My first year in London: Hannah Burke

My first year in London is a series in which we dive into someone’s first year in the capital, featuring everybody from moneyed young professionals to overlooked migrant workers.

For this week's edition, we're speaking to Hannah Burke, who is a natural wine sommelier and the writer of Bad Vinfluence newsletter. Hailing from Scotland, Burke never intended to move London — and, for a while, wasn't much of a fan. We spoke to her about what made her finally fall in love with the city, the queer scene of the late 2010s and the perils of limescale.

The Londoner: Where were you before you moved to London?

Hannah Burke: I was studying in Glasgow; I lived there for four years. I moved around Scotland a lot before that — I was born in Edinburgh, but we quickly moved up to Perth, and then Aberdeen, West Lothian and then finally East Lothian with my mum and my now stepdad. I lived there for two years before I went to university in Glasgow, so all over the shop.

What brought you to London in the first place?

I moved down in 2017. Initially it was just going to be a month for an internship, in the press office at Which? magazine. Then that turned into a job offer, and I thought, I’ll stay here and do this for maybe a year or so. And now it's been, gosh, eight years.

So you didn’t intend to move down here permanently?

It was never the plan. I was actually signed up to do a master's in journalism back in Glasgow when I came down to do the internship, and I was like, okay, it’ll end and I’ll go back up and do that. Then I got the job offer and — because at that point I wanted to work in media — I thought I could go back and do 18 months more of studying, but I’d probably realistically end up in similar roles. So I took the job, thinking I'll get the experience and then move back up to Glasgow. 

What made you so set on Glasgow?

I think I just never really saw myself living anywhere else; or, if I was going to move somewhere else, I thought maybe it would be abroad. I just felt really at home — I’d moved around so much, and it was somewhere that I’d laid down my own roots. It meant that when I moved down to London and people asked where I was from, I told them Glasgow.

So, about that move — how did you feel about it at the time?

I think I was quite resistant to the idea of moving to London. A lot of Scottish people think of London as this cold, unfriendly city; that Londoners act like they’re the centre of the universe. That everything in the UK happens there. So I definitely had this kind of reductive idea of London and the people who live there. I also knew that it was where the opportunity was — it's quite difficult to find the same level of opportunity in Glasgow or Edinburgh. But when I moved, I made sure that everybody knew that it wasn't a [personal] choice, it was just because I’d got a job offer and it was practical — that I'd be back.

Is there anything that surprised you about living in London?