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If you live in a city, chances are you spend a fair bit of time complaining about the cost of living, particularly if you live in London or New York.

Both regularly feature on lists of the world's most expensive cities for good reason. Yet both are also amongst the most creative, vibrant, diverse cities in the world.

We decided to ask flatmates in London and NYC how they live. By looking at average rents, cost of living, who people live with and how they commute, we've been able to build up a fascinating head to head picture of how London and New York really compare.

Let's dive in and look at the typical flatmate in each city....

So, the average Londoner earns less, is slightly younger and is more likely to have several flatmates. But how far does her money go? Let's look at rents.

London is definitely cheaper than New York when it comes to rent, which might come as a surprise to a few Londoners. You're also more likely to get some outside space for your money.

Those annual savings make it pretty clear that living with flatmates is way cheaper than renting on your own too!

Next we looked at the cost of living...

Turns out that, while Londoners earn less, they also need to spend a lot less on bills and food.

Finally, the dreaded commute. How do Londoners get around and how long do we spend commuting compared to New Yorkers?

The typical Londoner has a longer commute than her New York counterpart. Only one in three Londoners has a commute of less than 30 minutes, compared to half of New Yorkers. Looks like Londoners are more healthy though, as we're more likely to use our commute to exercise (and we're less likely to hop in a cab!)

So, there you have it. Which city wins? The truth is that both London and New York are incredible places to live, but the experience is a little different - Londoners have cheaper rents, bills and general cost of living, but those higher salaries mean New Yorkers tend to have more money left at the end of the month.

So, which would you choose? Or would you rather just Live Rent Free instead...

We’re excited to announce SpareRoom’s partnership with Rent Girl, a hilarious and brutally honest comedy about the life of a renter, written for this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.

Rent Girl is the latest project from actress and writer Maddy Anholt and follows the success of Diary of a Dating Addict, which enjoyed a sell out run at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe and transferred to London’s Soho Theatre this year.

Previews start this month and run across the UK throughout July, before the show heads up to Edinburgh for the Fringe.

Here’s what Maddy has to say about Rent Girl:

Hello, my name is Maddy Anholt and I am a rent girl. I’ve been a rent girl for the last ten years in London. I worked out the other day what I’ve spent on rent in London over the last ten years. £136,000. That’s not a typo… £136,000. Pretty vomit-inducing, isn’t it?

The fact is by 2025 only 26% of young adults will be on the housing ladder. That means 74% of us will be rent boys and rent girls by 2025. Rent goes up and up and our salaries stay the same so we don’t have much choice in the matter.

But is it possible to have an enjoyable renting experience? An experience where you could leave food in the cupboards safely knowing it’d be there when you got home? Where you didn’t wake up to your flatmate watching you sleep at the end of your bed? Where you didn’t find questionable hairs in your toothbrush?

It all started in 2009 when I first came to London from a remote countryside town to try and build my empire. I put up an advert looking for work: “Young, fresh girl seeks any part-time work… excellent typing and oral skills”. You can imagine the responses I got.

Rent Girl is Sliding Doors meets Pretty Woman … was I better off taking the job as a children’s entertainer ending up with two broken toes, or should I have sold my underwear for £800 a pop to afford my rent?

Rent Girl previews opened 26th June at The Comedy Room, Camden and run throughout July. For full dates and tickets see: www.maddyanholt.com or find Maddy on Twitter @maddy_anholt

Rent Girl will be at The Edinburgh Festival Fringe, The Gilded Balloon, 17:30, 3rd - 29th August. www.gildedballoon.co.uk

One of the delights with a website as large and complex as SpareRoom is that it's often our customers who show us interesting ways to use it that we'd never thought of, but that really strike a chord with other users.

Case in point: Map search. It's been on the site for a while, and once we launched it we didn't really have much to say about it. It works, showing rooms on a map rather than in a list, so you can make a beeline for ones in the precise area you're looking in, much more easily. Beyond that we really didn't think it would rock anyone's world.

Until @nickw84 tweeted a link to a map search he'd created, which showed a spark of genius. He's used SpareRoom's map search to show all the rooms in London which included the term 'banter' in the ad, which seem to cluster around South West London. So whether you love a bit of banter between flatmates, or this kind of thing fills you with abject horror, you can quickly identify parts of London to head for or avoid. [caption id="attachment_1489" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Flatshares which include banter in the description"][/caption] Nick's tweet went viral yesterday, and appeared in an article about online trends in The Independent this morning. Since then, people have got busy creating flatshare maps of vino drinkers, "LOL" users and those who are anal about cleaning - apparently these are rarer the further north you go. Why not create a flatshare map of your own? Use the advanced search tool on SpareRoom to search by keyword in an area of the UK, and then show results on a map, and share with the world! You never know what insights it may lead to.

SpareRoom attended the Future of London Housing debate hosted by the Evening Standard on Wednesday 20th March, in a packed room of over 1000 attendees. Housing is clearly a subject that is close to the hearts of many Londoners and the debate and following Q&A session became quite heated - showing the passion and emotion involved.

All of the panellists, including thinkers and politicians from all sides of the political spectrum, agreed that more housing supply was needed to relieve the housing crisis enveloping London. Deputy Mayor for Housing, Richard Blakeway called for London's share of stamp duty to be ploughed back into a massive house-building programme. Whilst the MD of Berkeley Housing proposed a simplified planning process, the former London Mayor, Ken Livingstone's call was to provide council housing for mixed communities, so there is less segregation between rich and poor in London. Alain de Botton, philosopher and writer, suggested a blueprint for attractive, affordable design that could be repeated easily and efficiently across London, removing some of the hurdles in the planning process, whilst the broadcaster and architectural graduate Janet Street Porter called for high density building, across railway lines and over car parks, like in New York. Possibly the biggest applause of the evening went to Evening Standard columnist Rosamund Urwin's suggestions of disbanding Foxtons, banning Kirsty Alsopp and deporting the Candy Brothers. Standing up for 'renty-somethings' she focused on her own case of being shut out of home ownership, and renting with family members.

Whilst many of their suggestions were valid and probably will help to resolve the housing crisis in a few years to come, if more intensive building programmes do get underway (we've only built half the number of homes we need for the last 20 years and have a lot of catching up to do), there was a distinct lack of focus on the here and now. With so many thousands of people on housing lists in London, and the capital attracting workers and students like never before, there is an imperative need to offer practical solutions to today's housing crisis, before London becomes a place that no real people can afford to live and work in.

Sharing existing resources seems to be the elephant in the room that nobody would mention. Amongst the talk of pressing empty properties and even offices into homes for the needy, there is no mention of the thousands of under-occupied properties that can help to ease the crisis. This is already happening - as teenage children grow up and move away, 'empty nesters' are starting to rent out their spare rooms in their thousands - but we need to see more of this, to make an impact. What could the policy makers do to help encourage this trend?

We would suggest a raise in the tax free limit homeowners can earn through the Rent a Room scheme for starters - it's been at the same rate since its introduction in 1997, whilst rents have been rising dramatically. Why not make it more attractive for people with spare rooms to take in a lodger, and help to remove the pressure on the limited supply in the private rented sector, and the social rented sector too? We've been pushing for this with our Raise the Roof campaign for some time, and hope that the Chancellor may see fit to increase the tax benefit in his next budget, even if it wasn't included in last week's.

Other ways to increase supply include removing some of the hurdles involved in turning a property into an HMO. This will promote more efficient use of existing property, and help young people to find somewhere affordable to live in the here and now, rather than being told to wait for houses yet to be built.

Do you agree? What do you think could be done to help solve the housing crisis sooner, rather than later?

Today's release of National Census figures from 2011 reveals that sharing has become a more common way of life in England and Wales.

Households that fall into the "other" category - not single people living alone, or a single family together - make up 8% of households, up from 6% ten years ago. This doesn't include "other households" with people over 65 living together, which would refer to those in a care home or hospice.

The statistics reveal where flatsharers are likely to be living. In London, house-sharing is at double the national average (15%). Inner London has the highest concentration of house-sharers, at 18% and the borough of Tower Hamlets is revealed to be the top borough for house-sharing - 21% of households are sharers. This accolade is joint with the Borough of Brent in outer London where the same percentage of households (21%) are made up of people sharing.

That London comes top for sharing is not surprising, given the pressures on London housing stock, the cost of living, and the relentless rise of rents.

The region with the lowest proportion of sharers is the North East, where only 5% of households are living with non family members.

The Census figures do not cover Scotland or Northern Ireland.

A new survey carried out by SpareRoom has shown that couples are struggling to be able to afford to rent on their own and are having to put their lives on hold as a result. Because of the rising cost of living, and the difficulty faced in getting onto the housing ladder due to stringent deposit requirements, more and more couples are struggling to rent on their own and save for their future.

SpareRoom's latest survey has revealed the impact that sharing with flatmates has on couples. Almost half reported that they are putting their life on hold - getting married and having children is not on the agenda. Where you live is perhaps the most important factor in feeling settled enough to take such steps, and the horizon doesn't look too bright right now.

Because people can't get mortgages without a huge deposit, they're forced to rent, increasing demand on the rental sector, which pushes up rents, which in turn makes it more difficult to afford to save, or even to pay the rent. The Money Advice Trust reports today that a record 12,000 tenants who are struggling with rent arrears have contacted them for advice this year.

So it's not surprising that couples like Kimberley Grant and Matthew Thursfield, as reported in today's London Evening Standard, have put their wedding plans on hold. The couple, sharing a four-bedroom house in Bromley, are living more economically than if they rented a place of their own. Their rent comes in at £480 a month, inclusive of bills, which is far less than the £750 average they'd need to pay to cover a one-bedroom flat just for the two of them. But even so, they're struggling to save for their future, and so have yet to set a wedding date, although they got engaged this summer.

With 44% of couples responding to our survey saying that their housing situation is affecting their aspirations to settle down and start families, it seems clear that the housing crisis is making people feel trapped by their circumstances, and having a long term impact on their life-choices.

13% of couples said they don't think they'll be able to afford to rent a home on their own, never mind buy their own place, for the foreseeable future.

Flatsharing as a couple comes with a range of additional complications that the single flatmate doesn't face. Just finding somewhere that will accept couples is tough for starters, without the added strains of trying not to make their housemates feel uncomfortable around them, the lack of opportunities to be alone with each other, and  just finding enough space to store all their stuff in a rented room.

It's a sad state of affairs indeed. If two people sharing a room in a flatshare can't save towards their future, what chance do the rest of us have?

There have always been several ways to search for a London flatshare on SpareRoom but they've been a little hidden away - until now.

With a bit of design tweaking we've been able to create a much easier way for you to access them. Here are the 4 ways you can search:

1. Location - Simply type in the postcode or name of the area you're looking in and away you go. Easy
2. Commute time - Select your ideal commute time, let us know which station you work nearest to and tell us your budget. We'll show you all the flatshares you can reach in that time
3. Travel zone - Looking in a specific zone or, say, between zones 2 & 3? Cut out rooms in places you're not interested in and zone in on the relevant ones
4. Tube line - If you want to live on a specific tube line tell us which and we'll show you all the best flatshares you could be living in

We hope these tools make it easier for you to find a London flatshare. Happy hunting!

Matt & the SpareRoom team

Looking for a flatshare in Croydon? Have a spare room you need to rent out? Come along to the very first Croydon Speed Flatmating event at Tiger Tiger this evening.

Croydon is the latest in a series of regular 'local' Speed Flatmating events, catering for people who want to live in specific areas of London. Other events include: Angel, Camden, Clapham, East End and Hammersmith, plus our regular Zones 1-3 event and our new LGBT night.

Tonight's event is completely free to attend - you just need to register in advance.

For those few people who still hear the words 'lodger' or 'flatshare' and think immediately of Rising Damp or The Young Ones here's proof (if any is needed) of the fact that there are rooms out there in some really lovely properties.

Take, for example, this flatshare in Dulwich, for which the owner and live-in-landlady Ann was awarded 'Ideal Home Interior 2011', presented by Linda Barker at the Ideal Home Exhibition.

Where to live in London

Choosing an area in London can be a bit of a challenge, especially if you're new to the city. Most people either end up in one of the few areas they've heard of or choose somewhere based on where their frinds are or to be near work. There's nothing like a bit of local knowledge though when it comes to living in a new city - luckily, with hundreds of thousands of Londoners using SpareRoom every year we're not short on local knowledge.

So, to take advantage of this (and make things easier for you), we've now added a new 'area info' feature to SpareRoom's London ads. This shows you the average monthly rents for a single and double room in the area (including bills), plus a handy list of the tube and train stations you'll find there. The best bit though is information on what each area is like based on real feedback from SpareRoom users who live there. Whether you're looking for somewhere leafy, chilled, good for pubs or multi-cultural we've taken the recommendations of thousands of Londoners to help you decide where to live.

Every London ad on SpareRoom now has an area info link (next to the postcode at the top of the details):

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Click the link and it'll take you to the info for the area in question (in the example the area is Brixton).

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If you know the area already there's even a link so you can tell us what you think.

Happy hunting - don't forget to come back and let us know what you think of your area once you've moved in!

Cheers

Matt

In the final part of Rick's guest blog for us he looks at the usefulness of Speed Flatmating and shares his thoughts on viewings

Speed Flatmating

I’ve been to a few Speed Flatmating events in my time, and as odd as the concept may sound to some, they’re an incredibly useful way of meeting potential flatmates face-to-face and sizing them up in a way that reading someone’s advert doesn’t really allow for (whether you have a room to let or are looking for a room). As undeniably useful as they are, the strangeness of turning up at a social event to basically ask people if they’d like to come and live with me is something I’ve always found a bit stressful; for example, as a man pitching the spare room in my two-bedroom flat to a woman, I have to give off an unspoken assurance that I’m not some sort of weirdo and that they can feel safe and comfortable if they were to move in. Still, printed copies of my ad and the video tour I mentioned earlier ready to view on my phone make for an impressive pitch, so there’s no shortage of interest. And it works – my current (female) flatmate was found at a Speed Flatmating event in Fulham.

Viewings

I’ll not presume to tell anyone how to conduct themselves at a viewing. But the one thing that caused me no end of annoyance and inconvenience whenever I’d arranged viewings was people simply not turning up without so much as a text message to let me know they weren’t coming. It’s rude, it’s inconsiderate, and it’s a colossal waste of my time. I once scheduled eight viewings over one weekend, and only three of them turned up. Two non-attenders texted me half an hour or so before they were due to arrive to say they weren’t coming, the other three didn’t bother. A whole day, during which I had plenty of other things I could have been doing, completely wasted. Politeness, consideration and good manners cost nothing. Well, perhaps the cost of sending a quick text in this case but simply not turning up seems to be considered acceptable. It bloody is not!

Viewings can sometimes be awkward experiences, though. For example, one person felt the need to make it very clear to me that he intended to be massively sexually active should he move in, in such a way that left me in no doubt that what he actually meant was that he intended to pay for the privilege, if you get my drift. That, as well as evidence of a drink problem and some frighteningly ‘old-fashioned’ attitudes regarding race and women, had me keen to wrap things up as quickly as possible. I didn’t fancy the prospect of an angry, tooled-up pimp kicking my front door in during the early hours, for one thing. Another person had a go at me as soon as I opened the front door, telling me that he hadn’t realised how ‘far out’ my flat was (despite my ad and the directions I’d given him being perfectly clear on the location), accusing me of deliberately misleading him, before turning heel and storming off. I was quite startled, I can tell you.

As I said, back at the beginning of this series of guest blogs, the search for a flatmate is usually an uncomplicated process, and hopefully you won’t encounter any of the potential complications I’ve described. This little blog isn’t meant to be taken 100% seriously, but I hope it’s been in some way useful, if not entertaining, and at the very least kept you from doing any work for a few distracted minutes.

Rick's post today looks at the part transport plays in people's search for somewhere to live (especially in London)

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Transport

Transport options are obviously an important factor, but one thing I found frustrating when managing my ad was the prevailing mentality that, if you live in London, you absolutely have to be within walking distance of a tube or overground station or you might as well be in the middle of nowhere. This seems just as ingrained in lifelong Londoners as it is in those looking to move to London for the first time. My flat is a ten minute bus ride from the nearest tube or overground station, which was enough to cause a large proportion of people to tell me it wasn’t worth their while because “I need to be within 5 minutes walk from a tube” – despite the fact that three regular and quick bus services run from right outside the block, and I can get to work in Central London in 45 minutes. Some people were even quite rude about it, as if my choosing to live somewhere not immediately next to a station was some sort of weird objectionable anti-social stance I’d taken specifically to annoy them. The very idea that anyone might even consider not living within 5 minutes of a station, let alone have the sheer sodding audacity to advertise the fact on a property website with a view to having someone move into the spare room, was evidently akin to my having drowned their puppy. It was strangely fascinating to see how it simply did not compute with some people, and how it offended their sensibilities to such an extent that I half-expected an outraged Daily Mail article to be written about me, which would be Twittered and Facebooked around the world within hours, forcing me to seek police protection and go into hiding.

Maybe it’s because I’m not from London, but this peculiar love-hate relationship its residents have with its transport system fascinates me. Everyone moans about it, no-one seems to have a good word to say about it, yet everyone seemingly cannot bear to be more than 5 minutes walk from its sweaty, smelly, dirty, overcrowded, overpriced, poorly-maintained, rude-staffed, perennially service-suspended cloying embrace. It’s an unhealthy, obsessional, dysfunctional relationship, and if TFL and the residents of London could be distilled into two people, we would no doubt see them shouting incoherently at each other on The Jeremy Kyle Show before being restrained and having Jeremy shout at them for a bit before Graham the counsellor comes on to offer a more soothing perspective.

Sorry... I got a bit ranty there. It just seems such a limited, and limiting, perspective to have. Maybe it’s the ‘instant’ culture we live in these days. Some people absolutely will not consider buses as a transport option, which I can understand where night buses are concerned, but for anything that doesn’t comply with the perceived ‘5 minutes walk from a station’ rule to be considered out of the way is ridiculous to me.

So, if you’re looking for somewhere, don’t be afraid to think outside the box in terms of location – it’s better to live somewhere nice that’s a bit further from a station than you’re used to than somewhere not quite as nice but within easier reach. If you’re looking for a flatmate, be sure to be clear on your location and transport options, and if you don’t come within the 5 minute rule, be prepared for some people to be inexplicably rude about it.

Starting today we'll have a series of guest blog posts, written for us by regular SpareRoom user Rick Beenham, that deal with making the most of your advert for a flatmate. This came about after Rick (@RickBeenham) jokingly tweeted that he was going to write a list of phrases commonly used in ads that annoyed him.

The posts will deal with a variety of subjects - here's #1

After having used their site extensively over the last 18 months or so, the nice people at SpareRoom have asked me to write a blog that might be useful to them as an insight into how people use their website, and perhaps be a helpful guide to anyone using it. Well, I say asked me… I actually light-heartedly mentioned in a Twitter post that one day I’d write a list for @SpareRoomuk of all the stock phrases found in ‘Room Wanted’ ads that put people off, and they responded by telling me that it would actually be very useful to know what they were. So, the gauntlet has been thrown down and it’s time for me to put my money where my mouth is.

I have used Spare Room fairly regularly, as an existing tenant seeking to replace an outgoing flatmate. Initially this was in a three-bedroom property, and subsequently in a two-bedroom flat I moved into in April 2009, where I still live. So I’ve learned a few things about putting an ad together, searching for potential flatmates, the dos, the don’ts, and the frustrations and pitfalls that can happen along the way.

Ideally, what should happen is this: a flatmate decides it’s time to move on, you advertise the vacant room on Spare Room and/or similar sites, interested parties contact you and arrange to come and view the place, one or more of them then express an interest in moving in, and the worst case scenario is that you have to make a choice as to whom you consider the most suitable. It’s all sorted quickly and with no fuss or stress. But it isn’t always so straightforward.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve reached a point in your life where you’ve moved on from house-sharing with a group of people and prefer a more sedate arrangement. The house-share dynamic no longer holds the allure it once did. The politics of it all – the division of territory into specific cupboards and fridge shelves, waiting your turn to use the washing machine or oven, the psychological warfare sparked off by milk theft, people hoarding toilet paper, the messy housemate who never washes up and has an interesting collection of smells in their room, the hedonistic housemate who regularly crashes noisily in at 3am with half the club in tow – is something you feel you’ve outgrown. A quieter life beckons, which in my case means not wanting to live with more than one person. It also means a more selective approach when seeking a new flatmate. I can’t just get anyone in, after all. It has to be someone I know I can live with. As the lease is in my name, I am responsible for all the rent, a heavy burden to carry on my own, so if it becomes necessary to search for a flatmate, I simply can’t afford to hang about.

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The next post will deal with the topic of the advert itself.

I was lucky enough to spend a couple of weeks in Italy recently and quickly got used to fantastic coffee on a daily basis. Cafes, restaurants, train station buffets - it seems impossible to get bad coffee in Italy. This made me wonder how Italians react when they arrive in the UK and are faced with the options we have. OK, the standard is improving but, let's face it, there are still plenty of places in this country to get really crap coffee.

So, here are my favourite places to get a decent coffee in London. There will be great places I haven't been to so let me know if you have a particular place you love.

1. Monmouth Coffee Company - These people roast their own beans (several varieties of which you can buy to take home) and supply them to coffee shops all across the capital. Their own coffee shops in Monmouth Street and Borough Market are the place to go for a brilliant espresso.
2. Caffe Vergnano - These people have a shop on Charing Cross Road and, having checked the website, another on the South Bank! Hurrah! Not only is their coffee as good as any I've had, full stop (can't quite bring myself to say the American version), but they also have a marvelous Caractacus Potts-style espresso machine.
3. Nude Espresso - Brilliant antipodean coffee shop near Spitalfields. The coffee is great and they do that wonderful thing with the frothed milk that makes it look all velvety and like a Vienetta (which doesn't make it taste any better but looks cool, bit like the shamrock on a pint of Guinness).

That's my top 3, let me know if there's anywhere else I should check out (and why).

Matt

Earlier today I came across an article I wrote for www.intoLondon.com several years ago ( just after I'd moved into a new flat in South East London). I'd lived in flatshares in London for around 4 years by this point - for the first 3 I was north of the Thames and happily prejudiced against anything south of the river. For the 3rd year I lived in a lovely flat on the not-so-lovely Stockwell Road. Every night (or so it seemed) I would have the convenience of having my walk home from the tube station lit for me by a kind police helicopter - one morning I woke up to discover that every single shop window in the area had been smashed. Not a great introduction to south London.

A year or so later, deciding that we wanted our own place, I ended up moving into a flat with my girlfriend purely because we knew someone who had a vacant rental property at exactly the point we needed one. The flat was in Forest Hill and, 6 years later, I'm still living there (albeit in a different flat a few streets away).

Re-reading the article took me back to the time when my perceptions of south London changed for the better and now I don't think I'd want to live north of the river again, unless I had a whopping budget and could pick from a handful of places. My girlfriend, now my wife, was born and brought up in north London but is now most definitely a south of the river girl.

Here's the article:

Taking Sides

Everybody knows about the great British North-South divide, it's like the American one but in reverse. In the US the northerners consider themselves the sophisticated city dwellers and think of southerners as the poor country cousins. Over here it's the other way round. We all know the divide exists in age-old attitudes and opinions but where on a map would you find it? Ask on either side of the Pennines and you'll probably be told it starts somewhere south of the midlands, ask in London and the answer will be 'just north of Watford', ask a Scot and it's all south to them. When it comes to the London North-South divide, however, finding the point of separation is easy, it's one of the most famous rivers in the world.

Ask most Londoners (and by this I mean people who live and work in London as well as the born-and -bred variety) and most will express a preference for north or south of the Thames as a place to live. Both have their benefits and drawbacks as well as their supporters and detractors. It tends to be the case that London conforms more to the US style of North-South divide than the British one with the north looking rather down its nose at the south, I've often been told by people that they'd never consider living south of the river. There are many reasons for this but by far the greatest when it comes to choosing a place to live is transport.

The perception is that north London is far better off in terms of transport. There are 33 tube stops south of the river only 5 of which have access to more than one line. In contrast north London has over 35 which serve 2 or more lines and enough in total that I got bored of counting. The upside of this is that in south London you often get more for your money property-wise (whether renting or looking to buy) as most people in London want to live near a tube line rather than a train station. Tubes are more frequent, tend to run later and can carry you around the centre of town far better than trains, but in terms of getting into town in the first place (presuming you can't afford to live in zone 1, correct me if I'm wrong), trains do the job just fine. For a start they don't stop as many times per mile as tubes do plus, as an added bonus, you get to see daylight and - sometimes - the windows even open. This might seem like a small benefit but, until you've travelled any distance on the Piccadilly line in high summer with your face in a stranger's armpit, you won't know what a difference it can make to your general state of well-being. The redevelopment of the Docklands area in the '80s also helped bringing the DLR links and eventually the Jubilee Line extension out into south-east London.

Another popular myth is that south London is a more dangerous and somewhat less savoury place to live than north London. People point to the high- and not so high-rise blocks of council flats, which march down from Bermondsey towards New Cross and out to Peckham as examples of this and Brixton still finds it hard to escape the taint of its troubled past. Slowly but surely, however, south London is being transformed as money moves in and starts looking for somewhere to eat out. Many areas south of the river are still affordable places to buy whereas their northern counterparts at a similar distance from the centre of London are way out of most price ranges. As a result bars and restaurants are springing up in areas where beforehand there wasn't much on offer and tired and forgotten areas are getting a new lease of life and much needed income. In addition to this, there are some lovely hidden gems in south London, which are well worth a visit even if you live north of the river. The better-known examples range from Borough Market, which has been around for nearly 250 years, to Tate Modern and the London Eye. Less well-known are the wonderful Horniman Museum and park in Forest Hill and the collection of 30 life-size dinosaur statues in Crystal Palace Park which, seen from the train on a misty autumn morning, must be one of the oddest sights in London.

I think you may have gathered by now that I'm not exactly impartial when it comes to the question of the north-south divide - I live in south-east London and I love it. The point of all this, however, is not to persuade you to live south of the river but just to consider it because I have no doubt that somebody, at some point, will tell you not to.

Matt