Southwest Water has the highest charges...by a long way...in the UK.
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I knew there was a sensible reason for the discrepancyOriginally posted by Anna View PostHowever, gross disposable household income per head of London residents is the highest of all regions. At £20,509, it is 28 per cent higher than the national average of £16,034
Therefore, as Londoners can afford it - they are charged more and are willing to pay more!!
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That's most interesting. So when you go into Tesco in London, they charge you more for a Mars bar than at Tesco in Manchester? (I only ask.)Originally posted by Beef Oven! View Post
Do they charge you more if you have a London postcode?Last edited by Eine Alpensinfonie; 11-02-15, 23:22.Comment
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Yes, as one who has never lived in London but is well aware of the huge disparity between it and the rest of the UK in all sorts of ways, I'm pretty sure you are correct.Originally posted by Beef Oven! View Post
We all have to exist in the world that actually exists not an imaginary one of our own preference.
Beefy has it by an argumentative mile, IMHO.Comment
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Is there an official cost of living index for London? There seem to be several offered by different commercial organisations. There can't be any question about housing costs being higher but what else? In my part of the rural world there is virtually no public transport and residents are forced to run cars, not I think true in London. Similarly there is less choice of fuel for heating (no gas) and sewerage services and sometimes mains water supplies are not available and have to be provided by home systems. Discount supermarkets are not always near and getting to them can be impossible unless one runs a car. Cinemas, theatres, concert and recital halls can be thin on the ground for rural dwellers too.Comment
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... I knew there was a reason I chose to live in London. I think Hazlitt knew what he was talking about -Originally posted by gradus View Post
"All country people hate each other. They have so little comfort, that they envy their neighbours the smallest pleasure or advantage, and nearly grudge themselves the necessaries of life. From not being accustomed to enjoyment, they become hardened and averse to it -- stupid, for want of thought -- selfish, for want of society. There is nothing good to be had in the country, or, if there is, they will not let you have it. They had rather injure themselves than oblige any one else. Their common mode of life is a system of wretchedness and self-denial, like what we read of among barbarous tribes. You live out of the world. You cannot get your tea and sugar without sending to the next town for it; you pay double, and have it of the worst quality. The small-beer is sure to be sour -- the milk skimmed -- the meat bad, or spoiled in the cooking. You cannot do a single thing you like; you cannot walk out or sit at home, or write or read, or think or look as if you did, without being subject to impertinent curiosity. The apothecary annoys you with his complaisance; the parson with his superciliousness. If you are Poor, you are despised; if you are rich, you are feared and hated. If you do any one a favour, the whole neighbourhood is up in arms; the clamour is like that of a rookery; and the person himself, it is ten to one, laughs at you for your pains, and takes the first opportunity of showing you that he labours under no uneasy sense of obligation. There is a perpetual round of mischief-making and backbiting for want of any better amusement. There are no shops, no taverns, no theatres, no opera, no concerts, no pictures, no public buildings, no crowded streets, no noise of coaches, or of courts of law, -- neither courtiers nor courtesans, no literary parties, no fashionable routs, no society, no books, or knowledge of books. Vanity and luxury are the civilizers of the world, and sweeteners of human life. Without objects either of pleasure or action, it grows harsh and crabbed: the mind becomes stagnant, the affections callous, and the eye dull. Man left to himself soon degenerates into a very disagreeable person. Ignorance is always bad enough; but rustic ignorance is intolerable. Aristotle has observed that tragedy purifies the affections by terror and pity. If so, a company of tragedians should be established at the public expense, in every village or hundred, as a better mode of education than either Bell's or Lancaster's. The benefits of knowledge are never so well understood as from seeing the effects of ignorance, in their naked, undisguised state, upon the common country people. Their selfishness and insensibility are perhaps less owing to the hardships and privations, which make them, like people out at sea in a boat, ready to devour one another, than to their having no idea of anything beyond themselves and their immediate sphere of action. They have no knowledge of, and consequently can take no interest in, anything which is not an object of their senses, and of their daily pursuits. They hate all strangers, and have generally a nick-name for the inhabitants of the next village. The two young noblemen in "Guzman d'Alfarache," who went to visit their mistresses only a league out of Madrid, were set upon by the peasants, who came round them calling out, "a wolf." Those who have no enlarged or liberal ideas, can have no disinterested or generous sentiments. Persons who are in the habit of reading novels and romances are compelled to take a deep interest, and to have their affections strongly excited by fictitious characters and imaginary situations; their thoughts and feelings are constantly carried out of themselves to persons they never saw, and things that never existed; history enlarges the mind, by familiarizing us with the great vicissitudes of human affairs, and the catastrophes of states and kingdoms; the study of morals, accustoms us to refer our actions to a general standard of right and wrong; and abstract reasoning in general, strengthens the love of, truth, and produces an inflexibility of principle which cannot stoop to low trick and cunning. Books, in Lord Bacon's phrase, are "a discipline of humanity." Country people have none of these advantages, nor any others to supply the place of them. Having no circulating libraries to exhaust their love of the marvellous, they amuse themselves with fancying the disasters and disgraces of their particular acquaintance. Having no hump-backed Richard to excite their wonder and abhorrence, they make themselves a bugbear of their own out of the first obnoxious person they can lay their hands on. Not having the fictitious distresses and gigantic crimes of poetry to stimulate their imagination and their passions, they vent their whole stock of spleen, malice, and invention on their friends and next-door neighbours. They get up a little pastoral drama at home, with fancied events, but real characters. All their spare time is spent in manufacturing and propagating the lie for the day, which does its office, and expires. The next day is spent in the same manner. It is thus that they embellish the simplicity of rural life! The common people in civilized countries are a kind of domesticated savages. They have not the wild imagination, the passions, the fierce energies, or dreadful vicissitudes of the savage tribes, nor have they the leisure, the indolent enjoyments and romantic superstitions, which belonged to the pastoral life in milder climates, and more remote periods of society. They are taken out of a state of nature, without being put in possession of the refinements of art. The customs and institutions of society cramp their imaginations without giving them knowledge. If the inhabitants of the mountainous districts described by Mr. Wordsworth are less gross and sensual than others, they are more selfish. Their egotism becomes more concentrated, as they are more insulated, and their purposes more inveterate, as they have less competition to struggle with. The weight of matter which surrounds them crushes the finer sympathies. Their minds become hard and cold, like the rocks which they cultivate. The immensity of their mountains makes the human form appear little and insignificant. Men are seen crawling between Heaven and earth, like insects to their graves. Nor do they regard one another more than flies on a wall. Their physiognomy expresses the materialism of their character, which has only one principle -- rigid self-will. They move on with their eyes and foreheads fixed, looking neither to the right nor to the left, with a heavy slouch in their gait, and seeming as if nothing would divert them from their path. We do not admire this plodding pertinacity, always directed to the main chance. There is nothing which excites so little sympathy in our minds as exclusive selfishness. -- If our theory is wrong, at least it is taken from pretty close observation, and is, we think, confirmed by Mr. Wordsworth's own account."Comment
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Not everyone who lives outside London lives in the country. I live in what used to be called the second city of the Empire, & at the height of its prosperity (and even now) it has the advantages of London without the disadvantages (and a better contemporary arts scene). Those who see London as the centre of the world are guilty of closed minds, parochialism, smugness & probably have a poorer over-all quality of life (& small willies too).Comment
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I think it’s dangerous to assume those figures are representative as to how much more expensive London is in all aspects compared to the rest of the UK.Originally posted by Beef Oven! View Post
Using that website, look at Oxford. It lists consumer prices in London being 8.7% more expensive than Oxford, if you include rent then London is 24.18% more expensive, but groceries in London are 16.20% cheaper than Oxford.
Then, Reading. Consumer prices in London are 2.89% lower than Reading, add in rent and London is just 18.94% more expensive, and grocery prices in London are 9.39% lower than Reading.
Looking at how the website gathers figures, well, it seems anyone can join in with the price of a kilogram of oranges and those exact figures and wording for Manchester are replicated on other websites where it says data has come from just 2,169 people doing that. (It seems the website is designed for people thinking of relocating to different cities around the world, and the indices for rentals or buy to let use prices in New York City as a base)
To be honest, I’d rather trust figures from the ONS, or the Halifax or Joseph Rowntree than a website run for profit by an ex-google software chap living in Belgrade who developed the number-crunching system that is used!!
Take out the ridiculous high rentals in London and the very vague comparison items on the website (i.e., unspecified brand of pair of mens leather shoes and womens summer dress) and substitute a regulated shopping basket of goods and I think you’ll find that the cost of living (minus London inflated rents) is more or less the same wherever you live. It’s a swings and roundabouts situation.Comment
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There are two strands of the city/ countryside debate. On the one hand, there is the the difference between life/working styles between the two. Then there is the other meaning, hijacked by the heinous fox-hunting fraternity (most of whom live in towns).Comment
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Last time I looked, yes.Originally posted by vinteuil View Post
No.... I thought that was Calcutta?.Comment
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Yes, it's swings and roundabouts, but after all is said and done, London is significantly more expensive than anywhere else in the country, with or without taking property prices and rental costs into account. But it's still a free country and you can believe whatever you want to believe.Originally posted by Anna View Post
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I don't think he did. At any rate he frequently took refuge from London to the village of Winterslow where he did much of his writing and even stayed on the outskirts of the Swiss town of Vevey for a time as he was so enchanted with the region. What's more, since he was presumably writing at a time when there was a deeply repressive government and severe economic distress in the rural areas due to poor harvests, enclosures and heavy taxes and duties to pay for the wars, it sounds like a complacent contempt of the fortunate for the economically oppressed.Originally posted by vinteuil View Post
Here are two different passages, from C19 writers with a far wider experience of life at that time than Hazlitt and a better understanding of it:
"What injustice, what a hellish system it must be, to make those who raise it skin and bone and nakedness, while the food and drink and wool are almost all carried away to be heaped on the fundholders, pensioners, soldiers, dead-weight, and the other swarms of tax-eaters!...One set [of politicians] is, to be sure, IN place, and the other OUT; but, though the rooks keep the jackdaws on the inferior branches, these latter would be as clamorous as the rooks themselves against FELLING THE TREE; and just as clamorous would "the gentlemen opposite" be against any one who would put down the system itself. And yet, unless you do that, things must go on in the present way, and FELONS must be BETTER FED than HONEST LABOURERS; and starvation and thieving and robbing and gaol-building and transporting and hanging and penal laws must go on increasing, as they have gone on from the day of the establishment of the debt to the present hour." (Cobbett, Rural Rides)
“LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.
The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.” (Dickens, Bleak House)
The fogs and smogs have now mostly gone, but the Wen remains and now its centre has largely become a kind of banking-house for the wealthy of the world, accumulating property solely to increase their wealth, while the financial centre has amassed a debt dwarfing any which Cobbett could have imagined, but like that earlier debt, to be repaid by the whole country unto the umpteenth generation. So I don't think London or Londoners have anything to be smug about.Comment
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