"I was bored of ending every month in my overdraft": Capital commuters keeping their London jobs but living in Manchester city centre

manchestereveningnews.co.uk:

Joe Parker had reached his early 30s and was reassessing his life. After years of hard work and hard partying in London he'd built a successful career in the advertising industry but had decided to take a break. "My dad died, I was not in a good place and I took a year's sabbatical from work and went travelling around the world for a year," he told the Manchester Evening News . READ MORE: Manchester quiz: Can you answer these 30 questions about the best city on earth?

When he returned, Joe found himself reluctant to re-enter the notoriously expensive London rental market. "The cost of accommodation in London is ridiculous, it's always been ridiculous," he said. "And I noticed, even in the year that I'd been away, rent had increased noticeably. "So I used to live in Clapham which is a nice area, young professionals, it's green and leafy, there's parks, it's got plenty to do. "But it's not Zone 1, it shouldn't be £1,100 a month for a room in a shared house which is what I was looking at paying to go back to Clapham High Street. "I thought to myself...

why am I doing that? Why am I paying that money?" Joe moved back in with his family in Stafford and found that he could easily manage an arrangement of working from home three days a week and commuting into the office for the other two.

He said: "It wasn't a problem, there's pretty good links. "I'd go down really early on a Tuesday morning, stay Tuesday night in London, have Wednesday again there in the agencies and come back Wednesday evening. "And it broke my week up quite nicely, I had a nice balance of in-person in London...