We met Sisi Cronin on a Cooler fashion shoot years ago and have recently been in touch again when she started promoting super cool old school GDR skate documentary This Ain’t California (images below) and we realised she’d become a film PR. She currently lives in London but spends a lot of time in other cities working remotely, largely because of the huge living costs.

Do you feel you or your fellow creatives are struggling with how expensive London is?
The price of living in London, mainly due to increasingly high rent prices, is a drain. Partly for this reason I spend time in cheaper cities like Berlin, and know many people who moved to these places after graduating and are put off from moving back to London due to the living costs.

There are relatively more opportunities here in London if you look for them, but it unfortunately comes at a high cost and hard work. In cheaper cities, you can rent somewhere nice for a reasonable price and work less to sustain a decent lifestyle with the time to focus on other creative endeavours. Where you could once rent a room in a warehouse conversion in zone 3 in London for 400 pounds a month you can now be paying close to 700 pounds, and you can no longer look to alternative living either.

The cost of public transport is a joke, and the cost of commuting by train from places outside of London can be the same as rent prices in London.
Friends who run creative businesses (relatively successful ones) still have to take full time jobs to afford to live in London, whereas friends who have moved to cheaper European cities are able to get by and focus on their dreams.

Has London changed because of it?
Growing up in Notting Hill I have absolutely witnessed the change as it is clear in areas like this. What used to be a place full of local characters who had been around for years and a creative crowd, where young people could afford to get a place together with their starting salaries, has become a place mainly for the rich and as a result is becoming more and more like an artificial version of what it once was.

What are the alternatives?
The working landscape has changed rapidly with the rise in self-employment and people setting up start-ups. The widespread use of cloud based servers like dropbox allows greater autonomy from the workplace. Creatives can work together to produce amazing results without the need to share a physical space or pay thousands for an office space in London. This is a route more and more people decide to take, giving them the freedom to work from outside of London and communicate online.