LONDON is not expensive – it is now officially GOOD VALUE - voted by famous Lonely Planet travel guides as one of the 10 best value destinations for 2010. 3rd after Iceland and Thailand ….. Although things might have changed over recent months in Iceland and Thailand – volcanos and political unrest might have affected all that. I think you also have to take these lists newspapers and magazines come up with over and again with a pinch of salt – it maybe just another way of filling up space. However, for many of the students who come to London there is a serious point to all this. The question “Is London expensive? is one of the most commonly asked questions by students and it is not easy to give a simple answer. The UK government even has a view on this – expecting potential students coming to London to have £800 a month for their living costs – this to include everything except the course fees. It’s hard to tell if this is a sensible or accurate figure but at UIC we tried to find out how accurate it really was and asked 30 of our students to estimate how much they actually spent each month. The answers came back with a wide range of figures – from £350 a month to £900. The one thing you can be certain of then is that fi you want to spend a lot it’s easy and if you don’t want to spend a lot it’s also easy! So – what would you have to do if you wanted to have an interesting yet cheap stay in London?
Accommodation – the normal places for students to stay when they come to study at UIC are either homestays or residences. While UIC offers these as cheaply as possible it can work out at anything from £130 to £230 a week – depending on whether you have meals, single rooms, self catering and so on – and also how close to the school the accommodation is. While this is fine if you are coming to London for a few weeks many of our longer term students tend to rent flats between them and end up paying much less – typically around £80 a week.
Food – you can of course eat in restaurants every day but if you are staying with a homestay the easiest way to eat is to have your meals included. If you are self catering then you can find supermarkets all over London, these tend to sell food at pretty much the same prices as each other – if you want ot find even cheaper food then one of the many street markets (for example Portobello Road) may be cheaper still.
Clothes – assuming you need to buy clothes then steer away from the touristy areas and places like Bond Street, Regent Street and Covent Garden. The cheapest place on the high street for clothes is Primark – there is a huge store in Oxford Street and the prices are amazingly low. If you want to find 2nd hand clothes at rock bottom prices, go to a market, a jumble sale or a car boot sale. You will be really surprised how cheaply you can find books, CDs, clothes and other goods. Some things are just generally cheap in London – computers for example, but of course this depends on the exchange rate with your own country.
And going out – don’t forget the museums and galleries are generally free (except fpr special exhibitions). If you are a students at UIC you can go along to all the social programme activities – there are at leat 2 free activities each week and you can join the International House Social Club for free (included in your UIC fee) where you can use their facilities as well – and this is one of the cheapest bars in London!
So …. you can look at websites like Time Out and find recommended cheap places to eat for example or just come – don’t go crazy and ask people who live here. Also make sure to ask the other students – once you have registered as a student you can even log onto the student community section of the website and ask current students these kinds of questions before you come to London. If you don’t have a login password just ask us for one.
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