There's no way the London market supports that at volume.
It's sort of a dangerous thing to assume that one's view of the market is the totality of it. Not to say that you're wrong, because I have never sold a gig in London, but I have heard the same about geographies/specialities with which I'm intimately familiar, and usually the claim comes from someone who has sort of fallen into a particular style of customer/acquisition channel/work and is not aware that large parts of the market exist in such a way that they'd never hear of them.
For example, rather frequently on HN we'll have people quote the going rate on Craiglist or RentACodeMonkey.com quoted as the maximum available for (without loss of generality) Rails programmers in Chicago, despite it being at an 80%+ discount to rates routinely charged by people whose clients wouldn't be caught dead on Craigslist.
It's sort of a dangerous thing to assume that one's view of the market is the totality of it. Not to say that you're wrong, because I have never sold a gig in London, but I have heard the same about geographies/specialities with which I'm intimately familiar, and usually the claim comes from someone who has sort of fallen into a particular style of customer/acquisition channel/work and is not aware that large parts of the market exist in such a way that they'd never hear of them.
For example, rather frequently on HN we'll have people quote the going rate on Craiglist or RentACodeMonkey.com quoted as the maximum available for (without loss of generality) Rails programmers in Chicago, despite it being at an 80%+ discount to rates routinely charged by people whose clients wouldn't be caught dead on Craigslist.