London Can't Afford You.

There's a version of this city that exists in the imagination of everyone who comes here to make something. It's the version with the good schools and the right postcodes and the sense that if you're serious, this is where serious people go. And that version is real. I'm not going to pretend it isn't.

But there's another version. The one where you're three years out of CSM or UAL or wherever, doing work that's genuinely good, and you're still sleeping in a house share in Zone 4 because the studio you wanted went to a developer in 2023 and the one that's left charges more per month than your parents paid for a mortgage, if you’re lucky enough to have one.

London has always been expensive. That's not the argument. The argument is that the gap between what the city promises creatives and what it actually delivers has become so wide that people are making rational decisions to leave. And the city just lets them go.

The internships were always bad. That's almost tradition at this point. But something has shifted. The entry-level jobs that were supposed to exist on the other side of the underpaid years have contracted. The studios are gone or unaffordable. The grants are competitive to the point of being lottery tickets. And the cultural institutions that built their reputations on nurturing emerging talent are now more interested in programming names that already have them.

What you're left with is a city that is extraordinarily good at the beginning of a creative career and increasingly hostile to everything that comes after. The education. The network. The early exhibitions, the first commissions, the scene. London does all of that well. Then the economics kick in.

Berlin gets mentioned a lot. Lisbon. Manchester, if you want to stay in the country. These aren't romantic choices — they're practical ones. Lower rent, available space, room to actually make the work without spending half your energy on surviving the city that's supposed to support it.

The people leaving aren't the ones who couldn't cut it. They're often the ones who could. That's what makes it worth saying out loud.

London will keep producing talent. The schools are too good, the culture too embedded for that to stop anytime soon. But there is a real question about whether the city is building something sustainable or just processing people through — taking what it needs from the formative years and releasing them somewhere cheaper when the bill gets too high.

I don't have a clean answer to that. I'm not sure anyone does. But the exits are well-worn now, and the silence around it is getting louder.