Considering moving to the UK?

I was brought up around Southampton & I left to come to West Cork in 1986. I've been back three times since then & the area is unrecognizable : fields & woods I used to play in as a kid are now housing estates, places I would walk around in the early hours, including the red light areas & be safe are no longer. Apparently it's the Kurds fighting the Iraqi's or something, I used to go to sound systems with the Rasta's never a problem.

Don't get me wrong, there are some lovely places in the New Forest, but burglaries around Fordingbridge have been a problem according to my brother. The last time I was over was nearly ten years ago & was never so happy to see Cork again .

Funny you should say that, I was only saying to my wife the other day about a lovely little pond that always had moorhens on & dragonflies, we used to play around it : all built over now. Funny for all the massive housing estates there no more doctor's surgeries or new schools, my brother says nearly four weeks to see a doctor, Ireland's not so bad for all our problems.

I don't think the OP will return at midnight or the end of the day to share any more musings on mayonnaise.

i would think and hope so, but given the rhetoric against immigrants from the nasty party it would be naive to think they won't start going at white immigrants again and in turn cause such incidents to become more widespread unfortunately.

I lived in Soton back in the early 80's in the Derby Road area, it was fun and pretty safe. I went back after 30 yrs away and yes it has grown and a bit rougher but it is still a good city. You have the historic with the new though the design of new buildings now are ugly. It still has a good feel to it walking around and the people are relaxed. New Forest just 10 mins away etc.

Originally from Dublin, with rural roots, I lived in semi-rural Kent for a little over a decade and watched it get progressively more and more concreted-over. By the middle of that decade, I could not reconcile myself to the thought of raising a family there, as it looked like every aspect of life was on a downward trajectory. So we upped and moved, out of the UK completely.

With some family members still there, I went back semi-regularly over the following 15 years and both the county and its towns got progressively grottier and grottier. When working in Northern France, I used to enjoy scooting over at the weekends to see old friends and do a bit of shopping for things we just can't get in France, but I'm here working in Northern France again this week and after my most recent (pre-Covid, pre-Brexit) excursions, I have absolutely no desire to go back there now. The one person I might have gone to see let me know they were going to be in Dublin a couple of weeks ago, so we met up there instead.

Of four close family members who were still living in Kentfive years ago, two have left completely (also citing no desire ever to go back to the county after trips at the end of last year) - one for Wales, the other to the far north of Scotland; a third is hoping to move to northern England as soon as possible, and only "lives" in Kent in a notional sense but spends most of her time in London. The fourth has had to move several times as her rented accommodation was successively sold on to yet another highest bidder; she would also have left long ago, but was on a hospital waiting list and didn't want to have start at the bottom of another. She finally got to see a consultant and have her necessary treatment, last week, after six years.

I'm in the relatively fortunate position of being able to compare the life trajectories of several people who stayed in Kent with those who left on or about the same time. In every single case, those who left are way more successful professionally, way more satisfied in their personal lives, and generally way better off than the people who stayed.

The only person I know from Essex is emigrating to Australia next week, citing the abhorrent nature of life in England these days, especially the level of abuse from clients (she works in the same public-facing profession as me). She was previously considering coming to work alongside me in a French organisation, but Brexit killed that opportunity stone dead.

Graces7 your experiences from twenty years ago are no longer the case in many instances. Things have dis improved greatly in the UK and it is one of the most unequal societies in the world. Ireland is better in that regard at least.

A recent report had the headline

The poorest Irish have a standard of living almost 63% higher than the poorest in the UK…

kind of says it all really.

We did a few years in the UK pre and post Brexit vote and you could feel the mood chill. We moved house just after the vote and when I went to register with my local NHS clinic I was told they wouldn't accept us because we weren't british citizens. I had to explain the whole legal situation of Irish citizens in the UK, then they switched their excuse to us not have family in the local area. It was a very high Leave vote area so we moved to a Remain vote area and had zero problems registering with a clinic, although trying to get a basic check up appointment was a long wait. I ended going back to my Irish GP and getting a walk in appointment.

I saw material poverty in some parts of north england that reminded me of ireland in the 70/80s. It just felt like the society was being asset stripped.

Edit to add, we got back to Ireland just before the pandemic and I would have been front line staff if I'd been there. Every single day I counted my blessings that we were home for that.

I remember listening to a local community radio station in Manchester one night and a man who'd immigrated from Pakistan in the 1950s was talking about all his grandkids were now going to Pakistan for better opportunities.

the uk is being deliberately destroyed and stripped of everything by a spiteful, nasty, fascist entity who want to undo the progress that was made during tony blare's years in power which modernised and dragged it out from being the sick man of europe, something thatcher actually failed to do dispite claims otherwise as she kept it sick all be it in a different way.

they want to turn it into a fascist hostile state where everyone is the enemy of the people bar their cult fans and donors.

it's a great pitty really, especially as a minority forced this crap on the majority and all cause dem uns, and sovereignty and take back control, and all the other crap that they actually did have but the nasty party wouldn't use it.

i genuinely thought soonak, dispite me not being of his politics, might bring sanity to proceedings but boy was i wrong, very very wrong.

pandering to a tiny minority of nutters, malcontents and degenerates at the expence of the majority.

the thing is i honestly fear the nasty party will get back in again, and while it personally won't effect me as i don't and never would live there, it is still hard to watch a country being deliberately destroyed before our eyes all the same.

So true. The England I knew as a child, [and even 20 and 30 years ago], is gone. I live in a market town in the West Country and the volume of traffic, the housing estates, the sheer overcrowding - is depressing. I used to walk my dog through the fields at the back of my place, and from there along the canal towpath. I might not see a soul. My dog loved it. Now the canal is full of boats parked nose to tail. The towpath has so many people on it, it'a like walking in a file!

There's no pleasure in walking along a road with streams of traffic flying past. The congestion in the town from traffic makes me wonder why anyone would bother to visit the place.

The place is just plain overcrowded.