Manchester – the UK's Most Live-able City, London Falls Outside Top 50
Those in the regions may think this just confirms what they already knew; Londoners may smart a little or wholeheartedly agree with this result, but London has failed to make the top 50 most live-able cities. That is according to worldwide analysis by the Economist Intelligence Unit in which Manchester was the only UK city to make the top 50, slipping in at 46th place. London managed 51st place. Canada’s Vancouver came first, Vienna in Austria …
Those in the regions may think this just confirms what they already knew; Londoners may smart a little or wholeheartedly agree with this result, but London has failed to make the top 50 most live-able cities. That is according to worldwide analysis by the Economist Intelligence Unit in which Manchester was the only UK city to make the top 50, slipping in at 46th place. London managed 51st place.
Canada’s Vancouver came first, Vienna in Austria was second, with Melbourne, Australia a close third. The criteria set by the surveyors includes the quality of healthcare, culture, environment and infrastructure. At the lower end of the scale were African and Asian cities “where civil instability and poor infrastructure present significant challenges,” according to the survey.
What people think of thier own cities as a place to live is of course highly subjective (old loyalties die hard) but can this sort of empirical study really do a place any justice? If so, can we expect to see an exodus of City folk hitting the M6 sometime soon?
June 10, 2009
London is easily the most vibrant city in the UK and, as far as legal work goes, the quality is just not the same elsewhere in the country.
June 10, 2009
I like living in London for its pace and energy but I’m not sure how I will feel in a few years.
June 10, 2009
NY is in a different league to London.
June 10, 2009
Manchester? These surveys are done by a bunch of analysts looking at statistical criteria. I’ve been to Vancouver and whilst nice, it would bore me senseless to live and work there. As a lawyer at the sharp end, living in a crowded, stressful place like London is part of the experience. Yea its tough sometimes but that is part of what makes it rewarding.
June 10, 2009
is pervasive in London. I have been on secondment to Moscow and it was awesome but I have colleagues in London who think anywhere alse is a waste of time. Being in one of the most open, exciting cities in the world does not ensure you will be surrounded by open-minded people.
June 10, 2009
Not from here but Manchester is not a bad place to live even if it feels like it is dying on its feet at the moment. Maybe not as exciting as London but it has a good night out and is easy to escape at weekends.
June 10, 2009
I wonder if Mia has actually been to manchester or even knows where it is? I generally find that people who make comments alluding to legal advice outside of london not being as good are slightly deluded by their own sense of grandeur. Just because something is more expensive doesnt mean its better!
June 11, 2009
Agree, Mia’s views are sadly typical but do not reflect my experience of the quality of the legal advice available to clients outside of the M25.
June 11, 2009
Manchester is so overrated. You can’t beat London for quality of work and variety of cutting edge social possibilities. NY – am sure it’s great for work, but nowhere near London on vibrancy.
June 11, 2009
Comment 4 from Anon; why is living in a crowded, stressful place “part of the experience”? Surely the goal is to get the best quality of work yet coupled with the best quality of life i.e the minimum amount of stress. The regions offer the latter in spades but legal centres such as Manchester and Leeds enjoy work at a level akin to that in London. The focus on stress being integral to work life demonstrates the difference between London lawyers and those in the regions. We are here because we want to be; not because we couldn’t get jobs in London!
June 11, 2009
I worked in a Magic Circle firm and moved to Manchester to work in a national practice 5 years ago. The work I have undertaken over the last five years outstrips the work I did in London in terms of complexity and leading difficult transactions from an early stage of my career e.g leading an £850 million deal as a 4 PQE on one of the largest deals in the country at the time. In addition, in major regional practices if you have the drive and skills you are able to lead significant client realtionships and get the opportunity to play a strategic role in the business. This all round training has been important in developing my skills and attributes as a commercially focused lawyer with a deep understanding of clients and what they want and not just simply being a transactional workhorse. Therefore please do not generalise about work outside of London!
June 11, 2009
I’m a Londoner born and bred, but practised in Manchester for 4 years before coming back to London last year. But for the fact that you can earn twice as much in London, Manchester offers a far superior quality of life and comparable quality of work to London. In fact, because there are fewer big players up North, the better clients are only spread between a few firms, and so you’ll often have better clients. Manchie has a great social scene and you’re back home a lot earlier to enjoy it (even if you work the same hours you can save so much time not enduring a wretched commute on the tube). Good for Manchester, shame the firms there shaft the assistants on pay!
June 11, 2009
People like Mia, with their blinkered views, get on my wick. I work, outside London, for a strictly non-London firm that routinely beats the likes of Freshfields and Linklaters in bids to advise on complex, ground-breaking £multi-million-or-billion deals. I suspect the same is true of many non-London firms.
Given that I also enjoy a far better quality of life than I ever did working in London (although it’ll probably be a while before the town I live in troubles the likes of Manchester for placement on this sort of list), I do sometimes wonder if for people like Mia there isn’t perhaps some element of self-reassurance that they really want to be living / working n London when there are so many other options out there.
June 11, 2009
Mia’s comments are, sadly, stereotypical of the blinkered Londoner. I’d be interested to learn on what basis such views can be substantiated. There is a world outside of London; open your eyes and dare to look outside.
June 11, 2009
I agree with AI’s comments. To be honest I probably had the same blinkered view that Mia had when I left Linklaters but soon became to realise that the London market is very narrow-minded in its approach to non-London legal centres. I suppose it is commonplace that inhabitants of a capital city dispay snobbery to their regional counterparts. Yes, the payscale may be less when you are junior but the gap soon falls away if you reach the dizzy heights (!) of partnership and where you also have strategic influence, command respect from major clients and are valued by the firm for your contribution. I am sick of the intellectual debates that London lawyers think are necessary to conclude transactions. Lack of commerciality is something I often hear about London lawyers from major regional, national and international corporates. The recession has shown that clients are now looking elsewhere for legal advice with commercially minded lawyers who really understand the sector they are in and can deliver value for money. The legal marketplace is in transition. Watch this space!
June 11, 2009
I agree with a lot of the comments but I think Mia has unfairly taken the rap for the anonymous poster at number one. Turning to her comments, pace and energy can be found all over the country too, you just have to mix with the right sort of people. Many of my friends and colleagues in the big smoke have very little of either most of the time, having to deal with overcrowding, pollution and the communters’ favorite – tube strikes!
June 19, 2009
Expensive, dirty, overcrowded, even dangerous – why would anyone want to live in a city?
April 6, 2010
As a former hard-nosed Londoner now living in Altrincham, Cheshire (the posh part of Manchester) I fully agree with this study having seen both sides of the coin…. but only if you live in a nice part of Manchester. I commute the 10 miles to work in Manchester and trust me, if you do the same you’ll wonder what you ever saw in London!
3 years ago I took a sabbatical to Manchester and have never looked back. For the first year I lived in Manchester city centre which is great up to your early 30’s, but like central London it is not a place you’d feel ’settled’. I then spent a long time looking around the suburbs and ended up in Altrincham which is a lovely place to live – a bustling small town within easy reach of everywhere (including the motorway back to London), the schools are 1st class, there are fantastic restaurants and bars, nice parks etc, very much ‘middle class’.
Fee wise I still manage to get my ‘London rate’ so not much has changed there, and our nice little 3 bedroom semi here cost just £375k compared to the £500k equivalent we had in London. Would I ever consider a move back to London??? Perhaps a 300%+ pay increase might tempt me, but otherwise I’m sticking around up north.