The Guardian: "London has become a citadel, sealed off from the rest of Britain"

Link to web site

"... The property bubble is lifting prices all over the UK, [but] London has long since left everywhere else behind. Over the past year, property values in the capital have risen by 18%, and the gap between prices there and the rest of the UK is the biggest since records began. The average monthly London rent is now £1,126.

"Having moved out in 2004, I know what this means: unless you are an international plutocrat, a highly-paid City type, or someone either clinging on in social housing or putting up with life in a shared hovel, it is an increasingly impossible place to live.

"Although the inequality London embodies is felt just as keenly inside its boundaries as outside them, the obstacles to living in the capital harden a view of it as a cut-off citadel – somewhere that not only fixes economic policy in its own interests but hoovers up public investment. The dire political consequences of this are all around us, though a capital-focused media often fails to see them."