OPINION - Leaving London is for people who can't handle the tough stuff — I'm so glad I never quit

Sometime around their late thirties and early forties, something happens to each London generation. A fundamental division emerges between those who flit the city for the coast and those who stay. The old ravers head to Margate. The gays to St Leonards. Fancy types that need at least one boutique hotel in their immediate sightline gravitate to Broadstairs or Deal. Artful bohemian London will land in Lewes. Each seaside enclave houses its own distinct demographic. One wonders how those who choose the chocolate box village green and Etsy shopping vibes of the prim Suffolk shoreline ever coped with the capital. Perhaps they rarely left Chiswick?

This early middle-aged exodus has a visibly beneficial, replenishing effect on London itself, as the city-smart wheat is separated from its more wistful, pragmatic seaside chaff. It’s like the city has had a new haircut, a couple of discreet shots of Botox or tried a first round of Ozempic. With the middle-aged thinning out of view, the city looks younger, prettier, leaner, cooler. It feels more exciting. An unusual Zone 2 borough emerges to which the young magnetise, stamping their identity all over it. In a flash, the visual landscape of Tottenham Hale Tube station is doing its bit to break down the gender binary. House prices may be cheaper, but you don’t get much of that in, say, Worthing.

In those mad couple of years during the pandemic, when London ceased to be London, presenting instead an empty outline, a pencil-sketched skeleton of itself with organs removed, the idea of the coastal idyll reached its peak. In 2021, a survey from the online property giant Rightmove suggested that as many as one in two Londoners were considering quitting the capital. Throwing caution to the wind in a time of city stasis, many fled.

This year’s Oscar-winning best actor Cillian Murphy said his move back to Ireland was because he didn’t want his kids growing up with posh London accents, which felt fair enough to those of us who’ve wandered the city with a regional tongue.

The entirely unsurprising news this week is that now most of those who left want to move back. We should take the weighting of an online estate agent’s survey with a pinch of salt. It is, after all, in their interest to encourage people to want to move house. But even so, it came as little surprise to me to learn that two-thirds of those who vacated London during Covid are now ready to come back.

The reasons for moving away from London are complicated, but always involve a degree of resignation. They are about money, security, family, tension, atmosphere. Sometimes they’re as easy as running away from a boss you hate or a lifestyle that looks unsustainable as old age looms. Often, they’re to do with having kids. The reasons for staying are more esoteric, like finding where the pulse of your own small thoughts fit within the huge ideas of the Metropolis. As any Northerner in the capital knows, it is to be equally envied and loathed just for your address.

The repercussions for those exiting can be wildly different, but for those of us who stay, a kind of stoic pride is magically instilled; as if we were born for the tough stuff. We made London work for us, didn’t get swallowed up by it. It’s coming up for 15 years now since my generational exodus. There’ll be another one happening right now. I could imagine the first two years of being away, seeing the sea, treating London as a stranger. But 15? That makes me panic. Who would I have become by the sea?

At the time, the thought of cashing in my chips and saying hello to fresh air, perhaps even a garden to tend, was fleetingly appealing. But I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to that strange, silent sophistication pact you realise you’ve signed with London after a couple of years living here. It can prove Faustian. You quickly attune to an elite level of everything, without necessarily the access to it, then find yourself craving the dog-eared reality of normality. Just not too much of it.

After 25 years of being here, I think it may be time to accept the fact that London is no longer somewhere I once moved to. It’s somewhere I stayed and will almost certainly sign off in, too.

Paul Flynn is an Evening Standard columnist