Well, someone's replaced you, since the population is growing rather than shrinking. I've only been here 7 years (since graduation) but more and more of my similarly-aged friends are coming to London. I think it's young people rather than retirees, graduates rather than not, and I'm not sure I care whether British (though I think most are).
I lived in London for 10½ years, from when I started university.
Most incomers are young people, but not all are graduates — many come from Eastern and Southern Europe and work low-skill jobs. I put "British", but probably meant someone one would expect to live in London for a long time. I got to know a few construction workers from Poland and Romania, and none of them had any intention to stay — they were in London to make money, and several had wives/children 'at home'.
This can make a functioning city, but it's a change from London of 20 years ago, when it would be artists and musicians taking some of these cheap houses and I think fewer people were there to make some money and leave.
A good part of why I left is because it wasn't as interesting as it used to be. I wondered if I was getting old, but then, "of the 430 music venues that traded in London between 2007 and 2015, only 245 are still open" [1]. I certainly noticed that there were fewer gigs I wanted to see, and they'd moved from Friday/Saturday to weekdays.
The other part: I was working for a scientific charity, with charitable pay. I wasn't saving much money, even with living in a shared house, so decided I needed a new job. I wanted to continue writing software for science, so there weren't all that many jobs that interested me in London.
> Most incomers are young people, but not all are graduates — many come from Eastern and Southern Europe and work low-skill jobs. I put "British", but probably meant someone one would expect to live in London for a long time. I got to know a few construction workers from Poland and Romania, and none of them had any intention to stay — they were in London to make money, and several had wives/children 'at home'.
There's always been people coming to London for a few years to make money. Ten years ago maybe it was the Australians coming over here to work in bars and restaurants. I think construction workers would always have been moving around (certainly my dad did); there are probably more of them now than ten years ago but more construction is hardly a bad thing. I certainly don't think there are fewer skilled jobs for graduates than there were: the City has been adding more and more jobs and sprawling down to London Bridge, tech has boomed in Shoreditch, Bloomsbury and elsewhere, there's that huge new medical campus effort around King's Cross. The BBC has sadly been driven away for political reasons, but I don't think there's ever been a better time to be a graduate moving to London.
Where is cheap has changed. Music, indie theatre and groundbreaking art have been pushed further out, to Camden and Highbury and Shoreditch and Hackney and Brixton and Clapham. Soho is halfway to being Knightsbridge. But that's always been the way of these things.
> "of the 430 music venues that traded in London between 2007 and 2015, only 245 are still open"
I have no idea what the real numbers are, but I can tell that's a line designed to mislead, to make you think there has been a decline in the number of music venues without actually giving any evidence for it. How long did those 430 last, on average? What proportion of the music venues that traded between 1999 and 2007 were open in 2007? Indeed, how many music venues were open in 2007? What's the betting it was less than 245?
> The other part: I was working for a scientific charity, with charitable pay. I wasn't saving much money, even with living in a shared house, so decided I needed a new job. I wanted to continue writing software for science, so there weren't all that many jobs that interested me in London.
You pays your money, you takes your choice. Some jobs and some people are surely getting priced out of London. But the city as a whole is doing very well thank you.
