General Chat

That's it in a nutshell, Sylvia.

It's his and he's keeping it.

Around here 'affordable' housing starts at £399,995 :-0 and that is official!

I would need to double, and more, the value of my house to be able to afford a bungalow and it would probably need work.

I can probably get an elderly person's 1-2 bed apartment if I willing to spend the same as my 3 bed house but would then have the extortionate monthly service charges to find.

Think I will stay where I am as long as it is humanly possible :-D

Chris

according to today's papers, the woman who suggested this lives in a 1.3 million pound hoouse

Well £ 1.3 million will not get you much opulence in Islington. RightMove list the cheapest terrace house in the area at £ 600 000. For £ 1.1 million you can have the keys to a a C19 2 bed town house in fashionable Quick Street.

I guess these might be desirable downsizing locations if you are starting in, say, Eaton Square. God knows where you'd put the furniture though. My Chesterfield came in by crane and window years ago god knows how much that would cost now. The wonders of modern technology and electronic keyboards have sorted the piano problem :-)

Quite how there are so many people in Islington / Camden getting by on extremely modest means is a never ending mystery to me. Especially now that the met has clamped down on nicking expensive bicycles and Osborne has capped and taxed everybody to the edge of extinction.

I have always fancied my GGF house in Regent's Park. He was somehow able to afford this as a postmaster and bring up 8 kids. I should have taken my chance as it is now way over my budget.

Of course a move to Cardiff might leave a bob or two in the pocket after the tax man and estate agent had cleaned up ... but it is 3 hours back to Paddington and then another half hour on the tube to anywhere near clients and for sure even a free first class ticket would not get them on Gods Wonderful Railway.

So we sit tight.

I don't think Foxtons and the like are aware that there is London property under £ 1 million. Not for long probably.

think it's less than two hours to Paddington from Cardiff now - my son is a train driver for First Gt.Western and he drives the high speed trains from Swansea to Paddington

And a Cardiff/Paddington season ticket will only cost you £10,096 a year

and you get to keep the train for that :-D :-D

We are lucky in my part of East Anglia, West Norfolk, in that bungalows are plentiful and not too expensive. We bought ours 31 years ago, and at the time they seemed to be cheaper than houses.

We didn't buy it with thoughts of retirement, but apart from it's being in a small village without much in the way of amenities, it's been a good move. :-)

Yes you are right it is now only 2 and a bit hours which is quite an impressive way to flog the elderly diesel locos which first came into service around 1976. As far as I remember from my Bristol days reliability was not a strong point. I know that the line is to be electrified but it is in the nature of railways that upgrading involves a lot of delay first. That is already happening on the GWR with the ongoing saga of the Box Tunnel. By the time they are done ( ten years? ) I hope to be taking it easy.

The cost of a season ticket would be buttons compared to lost income.Is loitering on the platform at 6:20am on a freezing February morning really a great start to a day's work in EC1 ? Dubious.

As a retirement location London has a lot going for it - most everything you need close to hand, lots of entertainment, 24hr bus, good health care even if you rely on the NHS while it is easy for people to come and see you. I don't think this downsizing idea will catch on with many. Bet LaGooner has no planes to leave London and why should she?

My house is perfect lived here 48 yrs. originally only 2 bedrooms, one bathroom, now 3 bedrooms with loft extention and 2 bathrooms, only problem hate it where we live, if you love kebabs and turkish shops would be ok.

Rollo - You are confused. La Gooner moved out of London many moons ago and said she wouldn't want to move back. ;-)

we all make mistakes

Hearing mention of the Box Tunnel 'saga' I am just reading in the latest edition of Rail Magazine that the work to upgrade the GW around Bath, which included the lines between Chippenham and Bath via Box and Bathampton Jn to Westbury was completed on 31st August, ten hours ahead of schedule.

Taking around six weeks it was the largest possession for track renewals in Britain's railway history.

A bit of a success, what?

The upgrade to GWR is hardly started let alone complete. The design and construction of the work on most of the Bath bridges has not even left the drawing board yet. Network Rail have met a wall of opposition to their plans from Bath City council, all sorts of pressure groups and now English Heritage.

The upgrade ( lowering the tracks so as to allow overhead power lines ) at Box ran way over budget and no actual electrified lines have yet been installed although Hitachi have started delivering trains. Quite how the GWR upgrade will be financed remains opaque and might well be shifted to a privatised Network Rail. Osborne is def. not interested in £ 70bn of railway debt on the govt balance sheet. The current review of NR has that at the top of the list.

The future problem for mass rail is that it is built on a business paradigm which may fall over as disruptive techologies remove its raison d'etre.

The bulk of passenger traffic on the railways is people commuting to work. People using rail for biz meetings are a tiny fraction though most of the case for HS2 is based on that.

The work of mainline and suburban railway commuters is mainly white collar in finance, administration and so on. The current structure was built up over more than a century as workers needed to be near the information they worked with, initially paper, then local biz networks. As high speed ( > 100 Mbs ) bandwidth rolls out it will become increasingly easy to dispense with commuting workers and site the jobs as and where. Indeed this is already happening with such diverse UK organisations as DVLC, banks and NHS offshoring operations to low cost centres in Bangalore and so on. Well within the projected lifetime of the new railways bandwidth will allow wall to wall video, real time hologram images and so on. What then the case for long distance railways?

I don't think City2City for HS2 originally meant Old Oak Common to Aston let alone a sharp degradation of Euston for everybody else. It is a vanity project and should be terminated. Utterly nuts.

We downsized from a three (good size) bedroom family home to a two bed log cabin which we had built to our own specs. It's been the best move we've ever made, the maintenance is minimal, and the insulation fantastic, which keeps electricity bills to the minimum. Also it's bottom rung for the council tax. I'd recommend it to anyone and everyone.

Own specs sounds ideal Magpie.

Okay, specification then!

keep out the cold

https://goo.gl/VjSgN2

worked for my GGF who was still doing fine at 90

Specs is fine Magpie. It would be unusual to find anyone who did not use the shortened version - what made you write it in full?