to fantasise about an existence where I could reach the hills on warm summer nights, passing hedgerows rather than stinking bins. The brat who spoiled every family Lakeland walk between 1990 and 1994, who dreamed of 24-hour bagel bakeries and who had memorised the Monopoly board, was craving the life she had been so determined to leave behind.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Life outside the capital: Media City in Salford. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

And then the Guardian’s north of England editor job came up. I wouldn’t have gone for it had the BBC not just opened Media City in Salford. It was a sign that you could operate at national level without being crammed into a grotty flatshare in Zone 3 – and recognition that there was life outside our overcrowded capital.

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Now I live in Manchester, in a redbrick three-bedroom terraced house that cost less than a one-bed studio in a crappy bit of outer London. Not everything is cheaper: the other day I bought a pot of tea in the Refuge, Manchester’s trendiest new bar, and was aghast to be charged more than four pounds. A pint is approaching a fiver in many places in the city’s Northern Quarter nightlife district. Rents are going up, the pay is still way below London salaries, and most of the best graduate jobs are in the south-east. Despite rapid improvement, the restaurant scene isn’t a patch on the capital’s, either.

But it’s only two and a quarter hours to London on the train if I want a fancy feed: I remember days when I would spend almost that long trying to visit a friend in south-west London from my flat in the north-east. Attitudes are just as liberal as in the capital: our Lord Mayor is a former Mr Gay UK and when a young gay couple got beaten up on the tram for singing show tunes, police helped the Lesbian and Gay Chorus stage an onboard musical singalong. I spent this weekend in the very same snow-capped peaks I used to scowl at while plotting my escape to the big city as I waited for the bus on Morecambe prom. My mum and dad can’t believe I came back voluntarily. I wonder what took me so long.

