I agree with Barbara that the pressures on running a business in London became difficult and eventually untenable. My non food business depended on visits to many building sites. When I started in the 70's it was quite easy to find parking spaces, and paying for a meter was OK. You got a fine if you overshot. As time moved on councils subcontracted parking control to firms which employed huge numbers of people whose delight was to catch you out. If a meeting overan by just two minutes (which was frequent because others arrived late) you would find your vehicle on the back of a lorry disappearing to some outer suburb. Clients always wanted you to come to their offices and not to come to yours. A few hundred pounds later, maybe after missing meetings, you got your vehicle back. Originally one person could easily do five visits a day then that reduced to two. I was paying thousands a year in car related charges. You often could not use public transport as the routes didn't conform with our projects distribution. Business rates were always increasing. We used to take on work experience and young student people then the people with the clipboards started arriving. Next door businesses didn't bother with refuse disposal contracts, but simply dumped their stuff on our land so we had to deal with that too. Fees undercutting from outside London or even unqualified firms doing drawings only and not visiting site ate into margins and in the end the only people benefiting from my firm were my employees and my customers. Not what Ted planned. One day I had a probably stress related black out on the M4 which we took as a sign that things had to change. On another occasion I was a passenger in a client's car leaving my office when were were rammed by a police car and went through a shop window. My BP was 220 over something! people I know who are still doing what I used to do have very small firms, often working from home. The people in the big firms have huge numbers of young architects from all over the world anxious to get London experience, ofetn working for quite low wages and in some cases getting living expenses only. It's a very different world from rural France and I won't be moving back unless I'm kicking and screaming. Now wait a minute.....
One of the reasons why I fell out of love with London was the local councils attitude towards
refuse collection.....
Cutting down on the number of collections per week....then month was very bad news. We left
London nearly seven years ago and serious problems were brewing. No matter how clean your
shop or restaurant was there would always be a negligent neighbour or 2 and serving or selling
food to the public is a responsibility. it was a struggle to keep suppliers in check.....and To be honest
the cleaning side of the work was overpowering yet essential.
Heaven knows what problems there are now as the population increases, the refuse collection
prices have risen and the collection men are not going to de gang now.
Lots of unwanted small creatures running around outside famous food stores.
And here am I deterring all the cats....personal friends and wild not to eat moving
things and going to the vets to collect anti vermitage pippets every 2 months.
All this talk may seem silly to some of you but believe me it is relevant for health
and safety to take care of refuse.
Yo Man! That's the real me taken a few days ago.
Tony, Is that good or bad?
Diversion - Vic, re. the new pic. I've been looking for my beard and shades. Now I know who nicked them!
Structural engineers use SF 6. Well all the stuff my over qualified cousin did for me seemed like it. I was a Design & build M & E contractor so my stuff had to be a bit more realistic otherwise the clients would have gone elsewhere :-)
That's Irish engineers. Two be sure, two be sure!
Vic I thought engineers always used a safety factor of two!!!? Maybe just on structures.....
Having now seen the previous post I can see where you get your figures from. My apologies for not twigging it & asking a dummy question. Me , a Pedant? Near enough is good enough for a retired engineer ;-)
main home so nothing Tony ;-)
Tony, you must take into account the inflationary loss as well as the inflation of house prices back in their home county of dorset in the last 10 years, i think they did well to move from a converted barn with land to a one bedroom flat in weymouth.
But they did not have a choice.
£90k! Given a three bedroom former council flat in SE London was sold for £3,000,000 last year, the first sum might just rehouse one dog!
How did you arrive at those figures Tony?
It's my missus on her way back from a Vide Grenier. She never could resist a bargain!
Still on Brian, i just pressed my link straight to it.
Exactly put!
Still 'page not found'. It appears to have done a bunk!
Is that one of our members? I'm sure there's something familiar about the gait....
it was the only one of the 6 places I've owned here where I had to pay an agent, the other 5 were private sales - both purchase and sale ;-)
Sad ain't it! Mine were in the 6 figure zone with both bought privately without agents fees, so I'm happy :-)