‘Bristolians are facing the same economic displacement we were up against in Hackney’

The Office for National Statistics heralded the start of 2018 with the publication of data on who moved where between mid-2015 and mid-2016. Not quite as riveting as the New Year’s Honours list, but interesting all the same, especially if you live in Bristol.

It’s common knowledge that this city of ours is popular, but popular in an 80-people-a-week-moving-from-London-to-Bristol kind of popular, well that’s quite a big deal.

If you delve a little deeper into the statistics, you can discover that the majority of people moving from London to Bristol used to live in Hackney. I am one of them. My husband another. Our two girls a further two. Just statistics. Four of 4,210 London escapees moving west.

Except we didn’t want to escape.

Tessa Lidstone moved back to Bristol with her family when the capital became too expensive

A common misconception about people who move away from London is that they are glad to be out. I have no doubt that there are plenty who could not be gladder to be free from the Smoke, but there are plenty more who would have stayed if they could.

I wasn’t always a London fan. A Bristolian through and through, I only moved there for a job; turning up on my first day at the office with an ‘I’d rather be in Bristol’ mug and a sandwich from a mystical place called Pret that, it seemed, I’d just spent half the day’s wages I was yet to earn on.

I remember wondering in those early days how it was possible to feel so alone in a city of seven million people.

But things change.

I discovered a borough that felt like home with its creatives and its independents. I made friends. I took many of the fantastic opportunities on offer.

Having loudly proclaimed I would never have children in London, I had two, and swiftly realised that London can be the most incredible place to grow up.

London has a huge amount to offer, but prices are forcing people out

When non-Londoners look sceptical about this, I cite Hackney’s wonderful array of parks, its brilliant children’s centres offering everything from baby massage to family cooking classes – all for free – as well as its dedicated voluntary organisations like the Hackney Playbus.

I also tell them that it was way cheaper to take our girls swimming in the glorious Olympic Pool than it is at Bristol South, which has changed little since I learnt to swim there 25 years ago.

House prices, however, were – and still are – off the scale. We lived in a one bedroom flat. With two children.

By the time we had accepted that maybe moving slightly further out to somewhere like Leytonstone could be OK, Leytonstone had become too expensive for us, and we had precisely zero hope of affording anything bigger in Hackney.

As the statistics show, we weren’t alone. Friends moved out of the borough too – some to the Kent coast, some to the very edges of London, some much further afield to cities like Glasgow.

Mainly due to economics. We all chose where we wanted to move to, yes, but we didn’t choose to leave Hackney. This loss to London’s inner city boroughs is only beginning to be quantified.

Bristol is the destination of choice for many Londoners – photo by Sichan He

At risk of sounding like an ungrateful misery, I’ll quickly add that moving from Hackney to Bristol is hardly rock and hard place. There was a happy inevitability about our move back to Bristol and I feel incredibly lucky to live in another place that I love. A lot.

My glumness is more compounded than that. Here, we have more than one bedroom, so don’t face the worrying pressure of trying to find somewhere bigger that – as house prices skyrocket – we inevitably can’t afford. But others living in Bristol are facing exactly the same economic displacement we were up against in Hackney.

It’s easy to blame all these Bristol-bound Londoners for pushing house prices up, but the problem is deeper than that. Just like Hackney, Bristol is an attractive location with a shortage of affordable housing.

Its challenge will be to cling on to its residents better than Hackney has done.

Tessa Lidstone is a mum of two girls; an uncontrollable liker of Bristol docks photos on Instagram; and not the chef at BOX-E.

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