First of all, I noticed that there are alot of people from the UK on this forum. My question is, how hard is it to move over england from the states? I have been wanting to do this for a long time, but don't really know how to go about it. Does anybody know of any americans that have done it and do you know what process they had to go through? Does the british gov't let people from the states move there? I am serious about this so I thought i'd ask you people over there first........
Thanks for any replies,
RANDON

Seems like our government will let any old person into our country these days...

I doubt you'll have a problem

Have a read here: http://www.ind.homeoffice.gov.uk/

Where abouts were you thinking of coming too?

cg

Thanks for the link - I was thinking Essex, Brighton, London but I'm sure yet, I have to study on the areas. You know, crime, cost of living, etc., other things I haven't thought of yet.
What about the northern part of england?

Thanks again for the link, it's really helpful!!

hum, weird, most of us are trying to get out


Compared to Pheonix - well, I've never been, so I can't say.

But YOU WILL find that things are many times more cramped that you're used to and prices for some stuff, will blow you out of the water when compared to what you're used to.

It's hard to explain lot's of stuff really. I mean if you have a few specific questions, I can give you some stuff on those three area's, as I was born/brought up in Brighton (living just along the coast - it's cheaper - check out my lat/long in my profile). Have worked/lived in London, and spent a fair amount of time in/around parts of Essex (well the bottom part anyway).

If you're interested e-mail me.

regards

John

p.s. Also got connections in various parts of the country - so.....

I have no idea about the rules for coming over here to live and work, but a tourist visa should be easy enough to get.

I've never lived down south, but London has been a nice city to visit although a bit big and busy. I'm from the north myself, and it isa pretty friendly despite relative poverty compared with the south-east. Just make sure your car is secure if you are coming to Sunderland

Scotland is nice as well - Edinburgh and Glasgow have the cultural perks of bigger cities like London or Birmigham, but with a much lower cost of living & very firendly. There is also easy access to a lot of nice scenery and winter sports type things. Downsides - very poor football (or soccer if you want to call it that) teams apart from the two big Glasgow teams; Celtic and Rangers.

There is a shortage of skilled workers in a lot of professions in the UK right now, so it is probably worth looking into. I know students who are here on student visas (obviously), but if you want to work you would probably either need to have something sorted in advance or be able to demonstrate your ability to support yourself until you find work before they would let you in.

Thanks for the replies guys, they are very helpful!! If I have any other questions, (and I probably will) I'll email you. Thanks again, feel free if you want to let me know what else I would need to know before taking the big jump over the pond!
RANDON

After seeing Richey's post, randon,

it occured to me to mention, that the UK's, a strange place in the "work" sense. I could seriously depend on what your field of work is.

If you looked around for media (news, tv, etc) based, you'd probably see stuff on "the north/south" divide.

This isn't something that's made up, but a genuine thing, but mainly caused by a couple of historical fact's. I, for one, wouldn't dispute that people "up north" seem friendlier. though the historical bit of that is connected to saxon/viking history and more recently was to do with the north haveing most, if not all, of the heavy industry (as in the dangerous heavy industries like mining, steel, etc).

Even today, a larger part of what's left of UK industry, is based in the midlands/north.

But, it's also fair to say, a considerable amount of IT (if that's your thing), is London/South East. If you've got a degree, and wanted to, you could probably get sponsorship for a post grad teaching certificate - then you could go pretty much anywhere (and then Richey's comments about how far your money goes, become very, very valid).

Erm, major business/finance is mainly London.

It's more about your expectations, and what you really want. I don't think that you'd have much of a problem.

Of course, if you need any further info that I can help with, just e-mail, but you could do worse than start looking, by checking out this site, which will/might have some stuff to help you.

regards

John

Search for up my street which is a website that will give you information about different parts of the UK eg prices etc. Don't forget that in many parts of the UK, housing and transport are very expensive. I have heard of people paying £100+ pw week ($200) to share a room in london.
Also the weather is very different (I think since I have never been there) from arizona and most parts of the US.

Can you post the link?

I was raised in new york and it rains alot there, so I don't think it could be that different in the UK, but yes, I know its quite different from Arizona, since it's brown and mostly desert and HARDLY EVER RAINS here!!

Please post the link, as I'd like to see what the cost of living would be like over there........
Thanks for the replies,
RANDON

www.upmystreet.com
and www.knowwhere.co.uk (a bit dated but still interesting).

here's upmystreet for you randon.

I did a quick check to see what you get with just initial names. Both Brighton and London i.e. no postal codes (zip codes) gave me just a very general overview. the Brighton one showed the central area, but did include a few pearls of wisdom i.e. housing cost (to buy), council tax/community charge (same thing) - which everyone pays irrespective of owning/renting housing. the same for London - infact it showed Westminster, which is right next the "the square mile" (historic London). For the UK, they Brighton is medium sized. Population of about 300,000 - though in Summer it goes up to maybe 600 to 750K.
London is a little different. The Westminster bit, is the city of Westminster, which is different to "The City", because that would be Old London/The square mile.

Greater London, is lots of local authorities together as the conurbation of Greater London. For instance, if you drive north from Brighton, the first greater london part you drive through is Croydon, as you continue north you drive through Streatham, then Brixton (Croydon is a "borough" in it's own right, whereas Streatham and Brixton are in "The London Borough of Lambeth" etc) and as you cross Westminster Bridge, you'd see the "London eye" to your right, and directly across the bridge is Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament.

It can be a little daunting/confusing - Brighton is in the county of East Sussex, but as they "run their own affairs" they are termed a unitary authority. It's side by side with Hove, and has "city status" as the City of Brighton and Hove - considered a trendy place to live (which is a real pain, as that makes it difficult, for the likes of me to live there - even though that's where I was born/brought up).

London, as I've already pointed out, is a conurbation of lots of different local authorities, the only real differences this makes is where you have to pay your community charge, and in some cases, housing prices. It's true to say, that (for example) if you lived in Islington or Camden, houses are one price, whereas if you lived a couple of streets east, and are in Whitechapel, then the houses are cheaper (a little) - it's considered more "down market", that's not to say that there aren't expensive/posh bits of Whitechapel, but some people pay a premium, because the different postal codes can, in some cases, mean that you can get your children into a "better" school (as the government now have "league tables" for schools, hospital's, local authorities, etc etc).

Now you also mentioned Essex in your earlier posts. Essex is a county. Some of it comes within what would be considered as Greater London (by those of us who live outside). This is where is can be confusing, because, you'd get better result's if you had a postal code to put into the upmystreet search facility. You'd then get much more accurate results.

For London, if you looked here and just look at the links for shopping, if you see the drop down for area's, that gives you various names of area's to look into.

For Brighton, this is a reasonable place to start,

and for Essex, it's a little more complicated because, if you googled for essex+UK one of the bigger sites is the "County Council", but that doesn't cover the towns i.e. Basildon, Southend, Romford, Ilford,etc to name a couple - and they are quite different in character.

to work out some stuff, excluding the bigger Cities, the structure is slightly different from the US, here we'd use National, County, town, parish - the bigger cities differ inthat, they might be in a county, but because they run their own affairs, as mentioned earlier, you'd have to consider county/city. As opposed to the US with your Federal, state, city, county, town, etc etc local organisations.

You just have to remember, that in distance terms, nowhere in the UK is very far apart, but because of the population density, things can seem much more cramped. If you do a job that can be done as a "home worker" and your life doesn't depend on municipal access, then there's some very isolated, quiet, beautiful places to live. But yes, the bigger towns/cities tend to feel "very busy".

What else would you like to know about ??? Any other parts of the country ?????

regards

John

p.s. One of the bigger, more confusing thing's to get your head round, is that the Whole of the UK, has the same population as, say, California, but I'd hate to think of how many times, you could fit the whole of the UK into California. Erm, the UK has a similar population size to that of France, except the small point that France is at least 5 times the size of the UK.

Actually France is only twice the size of the UK, bearing in mind how the french drive I think I know why there are not many of them.