The Telegraph had an article yesterday that suggested this:
It turned out that if you wish to retire, the only place to be is in the South East of England:
Nowhere else featured in their list. They might have been more affordable, but they just weren't nice enough to live in, apparently.
I subscribe to The Telegraph so that I might know what the absurd people who write for it produce on behalf of those mad enough to believe what it has to say.
Amongst their many failings is an absurd lack of faith in the country in which they live, which apparently does not exist outside of the immediate reach of London, and which results in them totally ignoring Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as if they were not in the UK.
It is very hard to take a paper that publishes such nonsense. If, however, they were to admit that they do genuinely think the UK should be split up as a result, they might actually do something useful. But I can't see that happening. The south-east is very keen to keep its colonies, after all. What else has it left to extract value from?
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It is my settled and long held view that the further one gets from London the better England gets. I cannot imagine reading anything in the Daily Telegraph which would change that view.
There is quite a lot to your thesis, as somneone who would never go back.
Retired this year to Adelaide, Australia. The view of the country of my birth, England, seems quite rosy from here.
It is ironic that much of the Telegraph’s “best places to live for a pensioner” is in areas where the Tories were heavily defeated by the Lib Dems in last year’s GE, and so one would think the Telegraph would want somewhere else?!
Thanks for subscribing to the Telegraph so we don’t have to (my mental health would plummet even looking at a headline – same goes for the other far-right press)!
If this is based on the L&G research it’s a biased sample and weak research, it’s basically measuring baked in structural inequalities, those wealthy few who have pots of money, live near a station. that gives them access to ‘amenities’ as well as being able to afford proximity to green spaces.
The six measures were health, housing, social and community (for example, opportunities to build social connections and distance to nearest station), nature, local amenities and financial security.
It measured 632 areas. It doesn’t describe how these areas are defined.
Since most of the UK is not near a station (after Beeching’s Axe and the Conservative government’s interests in tarmac building at the time) so it won’t score highly on the connectivity metric, and since most of the wealth is concentrated in the south east of the UK, this area will score on health and wealth metrics.
I personally wouldn’t describe the areas they list as particularly friendly, in fact quite the opposite.
If Journalists are just uncritically peddling this rubbish, they just aren’t serious journalists.
The areas were parliamentary constituencies.
Suffolk Coastal does well by having a railway line run righ through it, for example.
For anyone who is the “average” person, living in the south and London inparticular, must be a nightmare right now. The real cost of living is horrendous.
It is perhaps ok for those who bought their homes years ago, perhaps have a decent pension and can afford a decent retirement, but for those not in that position, you are stuffed.
I watch quite a few lifestyle blogs of London life, and it never ceases to amaze me that the capital still functions as a city. Of course, those with money need people to do all the sh-tty jobs that need to be done, but how ordinary people can afford it is beyond me.
What else can it extract value from? Making sure that people are worked into the ground for next to nothing? A slave labour economy? A no hope, greedflation economy? I think we have that already!
The telegraph lives in a fantasy world.
I don’t know what the Telegraph measures, to come to that conclusion. We live very happily in North Norfolk, could imagine being happy in several other counties, and would be far less happy in the London area apart from one or two of the greener bits.
My father was born in London and worked in The City
he joined the Army in 1940 and talking to soldiers who lived outside London and went home for lunch realised how much better the quality of life was outside London.
He never went back
The Times in the same. Totally focused on London & the southeast. Its property section – Bricks and Mortar – is the worst. The rest of the country does not exist
I’m surprised that The Telegraph thinks retiring anywhere in the UK is a sensible idea given their seemingly daily op-eds telling us how ‘the country is finished’ or how close we are to an inevitable civil war!
“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford” – Samuel Johnson – has life changed so much since then? Only a few can ‘afford’ all that life in London can afford. When I was retiring, indeed before I retired, I moved back to the Peak District where I was reared (apart from school in Suffolk). Clean air, hills, clear streams and open moorlands – but my friends told me I would regret it, telling me that I would miss my theatre, that I would miss so much. How wrong they were – I have Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Nottingham for theatre, and most of all, I have the exquisite (Frank Matcham) Buxton Opera House which first opened it’s doors on 1st June 1903. Along side the Opera House is the Pavilion Arts Centre housing a smaller theatre/performing platform. Both are mainly receiving theatres, so allowing a huge range and diversity of visiting companies and acts, and including the annual Gilbert & Sullivan Festival and the annual Buxton Festival of opera, music, literature and jazz – all of this easily accessible and mainly far more affordable. Yesterday evening I attended a performance of ‘Grease’, by the Buxton School of Performing Arts with an age range amongst the performers of 8 to 18 – it was brilliant. The Buxton Festival has just finished and the Gilbert & Sullivan Festival starts this Saturday. After that I have a full diary of visiting performing arts, including films, and all within walking distance. Oh – and then there are concerts in the Church of St John, an even shorter distance away, and with wonderful acoustic – it is where the Buxton Musical Society perform, and also performances by the Burbage Band (Buxton) which is a 1st section band formed in 1861 who train up young would be musicians at no charge, including providing them with instruments. This church houses a four manual William Hill organ dating from 1897. Property is relatively affordable, we have a small community hospital/walk in centre and I have an NHS dentist! With all this on my doorstep, why should I be tired of life? Why should the Telegraph dictate to me, in their opinion, the best place to retire? Indeed I admit to being thankful that this beautiful area is not on their list of ‘retirement happiness hotspots’ – I do not mind sharing these wonderful places around me, but I prefer to be far from the madding crowd.
You make an immensely important point, Susan. There is only so much pleasure we humans can have in the time availoable to us, nd if we driop the desire to impress others the capacity to enjoy exists in very many areas. We only have to look. and participate, something that far too many will not do, and which is by no means always expensive.
my problem Richard is that, being less than 20 years off my centenary, can I fit in all those current (and remaining) pleasures in the time left to me? I’ll try – but —
🙂
They also missed out the north of England and (imo) the best and biggest county of all, Yorkshire.
Funnily my friend came up from London at the weekend, he commented how friendly and helpful the station staff were but was shocked at how much the people in York hated southerners. I explained to him how policy for the last 40 years has favoured the south and London at the cost of many northern towns and cities, so there is a level of animosity there. While I get that London often doesn’t vote conservative or for what has happened, it doesn’t change that they have benefitted massively for it at the cost of others.
In the end he just didn’t really get it. Then again I do feel they went a bit far holding a fake execution for him, so I can understand his PoV too.
Alex, as a fellow Yorkshire person (Tyke) I’ve always been glad of the mysterious cloak of invisibility which somehow renders our county invisible to southerners. If anyone asks me what it’s like in the North, I always tell them it’s really grim, just as they imagine it, grey, poor, uncultured, land of the great unwashed… anything to keep them away.
Meanwhile, I’m having a lovely retirement here.
And by the way Richard, I enjoy daily visits from up to seven Red Kites who often fly at tree height over my loft in the north Leeds suburbs.
I love the moors, but haven’t been for a bit. I should remedy that….
The Daily Telegraph has become the butt of many jokes and much satire and derision in Private Eye ever since it was sold to whoever/whatever it was that bought it. Even more, bonkers than it was when it was classed as “The Daily Torygraph”. But anyway, yet another suggestion that isn’t in the South East or London: the Lincolnshire Wolds. Beautiful. I shan’t say more, as if anyone knows the area they’ll know what I mean. And if you don’t, well worth a stay.
Agreed
And I like Lincoln
The Telegraph? Yeah whatever.
Like the slightly less rabid Daily Mail, I think its main readers and writers live in a kind of fantasy world, maybe phantasmagorical might be a word, of the upper middle class and spitfires and the ‘right sort of people’ living away from the rest of the barbarians outside the gates.
Ironically, and perhaps rather thankfully, the majority of decent and ordinary British people are happy to live away from London and the SE generally, I personally would not thank you for any of it. The Telegraph and those kinds of newspapers sum up perhaps even unconsciously all that is generally negative about Britain and the UK whilst thinking that they are the zenith of it all. Which to many of us is bemusing at the very least.
Personally, I have no problem with people believing what they wish but as ever such newspapers seem to thrive on elitism, division and constant binary opposition, possibly why many of those affluent up to extremely wealthy people never seem to be satisfied or have any kind of peace within. Money of itself does not necessarily bring happiness or contentment just more fear and stress often. Perhaps this is why the rich and powerful are distracted in the end. What they have got and hoarded and cheated to obtain has not brought the happiness and contentment they thought it would.
Depending on your local library authority you don’t need to subsidise the Telegraph. Many authorities subscribe to Press Reader which has an incredible list of newspapers and magazines from all over the world. All you need is a library card.
True
But not much use very early in the morning…
We spend quite a lot on subs
or just cease your subscription (by phone), and they come up with (yet another) offer – both the Telegraph and the Times need subscribers at whatever discount.
Public library access is often online nowadays, so “24/7”.
Oh….show how much I know….
I should go around the corner and renew my card