Where does the London commuter belt end?

[Transilien]

London is a very large city with a large draw of commuters, many by train. My question is where does this commuter belt end, some on this forum say that people commute from places like Birmingham to London however, that can't be very common. How about outliers like King's Lynn which is far away from London but has a commuter style service? What motivates people to live so far away from their jobs? I also wonder if the opening of HS2 will expand this belt further away from the south-east of England?

 

[Tomos y Tanc]

London is a very large city with a large draw of commuters, many by train. My question is where does this commuter belt end, some on this forum say that people commute from places like Birmingham to London however, that can't be very common. How about outliers like King's Lynn which is far away from London but has a commuter style service? What motivates people to live so far away from their jobs? I also wonder if the opening of HS2 will expand this belt further away from the south-east of England?

I guess it depends what you mean by commuter. I live in Cardiff and know plenty of people who WFH but travel to the city for a couple of days each week. Are they commuters?

 

[Mcr Warrior]

What motivates people to live so far away from their jobs?

Cheaper, more affordable, and likely nicer housing than would be available for a similar price in inner London, even when you factor in the travel costs / journey times.

 

[Transilien]

I guess it depends what you mean by commuter. I live in Cardiff and know plenty of people who WFH but travel to the city for a couple of days each week. Are they commuters?

They are considering WFH for a few days of the week is becoming a new normal for many people.

 

[30907]

Difficult to say. Before WW2 the North Kent coast (Whitstable-Margate/Ramsgate) had enough business travellers to justify a half-hourly peak service to Cannon St and that was long before electrification, and I suspect Winchester if not Bournemouth had a fair few, along with the Sussex Coast (which was electrified!).

60s-70s growth was places like Longfield, Medway Towns, Staplehurst and Fleet - no longer "City Gents" but upwardly mobile folk looking for homes beyond the Green Belt because the 30s suburban developments were too expensive.

North of London is not my area, but at that stage Peterborough (development started about 1971) was about the limit for commuter trains, though most of the passengers would have left by then. Grantham and Newark followed in the HST era (I recall ideas about 110mph l/h services back then).

West of London in the 70s, Thames Valley and Newbury might have been the limit, but come HST Swindon was more of a possibility with loads of new housing.

I'm not sure how much that has changed, hough obviously there are people who commuted from much further pre Covid, often with spouses/partners working more locally. I have a relative who lives in Wakefield but whose workbase is still London..

 

[Indigo Soup]

What motivates people to live so far away from their jobs?

Or, what motivates people to work so far from their homes?

Of course, that's easy: a lot of good jobs are in London, and moving the whole family to an expensive city is unpalatable. Hybrid working makes the commute easier. If HS2 ever gets fully built, we'll probably see people commuting from Liverpool/Manchester/Leeds to London, and those cities lose more good jobs.

 

[Transilien]

Of course, that's easy: a lot of good jobs are in London, and moving the whole family to an expensive city is unpalatable. Hybrid working makes the commute easier. If HS2 ever gets fully built, we'll probably see people commuting from Liverpool/Manchester/Leeds to London, and those cities lose more good jobs.

Perhaps the whole of the UK will become suburbs of London in the future!

 

[urbophile]

How would you define a job with national responsibilities (eg CEO of a large charity) whose head office might be in London but whose remit is nationwide? Clearly for some of the time they would need to be a commuter in the traditional sense, though maybe no more than once a week if that, but for the rest of the time they would work from home or travel to other places. That wiould theoretically extend the limits of the commuter belt almost indefinitely.

 

[etr221]

The limit for commuting is a function of time (rather than distance) - I think for most people, the normal is one to two hours, the extreme two to three hours, which more or less includes everywhere in the South East and East of England regions, together with Dorset, Wiltshire and Northhamptonshire. Beyond, there are still a few from further still, where fast trains permit...

If HS2 ever gets fully built, we'll probably see people commuting from Liverpool/Manchester/Leeds to London, and those cities lose more good jobs.

Back in (IIRC) the late 1970s, one of TV news magazine programmes featured someone who lived in Cheadle Hulme: prime commuting country - for Manchester - but he worked in London... So a regular on the Manchester Pullman!

And way back, someone did get the booking clerk at Thurso to go over backwards - by asking for a season to London...

Something I wonder - does (did) Eurostar bring commuters in from the Pas de Calais?

 

[Magdalia]

Financial deregulation and the subsequent expansion of the City of London in the late 1980s was the most significant event, aided by various electrification schemes. New towns hit by the decline in manufacturing pivoted to London commuting, on this side of London Harlow, Stevenage and St Neots are good examples. Commuting longer distances on Inter City routes began to take off when HSTs began to be used on early morning trains with early London arrival times suitable for commuting.

How about outliers like King's Lynn which is far away from London but has a commuter style service?

Through the 1990s and 2000s London commuting from Cambridge and the Fen Line grew rapidly, when First Capital Connect took over they had 6 of the top 10 most overcrowded trains on the railway.

In the last 10 years Cambridge has become a significant commuting destination in its own right, including people travelling out from London, and that can be expected to continue into the future. In particular lots of people on the Fen Line are commuting to Cambridge not London.

 

[BazingaTribe]

Perhaps the whole of the UK will become suburbs of London in the future!

I didn't agree with Jeremy Corbyn on much, but he was right when he said that high speed rail links from London to the North would probably only encourage that process. The pandemic might have brought people into the provinces who might otherwise have had to live a lot closer than that, but without commensurate investment in local infrastructure for people whose jobs don't allow the same mobility, it just ends up in gentrification rather than any actual support for those communities as their own entities. It's like the way people buying second homes in the countryside have hollowed out the affordable housing market in those places rather than breathed new life into the actual places.

As someone who only lately got to work from home at all and felt ignored by the media discussion on work from home, I'm very mindful of the privilege and try to act accordingly. Otherwise yes, we will end up in that situation, and it will be a big problem for sustainable community life. However, I think there's a return to the office under way because complete atomisation was also unsustainable for businesses in the long run; when I left my reception job in November 2023, people with corporate lanyards were starting to fill up trains again. While you won't ever put the WFH genie back in the bottle again, I think a lot of people are starting to find moving away from London wasn't the best idea in the long run.

@Magdalia -- good to hear that Cambridge is growing that way. I spent some of my teenage years in Bedford and, while I was anxious to get away from home into the big city, three years of university in London was enough -- I came back to where my semi-nomadic parents (ok, they make the Bedouins look settled, but my dad was a civil engineer and you just have to go where the work is) had moved to in the Reading area and moved to Basingstoke when I got married. (Ironically once I was an adult and could have plausibly not gone with them when they had to move again, they also reached the point in their careers where they had more choice as to where they lived.) Even after being widowed (I had the great misfortune to marry someone with a genetic time bomb in his kidneys; I'm 45 tomorrow as it happens and it's already been more than 5 years since he passed away, missing the pandemic by about seven months), I stayed here because it has the perfect balance of green space and urban amenities. I work in provincial NHS property management, and when I've been to our London HQ, it reminds me just why I wasn't sorry to leave twenty years ago. Too crowded, too chaotic, just too much.

Some of my best memories have been on train journeys and I spent 10 years commuting between Basingstoke and Reading. It would be a real shame if London continued to suck everything into its orbit, but what you've said gives me a lot of hope.

 

[Indigo Soup]

And way back, someone did get the booking clerk at Thurso to go over backwards - by asking for a season to London...

The Berwick-upon-Tweed to London Terminals season is still in the fares system. No idea who's buying it, but it's there!

 

[Simon75]

I would say the Home Counties ( Essex, Kent, Surrey, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire)

 

[NorthKent1989]

My aunt commutes from Leamington to London 3 days a week, it takes 1hr30.

I myself am moving to the Kent Coast in the near future and I am choosing the North Kent coast for how commutable it is, Whitstable/Thanet Towns is a reasonable distance

 

[AM9]

I commuted from north-east Essex in the early '70s when the busiest trains were the first stop Chelmsford and Colchester, including the 17:30 which was a Yarmouth Vauxhall via Norwich. The trend continued through the '80s until the route to Norwich was electrified, since then, that service continued to grow and after the city's big bang, there were early morning expresses timed to bring these long distance commuters in from Norwich to arrive before 08:00. Now the service is reinforce with Ipswich intermediates which have provided alternatives for Colchester commuters as well as the Clactons. It's notable that so much emphasis was placed on the number of small 3 + 2 seating in the specifying of the class 720.

 

[Tetchytyke]

The limit for commuting is a function of time (rather than distance) - I think for most people, the normal is one to two hours, the extreme two to three hours, which more or less includes everywhere in the South East and East of England regions, together with Dorset, Wiltshire and Northhamptonshire. Beyond, there are still a few from further still, where fast trains permit...

Cost also comes into it at some point. Rugby is an hour from Euston but a season ticket is roughly £1000 a month, so you'd have to earn £12,000 a year (after tax) more in London or your mortgage would have to be £12,000 a year less than in London just to break even. There does come a point when the cost of commuting isn't worth the extra pay you may get in London.

 

[Farigiraf]

This map I found on the internet a couple years ago is quite good to show at least the 'season ticket' (as in many days of the week - as mentioned upthread there are people from much further who commute once or twice a week) area for London commuting. Has some gaps e.g. I'm fairly sure Tunbridge Wells has a fair bit of commuters, but it does show the general boundaries as well as quality/speed of transport to the city.
Apologies for the strange crop, the parts cut out are Kettering, Peterborough and Cambridge

 

[Bletchleyite]

I think you can get a reasonable idea from the Network SouthEast area though possibly minus a few of the more distant extensions, e.g. I doubt anyone daily commutes from Weymouth or Exeter (if any do from Exeter they won't be using former NSE services).

There are of course exceptions to every rule, but on the WCML I think bulk commuting is much reduced north of Northampton/Long Buckby.

Realistically a journey of up to just over an hour into the relevant London terminus is the most the majority will put up with (which tends to mean about 90 minutes to two hours door to door unless both home and office are right next to the relevant stations, i.e. leaving home around 7am for a 9am start and arriving home around 7pm after finishing about 5pm for dinner). Things like Thameslink and the Lizzie probably push it a bit further out by having destination station options very close to major employment areas in London - I don't doubt for instance that if Thameslink was extended out to Corby or Market Ketteringborough you'd get more commuting from those places than you do now. Though cost is also a factor - Rugby-Euston may well be under an hour and Coventry only a little more, but the price is swingeing, that's why I doubt there will be much daily HS2 commuting.

The latter is also why I don't think there's any danger of HS2 turning Manchester into a London commuter town. Milton Keynes has a lot of London commuting, but in reality the proximity of London has grown its economy, not weakened it, because companies can locate there (for cheaper premises and staff than London) but still have easy access to take day trips there when business requires that.

 

[Sad Sprinter]

I didn't agree with Jeremy Corbyn on much, but he was right when he said that high speed rail links from London to the North would probably only encourage that process. The pandemic might have brought people into the provinces who might otherwise have had to live a lot closer than that, but without commensurate investment in local infrastructure for people whose jobs don't allow the same mobility, it just ends up in gentrification rather than any actual support for those communities as their own entities. It's like the way people buying second homes in the countryside have hollowed out the affordable housing market in those places rather than breathed new life into the actual places.

As someone who only lately got to work from home at all and felt ignored by the media discussion on work from home, I'm very mindful of the privilege and try to act accordingly. Otherwise yes, we will end up in that situation, and it will be a big problem for sustainable community life. However, I think there's a return to the office under way because complete atomisation was also unsustainable for businesses in the long run; when I left my reception job in November 2023, people with corporate lanyards were starting to fill up trains again. While you won't ever put the WFH genie back in the bottle again, I think a lot of people are starting to find moving away from London wasn't the best idea in the long run.

@Magdalia -- good to hear that Cambridge is growing that way. I spent some of my teenage years in Bedford and, while I was anxious to get away from home into the big city, three years of university in London was enough -- I came back to where my semi-nomadic parents (ok, they make the Bedouins look settled, but my dad was a civil engineer and you just have to go where the work is) had moved to in the Reading area and moved to Basingstoke when I got married. (Ironically once I was an adult and could have plausibly not gone with them when they had to move again, they also reached the point in their careers where they had more choice as to where they lived.) Even after being widowed (I had the great misfortune to marry someone with a genetic time bomb in his kidneys; I'm 45 tomorrow as it happens and it's already been more than 5 years since he passed away, missing the pandemic by about seven months), I stayed here because it has the perfect balance of green space and urban amenities. I work in provincial NHS property management, and when I've been to our London HQ, it reminds me just why I wasn't sorry to leave twenty years ago. Too crowded, too chaotic, just too much.

Some of my best memories have been on train journeys and I spent 10 years commuting between Basingstoke and Reading. It would be a real shame if London continued to suck everything into its orbit, but what you've said gives me a lot of hope.

I see Corbyn's point, but I would hope that increased investment in local transport within northern cities would make them competitive in their own right.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I see Corbyn's point

I don't. Milton Keynes demonstrates it - it's symbiotic with London, London doesn't suck the economic life from it as Corbyn suggests, not at all - indeed its proximity to London is probably a key reason why it succeeded and Skelmersdale, Peterlee etc arguably didn't.

I'm all for investment in the Northern cities' transport networks, to be fair, but connectivity to the capital is also important.

 

[Mcr Warrior]

The 'Telegraph' published a book on the subject of commuting into London a few years ago. Obviously it will no longer be bang up-to-date but the title is still readily available for little more than the cost of the postage.


(Pic of front cover of "The Telegraph guide to Commuterland" (2009 book) by Caroline McGhie")

 

[simonw]

This map I found on the internet a couple years ago is quite good to show at least the 'season ticket' (as in many days of the week - as mentioned upthread there are people from much further who commute once or twice a week) area for London commuting. Has some gaps e.g. I'm fairly sure Tunbridge Wells has a fair bit of commuters, but it does show the general boundaries as well as quality/speed of transport to the city.
Apologies for the strange crop, the parts cut out are Kettering, Peterborough and Cambridge

What do the numbers represent? There are in sure more than 93 commuters from Guildford

 

[Ken X]

It's a complex area. I know people who commute from Cardiff to Paddington regularly. There are daily commuters from Sheffield to London. Then there are people who have a small flat in London and commute weekly.
Where we are now in Sussex, people are moving out from London and commuting in as they have a net saving on costs compared with living nearer.

As to why, where we used to live in Lightwater, Surrey, people moved in, gave it ten years in the city and then left, usually due to burnout. Our road was known as widows alley due to the number of suicides, divorces or premature deaths.
The plan seemed to be get a high earning job, work like crazy for ten years, then get out.

It now seems easier to live where you want to long term. Commute for a few years to earn good money then ease back into the hinterlands. WFH has made this much easier due to the flexibility it provides.

 

[gg1]

Cost also comes into it at some point. Rugby is an hour from Euston but a season ticket is roughly £1000 a month, so you'd have to earn £12,000 a year (after tax) more in London or your mortgage would have to be £12,000 a year less than in London just to break even. There does come a point when the cost of commuting isn't worth the extra pay you may get in London.

In that example, Rugby wins easily on the basis of cost, especially for a family home rather than a small flat.

According to Right Move the average price of a semi detached house in Rugby is £273,000 compared to £783,000 in London. That equates to at least £2,500 per month extra on a 25 year mortgage.
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/house-prices-in-london.html
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/house-prices/rugby.html

 

[Bletchleyite]

In that example, Rugby wins easily on the basis of cost, especially for a family home rather than a small flat.

According to Right Move the average price of a semi detached house in Rugby is £273,000 compared to £783,000 in London. That equates to at least £2,500 per month extra on a 25 year mortgage.
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/house-prices-in-london.html
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/house-prices/rugby.html

That works if you only compare London and don't look at towns in between the two which give a better balance in most cases as well as sometimes a shorter journey. Northampton probably particularly so (and I wouldn't say either was particularly nicer than the other, both are pretty nondescript and average).

 

[judethegreat]

I didn't agree with Jeremy Corbyn on much, but he was right when he said that high speed rail links from London to the North would probably only encourage that process. The pandemic might have brought people into the provinces who might otherwise have had to live a lot closer than that, but without commensurate investment in local infrastructure for people whose jobs don't allow the same mobility, it just ends up in gentrification rather than any actual support for those communities as their own entities. It's like the way people buying second homes in the countryside have hollowed out the affordable housing market in those places rather than breathed new life into the actual places.

As someone who only lately got to work from home at all and felt ignored by the media discussion on work from home, I'm very mindful of the privilege and try to act accordingly. Otherwise yes, we will end up in that situation, and it will be a big problem for sustainable community life. However, I think there's a return to the office under way because complete atomisation was also unsustainable for businesses in the long run; when I left my reception job in November 2023, people with corporate lanyards were starting to fill up trains again. While you won't ever put the WFH genie back in the bottle again, I think a lot of people are starting to find moving away from London wasn't the best idea in the long run.

@Magdalia -- good to hear that Cambridge is growing that way. I spent some of my teenage years in Bedford and, while I was anxious to get away from home into the big city, three years of university in London was enough -- I came back to where my semi-nomadic parents (ok, they make the Bedouins look settled, but my dad was a civil engineer and you just have to go where the work is) had moved to in the Reading area and moved to Basingstoke when I got married. (Ironically once I was an adult and could have plausibly not gone with them when they had to move again, they also reached the point in their careers where they had more choice as to where they lived.) Even after being widowed (I had the great misfortune to marry someone with a genetic time bomb in his kidneys; I'm 45 tomorrow as it happens and it's already been more than 5 years since he passed away, missing the pandemic by about seven months), I stayed here because it has the perfect balance of green space and urban amenities. I work in provincial NHS property management, and when I've been to our London HQ, it reminds me just why I wasn't sorry to leave twenty years ago. Too crowded, too chaotic, just too much.

Some of my best memories have been on train journeys and I spent 10 years commuting between Basingstoke and Reading. It would be a real shame if London continued to suck everything into its orbit, but what you've said gives me a lot of hope.

Wishing you Happy Birthday and sending Love, from someone who can relate to some of your life experience

 

[BazingaTribe]

I'm quite happy for Corbyn to be proved wrong .

 

[Farigiraf]

What do the numbers represent? There are in sure more than 93 commuters from Guildford

It's apparently a 'location ranking' for quality of life / commuting quality of the place. Not sure where they're getting their numbers from though, as I certainly wouldn't give Maidenhead a 7 while Luton gets a 109.
Source is from this website: https://www.totallymoney.com/commuter-hotspots/tool/

 

[Magdalia]

It's apparently a 'location ranking' for quality of life / commuting quality of the place. Not sure where they're getting their numbers from though, as I certainly wouldn't give Maidenhead a 7 while Luton gets a 109.

It will depend on the criteria assessed, the scoring system, and the aggregation.

The top ten are:

1 Purfleet
2 Waltham Cross
3 Cheshunt
4 Erith
5 Gravesend
6 Laindon
7 Maidenhead
8 Grays
9 Swanley
10 High Wycombe

If that is the result, it doesn't strike me as being very useful!

 

[The exile]

How about as a basic rule of thumb “anywhere from which 10 or more monthly /annual season tickets to London are concurrently valid”?