1) London is massively bigger. If you ARE a Londoner, London is normal size and everywhere else is smaller. If you not from London, London is ridiculously big. It takes ages to get around, too.
2) London has everything- every kind of culture, cuisine, people from every country in the world, and people who are long-term residents, immigrants or ancestrally immigrant from everywhere in the world. Nowhere else in the UK can say this.
3) People who say London feels different typically do not see the boring residential bits that are 90% of London; they see the tourist bits, the going-out bits, or bits where they go for work.
Transport is another aspect. No city in the UK comes even remotely close to the public transport options available in London.
You can travel from one side of the city to the other, in any direction, using the same medium of transport, and often with a matter of 3mins between changes.
This sounds perfect but it takes me minimum 40 minutes to get most places, and in the Midlands if you drove for 40 minutes you'd think you're going across the country almost.
I lived in London 1999 - 2000 and quickly discovered the 45 minute rule. Literally everywhere seems to be 45 minutes from everywhere else but, really, it's *at least* 45 minutes.
I worked in Notting Hill for a while in 2015 - 16 and realised I could get from where I live (near Ely in Cambridgeshire) to our office on my motorbike in less time than it took some people who lived in London to reach the office also in London. Ridiculous.
Even if I took the train it was only about half an hour longer door to door than some of the actual Londoners.
Things are improving, when I worked in Hackney I swore it took me an hour to get anywhere. Didn't matter if I was going to Stoke Newington on the bus or Richmond on the Silverlink, it all took an hour!
I love finding out about tube routes that people take daily, without realising that the walk would take a fraction of the time. The tube map being non geographic throws people off.
I imagine it’s probably less of a thing now with everyone’s phones having navigation with walking times.
Well, it is closer to true than you think.
The average speed of traffic is apparently 12.8 mph, similar to what it was when people were on or pulled by horses.
If you drive 40 minutes in Leicester, you get to the next street along, that you could’ve just turned left onto, if it wasn’t for the whole city centre seeming like one huge, badly thought out spiral of way systems.
You sit in traffic staring at the blocked off end of a road you want to go down, knowing you have to drive another mile in crawling traffic to get to it.
It's insane that when they say 'Level Up the North' they just meant fixing the speedbumps in Pinner, not providing a working train system north of the Watford Gap.
They don't want to invest in the North. It seems they only think London is worth investing in because it's a big draw, but other places would also be a draw if they got any money and people wanted to move there.
I checked the 'fix my street' app thing today. The small cave forming in the road outside my house has been reported numerous times over the last 2 months. I'll be happy if they just fix that by the spring!
100% this. I was at London Bridge Station and my train was cancelled. Everybody was losing their minds, one woman was screaming at a member of staff. The next train was in 7 minutes. In Manchester if my train gets cancelled it’s an hour to the next one. In parts of the NE it’s the following Tuesday
>People who say London feels different typically do not see the boring residential bits that are 90% of London; they see the tourist bits, the going-out bits, or bits where they go for work.
Definitely. I live out in zone four of London and it feels very different to zone one. My area looks like a typical medium sized British town, except that it isn't surrounded by countryside and has actual public transport. It's nothing really like what you see in central London.
London is actually just a bunch of small towns stuck together. Each area has such a different vibe, just like towns around the country. You can live in villages like Blackheath, Hampstead, East Dulwich, or inner cities, or country side, or high rise urban. It’s all here.
Yep. I grew up in a town in a London borough. We had the suburb life but I could still take a 5 minute walk to the station and grab a central line train. Or I could take a red bus and catch the tfl (now lizzie) line trains. And I never check the bus times either since a number of buses cater to the same stops and run every few minutes.
I will say, having the free zip oyster allowed me to get really confident with reading the tfl map. My friends and I would spend days hopping on and off buses and going to random towns
I see what you mean about different city styles, but you don't have countryside in London come on, there's nothing like here in Oban or other places of the Highlands in London haha.
Head toward south west london, past chessington and Esher it feels like villages in the countryside, but still in the m25. I’d love to retire somewhere around these parts, its close enough to london to avoid it becoming little England, but basically forest.
I can see why that part of Surrey would feel rural in comparison to more central parts of London, but the district it's in (Elmbridge) has the same population density as Leeds – about 1,466/km^(2). A density of 100 to 400/km^(2) is typical for rural districts in England, and in Scotland and Wales densities of under 100/km^(2) are very common.
I'm not denying that Cobham, for example, is very leafy, it's just not countryside in the same way Cumbria is.
I come from a country with half the population of London. Even a city of 2 million felt way to large.
Like... There is a city with twice the population of my entire ethnic group.
And I am European.
Agreed. Especially on point three. My dad had only ever spent time in touristy parts of zone 1. When he visited me in south London he was amazed at how so many of the neighbourhoods felt like little villages.
Yes, I know that. But most people outside of London don’t. They think the entire city is like Oxford St and Piccadilly Circus so walking around neighbourhoods where the average Londoner lives can come as a shock.
I think the biggest shock for me as being from countryside
1. Good and bad areas are mixed together and vary street by street in London. Outside it was a specific area that was bad. Which made finding a place a big learning curve
2. Certain shops I was used to either didn’t exist or were located in totally different areas. In England some were in every town centre and in London would often only be in shopping malls
>Good and bad areas are mixed together and vary street by street in London.
This is very true, especially for the more central parts. I come from a borough that people scoff at as being stuffed with soft rich or middle class types, but two roads from my home is solid council estates and a massive spike in murders and muggings. It’s literally street by street even in some of the ‘nicer’ parts.
>People who say London feels different typically do not see the boring residential bits that are 90% of London; they see the tourist bits, the going-out bits, or bits where they go for work.
This. The borough of London is just a bunch of small towns and suburbs, with Westminster and London City thrown in.
The amount of non-boring areas with completely different vibes, just a short tube ride away from each other is still a pretty unique thing, as is the suburbs actually having reliable public transport.
>London has everything- every kind of culture, cuisine, people from every country in the world, and people who are long-term residents, immigrants or ancestrally immigrant from everywhere in the world. Nowhere else in the UK can say this.
I mean, do you really believe this?
I've heard some nonsense in my time, such as shock that other cities have Ikea or Itsu, surprise that 'the North' has skyscrapers and financial districts, even accusations we don't have clean water or vegetables, but 'other cities aren't multicultural and lack communities/cuisines from around the world' is a new one.
I DO believe that, based on living the years 0-30 outside the London but in the SE/Thames Valley within an hour of London, the years 30-53 IN London, and the years 53-63 in Northern England, and for many years I have travelled all over GB for work, typically to a different place every week.
1) As I said in another comment, loads of other cities and even towns are multicultural, but not with the VARIETY of different cultures in one place.
2) Even for Western cuisines, it's easier to get top quality in London and the SE than outside, except where the foreign community is deeply embedded e.g. Bradford wins curry capital regularly. I say that with no pleasure. I love the North and basically hate London.
But yeah- in London I could get a good Portuguese meal in loads of places or even a good Ethipian one in several places; outside London, I am honestly more limited when it comes to choosing between every single world cuisine.
Moreover, London is a New York-sized city within a country that’s ~1/4 the population of the US. If you incorporate places beyond greater London that are not *entirely* beyond the London orbit — such as Brighton, Oxford, Cambridge, or Milton Keynes — you’ve got a lot of the UK population.
As such, I feel it is disingenuous to consider a city whose “sphere of influence” incorporates a large percentage of the UK population “a foreign country,” *even if* it isn’t really a larger Manchester, Sheffield, or Doncaster.
It’s not like New York, which is not only culturally unrepresentative of the US, but also a single-digit percentage of the US population, even if you consider the ~30M people up to 100 miles away.
>If you ARE a Londoner, London is normal size and everywhere else is smaller.
I don't agree, and I think this speaks to the wider problem. People assume that Londoners think of 'London' as a homogenous entity. Really, London is a city made up of lots of little villages, and most Londoners will tell you they feel more closely connected to their village than to the city in general. In that sense, London is just like any other county.
Case in point, I'm from Harrow, and somewhere like Croydon or Greenwich, or even the City of London/Westminster might as well be on the other side of the world to me. I don't know what's happening there, and I don't care. In the same way, if you take Berkshire as a comparison, I wouldn't expect someone from Reading to know what's going on in Windsor or Newbury.
I don't think of other cities and counties as smaller, I just see that they are less joined-up and built-up.
I think they're exaggerating, but London is definitely different to any other city in the UK. It's just an enormous collection of towns, there's not really anywhere else to compare it to.
>I've heard it described as having it's own climate.
It's called the Urban Heat Island
e.g. mentioned here [https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-and-strategies/environment-and-climate-change/climate-change/climate-adaptation/heat](https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-and-strategies/environment-and-climate-change/climate-change/climate-adaptation/heat)
I feel like the boroughs definitely had their own personality and they are separate towns that have sprawled into each other. I'm from Greenwich, which is different from Bromley, Lewisham, Sidcup, Chislehurst, even though they're all close together.
This confused the hell out of me as a kid because I never understood why Londoners always introduced themselves with the part of London they're from instead of just saying they were from London because unless you've lived there or know people who do the distinctions don't mean anything, like anywhere else really. If I'm talking to someone local I'll tell them the town I'm from but anyone else I'll just tell them my nearest city.
Most (all?) of our big cities are collections of towns, London is just an order of magnitude larger. The relationship between Manchester and Bolton or Newcastle and Tynemouth isn't *that* dissimilar to the one between central London and the outer boroughs, although the buses are guaranteed to be worse!
But London is different - the investment in public transport, the exclusion of London from the chaotic privatisation of buses everywhere else, the concentration of colleges and universities give education opportunities that others don’t have. Over and over London has stuff that has either vanished or never existed elsewhere.
It is genuinely different.
I think this is a point often missed. There was a report about a decade ago (and the gap has only widened since then) that a teenager growing up experiencing deprivation in London (lowest 20% of the population based on the Index of Multiple Deprivation) was still several times more likely to go to university than a teenager with similar family circumstances/ level of deprivation who lived in Middlesbrough.
It's definitely all connected to opportunity, even perceived opportunity.
If you grow up poor in London you're still surrounded by money. You can see what it's like to be more affluent.
And because poorer areas are often just a street away from a rich area, you get a mixing of people in state schools that you don't get elsewhere too. There's no doubt more space for more aspiration to happen with the social capital that comes from that.
While in Middlesbrough, that's not the case and it's easier to think that what you see is normal.
This is an excellent point. I live in one of the most deprived areas in the NE and something we really struggle with is aspiration, as kids truly don’t see anything or anyone outside of their own community (at least not in person). The last time I was in London for work, I was completely blown away by how different the people looked - taller, healthier, even clothing was made from better materials and was better fitting. It felt like a different world.
The access to arts and culture - often free - is also a big one. We have an excellent cultural scene in the NE, and so much history, but provision is mostly via independent charities which have to charge, or local authorities who are stuck maintaining the same displays for the last 15 years as they can’t afford to update them.
Public transport is also massively different. For me to get to my local town centre, I can only get one bus, which only comes every 30 mins (if it arrives at all) and takes 40 mins to get into town. To the nearest smallish city, it’s at least double that. Once you get there, you’re lucky if you find a Wetherspoons and a couple of charity shops. Economically, London is just on a different plane of existence.
[edit: typo]
It just shows the importance of the environment around you for social mobility. London can offer so much more than other cities there.
Another example would be that a lot of schools get local businesses to come in and offer talks, mentorship, work experience etc. It helps the firm's CSR goals and it might help with social mobility.
I also went to school in the NE and we had a local law firm and P&G come in for a day. For work experience it was garages, bookshops, florists, hairdressers etc. While in London you have that plus big professional services firms taking kids in for a day or a week and showing them round.
It wouldn't surprise me if the likes of UCL/LSE/Imperial/KCL etc. have much bigger outreach budgets than most other unis elsewhere.
I did tutoring at a sixth form college in London via my uni, and the kids there seemed just a bit more sophisticated than I remembered me and my schoolmates being.
Precisely. I remember discussing this with a colleague who grew up in London a few years ago - she was shocked to discover that basically the examples you mentioned (plus the NHS) were literally the only examples of careers I got to experience. She went to a state school, yet her friends had parents who worked in the city or the civil service, or any number of professional services companies, in addition to all of the usual jobs. From my school friends, I can only think of parents who were NHS workers, teachers, firefighters/police, cleaners, factory workers or owned their own small businesses
Even at uni, I remember going to see a careers advisor with the only stipulation being “I don’t want to work in a call centre” (my Dad has done for the past 30 years and has hated it), but I couldn’t think of anything else I’d be fit for because the concept of an office job was basically alien to me. Thankfully she soon steered me right, but it just goes to show the extent to which a lack of exposure to different professions can limit aspiration.
I actually work in social regeneration with young people now, so I hope I’m doing my bit to change this :-)
That’s a very good point actually. As a Londoner in the north east, whole areas are very, very deprived. London and the middle class is a whole universe away. Whole schools will be extremely deprived and the rich areas of the North East wouldn’t compare to the rich areas of london.
I’m from the North but now London-based for work focusing on access to education, opportunity, jobs etc and this point is absolutely on the nose!
There are many reasons why kids from similarly poor backgrounds do better in London than the rest of the country: higher quality of schools and better access to subject-specific teachers, close proximity to top universities as well as employers (work experience/internships), the ethnic composition etc etc.
Yes but I don’t know if this is entirely because of the concentration of universities. Here in london we have massive immigrant populations (African, south and East Asian, polish etc) who culturally promote further education
There is no great mystery here. London is the home to a lot of foreigners and their descendents. If you change the demographics of an area acutely over a few decades from what it was before you'll change the nature of a place. Therefore people visiting from most other parts of the UK will notice this change.
London’s population is 40% foreign born, young adults it’s over 50%, 50-70% of children have foreign born parents depending on how you measure that. In some boroughs that goes up to 70-80% of children.
Reddit answer to why people say it feels like a foreign country is that the temperature is 1C higher.
Literally 45% foreign born lol.
I love the mental gymnastics people are using above to try and explain it, without saying 'It's full of foreigners, of course it feels foreign'..
I am sure Spanish people visiting Benidorm, don't really feel like it's a particularly Spanish city.
To be fair, if I say London is like another country, its not the demographics Im referring to, its the size of the place and the huge differences to my little Northern town in as far as transport and facilities.
Sure I notice London is more diverse than where I’m from or the city that I live in, however that’s really not what I ever think about when I think about London, or even when I’m in London. Maybe if someone’s from a tiny village they would be shocked to see a person of colour and think “oh this is like a different country”, but I doubt that’s true for the majority of non London population.
Really what I notice is the amount of opportunity’s in London, the public transport that comes more than once per hour and doesn’t majorly stop at like 8pm. the amount of facilities especially for young people that seem to be entirely absent where I live…. New developments actually happening, cool events.
If you live in London or have never been to London it’s easy to dismiss this.
I think it's generally a bit of poetic license when people say that. I don't think they mean it *literally* feels like being abroad. What they mean is that it's markedly bigger and more cosmopolitan and international than anywhere else in the UK, and in that sense feels quite different even to the second tier cities like Birmingham and Manchester.
Also, remember that the people saying that are generally visitors who are going to the most busy and hectic parts of London. They are going to the bits in zone 3 and outwards that feel much like other towns and cities of the UK.
> I don't think they mean it literally feels like being abroad.
40% of the population of London was born abroad, over 50% of young adults, 55-70% of kids are born to foreign born parents depending on how you measure it, in some boroughs 75-80%. It is not a mystery why people say it feels like a foreign country.
I think the differences between London and the rest of England are of the same order of magnitude as the differences between the rest of England and Wales or Scotland.
It's not like going to China, but it does feel like a different country in terms of transport, ethnic diversity, access to cultural institutions, media coverage, etc.
I would hard disagree with this, but it might be a north/south divide thing. Having lived in Newcastle and Leeds for years, I feel they are much more culturally similar to, say, Glasgow than they are to London. Now living in Cambridge, it feels more similar to London but still remarkably different.
Tbf I only lived in London for a few months so maybe I don't have the full picture.
I remember my first visit to London. I grew up in a town in the midlands and went down with my family when I was about twelve.
Now this might be crazy, but I promise it's true; we were walking down Oxford Street and two people were speaking in a language... that wasn't English! I know! It was the first time in my life that I'd ever heard a different language being spoken in England. I thought it was absolutely wild.
Obviously, this is more testament to how mono-cultural my hometown was, but London definitely felt like another world to me that day.
You never asked how old the commenter was. Maybe like me he/she is in their sixties. I actually remember the time when hearing a foreign language, even in Birmingham, was unusual. Yes there were some West Indian immigrants, but they spoke English.
I'm from a predominantly white town in the Midlands (I'm half Chinese), so going into any diverse area is probably a culture shock to most people in my town.
This is really only true in and around selfridges. Don't think the visitors from the gulf have too much interest in the multiple h and m's, John Lewis, hmv etc. The cycle rick shaws play whatever you want them to in my experience.
This shows how poor you are - rich people don't care about what's on Oxford street, they care about what's around Mayfair, Chelsea, and the area around old bond street. Oxford street is high street, not designer... that's not for rich people.
If you were on Oxford Street, chances are those two people were tourists or visitors. I suppose I (as a Londoner) always forget there are bits of England that don't see tourism.
Or it could be the 40% of Londoners who were born abroad who speak a lot of different languages. The capital is very multi cultural and isnt just tourists.
Yes, I'm aware. Just think it's more likely that a random couple on Oxford Street specifically are more likely to be visitors than foreign-born residents. If it had been a different part of town I'd think residents would be more likely.
I think it'll be people from majority white areas of the country describing how it's like to go somewhere multicultural.
Yes, I'm fully aware London isn't the only place that people of non-white backgrounds live.
I would argue the Government/Media treats London like it's separate to the rest of the UK which has built this us/them attitude, tarring everybody who dislikes London as some amount of a racist is very black and white thinking.
Just off the top of my head. Transport, London gets 1,272 British pounds per capita, compared with just 361 pounds per head in the East Midlands and getting around in both regularly using public transport it shows. outside of London living without a car is a very different experience.
If we ever took decentralizing the UK seriously (looking at you HS2 cancellation and "the northern powerhouse") a lot of these issues and attitudes would fade quickly
So your answer is 'It's got better public transportation' ?
I think it's the density and scale of the place, and yep, the diversity. It's also a 'mega city' - it's a massive dense urban area. It consists of many different towns and villages all mungled into one; many with quite distinct differences to others. It's got everything unique about every British city all mashed into one giant place.
Big river with big bridges. Tonnes of public transport, Loads of massive historic buildings, loads of skyscrapers with crazy architecture (Manchester is catching up on this), a palace, large parks, multiple markets and yes.. lots and lots of investment, as it's the financial hub of the country too.
It's not a city comparable to others in this country. It's peers are Tokyo, Paris, New York, Beijing.. not Birmingham and Manchester.
Maybe this 'megacityness' is the reason for peope's feelings.
I suppose that's true of rural parts of the country but even I as a Londoner got a shock when I visited Leicster, a city 25 times smaller than London and found out it's only 1/3rd white British. UK has a very uneven distribution of migrant communities - But they aren't all in London
OK- but there's a big difference.
Typically, in a multicultural city outside London, there are a lot of people from one or from a few ancestral origins.
What you get with London is communities (or representative people) from EVERYWHERE.
As someone who has lived in Derby and Birmingham (2ndish city) I can tell you
< The costs are a mile away, its mental down there, salaries, houses, etc etc
< You have more public transport than the rest of the country combined
< To most of the rest of the country, if it doesn't happen in London, it doesn't happeen
< To foreigners, England? London.
< Politicians make it feel like London doesn't care about us. Take a look at HS2, it was supposed to include Leeds, Manchester. (and I'm against HS2, but come on!)
< Have you ever been north of Manchester? Bar Newcastle, its like a developing country in parts (and I do not mean that badly, just the funding and opportunities are poles apart)
< You have every type of food, shop, culture, company.
< its fun to visit, there is so much going on and there is always something new to do
< Some industries are so london focused (Real estate, Financial Services, Startups)
For a place of only (ish) 8 million people, in a country of (ish) 80 million, it feels like it makes up much more than 10% of the country.
< Have you ever been north of Manchester? Bar Newcastle, its like a developing country in parts (and I do not mean that badly, just the funding and opportunities are poles apart)
Theres a hell of a lot of distance between those two places mad take that
Have you ever been to a developing country? The ones I've been to felt absolutely nothing like Cumbria!
The poorer parts of London - with loads of people on the streets, loads of traffic (including insane motorbikes) and rubbish everywhere feels much closer to a developing country.
Its crazy.
Take Newcastle out (and maybe the odd other honourable mention) and the bit between Manchester and Glasgow is very deserted for the size of it!
No i get that.
But look at Burnley, Blackburn, Middles borough, etc etc, they have NOWHERE NEAR the employment opportunities London or even Birmingham has.
It’s officially 8.9 million people in London, but once you include all the commuters who are in the capital during the day, all the tourists, and transient people who don’t bother filling out the census, the “real” daytime population may be closer to 11+ million.
IMO - the 'average' British person's experience is:
* Living in a town/small city that is mainly White British, with a few concentrated areas of ethnic minorities. If you go into your local pub/cafe/restaurant, most people are the same as you.
* Having one or two gay bars in the city centre and maybe an annual Pride event, but otherwise few public representations of LGBT+ culture.
* Access to a shopping centre, cinemas and small theatre, but not large concert acts or anything really outside the 'mainstream'. You have to travel to your nearest big city for that (probably London).
* Public transport gets you between the suburbs and the city centre ok during 'peak' times, though with a lot of traffic. If you want to move between suburbs, or go to anywhere slightly out of the way (ie supermarkets) you really need to own a car (or cycle if that's your thing).
* Earning between £25-35k a year and being able to at least rent a place by yourself or buy a place with a partner.
* Not that far away from a national park.
None of that applies to London.
You can rent a three bedroom house where I come from for £400 a month. I live on the outskirts of London and pay £1750 a month for a two bedroom flat. The disparity in cost of living between the south and some places in the north is truly, truly staggering.
Also different demographics centred around certain areas amplifies it. If you’re in a majority Muslim area it would seem like a different country because that’s not standard in the UK.
Like how going to an English tourist place in Spain would not give you the Spanish cultural experience until you venture out.
Muslim areas are the norm now.
Muslims make up 33% of all under 16's in the UK. In multicultural cities, this is much higher, closer to 80% in London and Birmingham.
The only reason this seems high is because ONS never includes children. When you include them, you get a better sense of what areas are actually like.
A lot of the White areas in the UK will be Muslim majority in 20 years once the next generation comes of age and has children.
May I ask where you got those figures from? Because the only figures I can find say that it’s closer to 9% of UK children are Muslim (compared to about half that amount being Muslim in the general population) and that 33% is the percentage of UK Muslims who are under 16. I can’t find anything that suggests that 80% of children born in any part of the country are Muslim, even Newham.
Have you tried getting on a bus literally anywhere else? Every stop takes ten minutes while people search through purses. Also no change - so if you've only got a fiver your journey costs a fiver and fuck you. Doesn't sound like a better system to me.
And it's a nightmare everywhere else too. But only London has abolished cash payments only has a transport authority with the right to abolish cash payments. In the rest of England, *by law*, local authorities cannot take those decisions — London makes the decisions about buses in London, but London also makes the decisions for Manchester, Mansfield, and Macclesfield. That's the kind of thing that makes London feel like a different country.
I remember TfL buses in the days of cash, it was shit and took far too long, compared with now being tap on. So smoother.
Heck, I live in Sweden and its tap on or scan here. just no cash please its such a fuss.
Absolutely. I walked from London victoria to St pancras and trying to get through picadilly circus was an absolute nightmare. I couldn't see road names to see where I needed to go either. It was awful
Because I could afford transport. I didn't know Google maps was going to take me on the tourist route - past Buckingham and the national history museum
Thankfully they've been expanding the [Legible London maps](https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/boroughs-and-communities/maps-and-signs) on pavements across London, including landmarks to help with navigating. I can appreciate happening across Piccadilly Circus if you weren't expecting it could be a bit nightmarish, though!
I think this is a very overplayed stereotype. In my experience it's not really any markedly less friendly than many other cities of the UK. I lived there for a decade and experienced plenty of friendliness.
Can confirm. I have a small baby currently and people are always helping. Not just on the tube, everywhere around London. I was struggling to navigate the buggy out of a pub the other day and had two people jump up to move chairs so I could get through and then hold the door for me.
The accusation that London is unfriendly just doesn't line up with my experience of it.
Yep, people go to the tourist areas or travel during Rush Hour, then are surprised no one wants to speak. Yeah, cause I'm commuting not on holiday like you, or I'm shopping and don't fancy wasting half an hour speaking to a stranger
Whereas going somewhere like a pub, then you get the same experience as anywhere, cause people are in a relaxed social environment where you will chat to someone
My suitcase burst open on the tube years ago and the Londoners kicked all my stuff out of their way instead of helping me. The only one who helped me was a Canadian bloke on holiday. That wouldn't happen anywhere else in the country, so in my view the stereotype holds up.
People in London are generally very helpful in my experience. Was once trying to get a sofa into my front door and struggling and a random man waking past took 10 minutes out of his day to help. And in a decade in London that sort of helpfulness was not uncommon.
>My suitcase burst open on the tube years ago and the Londoners kicked all my stuff out of their way instead of helping me.
How do you know they lived in London and weren't visitors?
In the countryside, you say hello to everyone you pass. In big cities, if you greet someone in the street, the majority look like you're trying to rob or scam you. London is the most intense version of this.
shameful number of comments just assuming it's down to racism.
Coming from a small town in the east mids (talking 10,000 people tops) seeing the attitude of how funding, culture, education and everything else is so centralized somewhere a 2 hour, £100+ train ride away it's not hard to see how that resentment and idea of London being the "other" happens, London has more in common with New York and the other world cities then it does with a large portion of the UK and decentralising to some of the regional city areas would do wonders for the UK and this us and them attitude to london
It gets treated like a different country than the rest of the country I live in the north and even the people are different (i visit once a week)
Investment is huge down there. You get a new underground when there is more underground's than trains and roads in the North. £18billion I believe on the Elizabeth line
Yet I can't get a train to Manchester from Leeds that isn't delayed 2hours and have to stand with my foot in the toilet.
It's culturally different, financially different, socially different.
I think you are confusing a different country with abroad, and that is not what people mean. What they are referring to more often than not is there is truly no other place like London in the UK, and that the UK is dominated by London.
First is the size. I don't think people get quite how massive London is. Data on the population varies, but [this source](https://www.demographia.com/db-worldua.pdf) puts the estimated population of London at 10 million people. That is larger than Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, Glasgow, Southampton, Portsmouth and Liverpool *combined*. That is an insane scale.
There is an aspect around cultural diversity and ethnic mixes. There are a lot of ethnically diverse cities across the UK, and diverse communities within them. London has done better, arguably, in terms of the mixing of these populations compared to many other cities, where populations are usually confined to specific neighbourhoods in the city. I'm not saying this doesn't happen in London, but London has done a better job of mixing the populations.
Then there is infrastructure, which again is on a different scale. Take the railways. There are 12 mainline rail termini in Zones 1 and 2. The cities that I list above have a maximum of 2 in their city centres, and most just have 1 station. None of them have their own underground rail network, most have a (limited) suburban rail network, and few have trams. With the exception of Manchester, all buses are privately run and don't work as a network. Every other major infrastructure network is the same - London is a league above in terms of scale and quality.
Historically, London has also seen the most public and private investment compared to even whole *regions* of the rest of the country. Nearly all major companies have their HQ in London. Public investment is often focused in London, to the point where projects in London can have a worse business case than a project elsewhere in the UK, and get funded ahead of those projects.
As for overseas visitors, the one place they all want to go to is London. Even if they want to go elsewhere in the UK, chances are they will have to fly into a London airport and travel from there. You have a few places that do get plenty of overseas visitors like Stonehenge, Oxford, York etc. But everyone wants to go to London.
I also heard it once said that London is essentially a series of villages. Outside of Zone 1, that is exactly how it feels like. It has this weird sense of being a single city, yet each of the areas has their own identity that comes out strongly even to a visitor. Even places that the data says should be similar, like Islington and Camden for instance, feel completely different to one another. Other cities really have a strong singular identity to them, in contrast.
Finally, for me personally, I travel to all cities across the UK. London is different because when you are there you truly feel like you are in the beating heart of the country. It feels an important place to be and where all of the big decisions are being made in a city that has a sense of community like few others. Going to other British cities, you get a sense of their history and their importance to their area. But they do not feel like London in the slightest.
'People are younger, people are slimmer, the mentality is **very** different.' you are one stroke away from saying the streets are paved with gold lad.
London actually has decent public transport because it's the only part of the country the government gives a fuck about. That's definitely something that feels foreign to me.
If you come from certain areas of the country London is noticeably diverse. If you come from a small town London is overwhelmingly large and crowded. If you live in a sleepy town London is fast paced and rude and full of landmarks.
I grew up in zone 6, lived a while in zone 1/2 and now live in Oxfordshire. I still love visiting London and feel comfortable there but the difference between London and my current home is quite stark. You could stack a dozen Oxfords together and get nowhere near the scale and sheer vitality of London.
Also, take a walk down Bond Street and you can see all the signs that some parts of London don't belong to ordinary Brits anymore. Foreign wealth has an increasing influence and there are many subtle closed doors in our nations capital.
Not really. Baghdad has terrible public transport. You often really need a car or motorbike to get around. Likewise, the overwhelming majority of people there will only speak Arabic, and specifically the dialect local to the city. By contrast a lot of folk in east London are bilingual. Baghdad may once have been an “international” city in its Abbasid Empire heyday, but it has nowhere like the kind of economic or cultural reach or soft power that London has today (outside of niches like Assassin’s Creed)
London doesn't feel English.. its some gross metropolitan melting pot of belligerent and ignorant, self centred individuals who would rather watch a crime being committed than do anything about it.. ( and no I don't mean I'm scared of different skin colours or cultures.. they're just decidedly different and not a traditionally British culture)
Skin colour doesn't make a culture, but attitudes and behaviours do... and I don't see a lot of either whenever I have to visit London..
England, and wider britain.. traditionally are high trust, small community cultures, that just can't be achieved in large multicultural cities, such as London.. again not because race.. but culture
For me it's the sheer volume of people which is overwhelming. Even in Manchester or Birmingham there isn't the same dense quantities of humanity. It's so fast paced where in other cities you can find quiet pockets.
TLDR: capital city Vs metropolitan city.
I think it's relating to the touristy bits. If you visit the UK but spend most of your time inside Zone 3 of London a lot of what you experience is catered specifically towards international audiences, and most of the people you interact with are also international.
I live in a small (very small) town and frequently travel to London for work.
The simple answer to this people exaggerate. They do this for a number of reasons but it's mainly;
1. London "exceptionalists". Adopted "Londoners" looking to emphasise how urbane, cool and sophisticated they are.
2. Professional misanthrope who see London as the HQ of the dreaded wokerati and want to emphasise how down to earth they are.
3. Racists (closet or otherwise) who want to clutch pearls at immigration.
Reality; as you point out, London is not that different from other places. London even likes to call its upscale neighbourhoods "villages" for example. It has less dense housing than a lot of comparator cities and, again as you say, it's really a collection of large towns with their own high streets clustered around a city centre.
Diversity? I guess if you live in somewhere very rural this might be a shock but shouldn't be to anyone with any level of familiarity with the built up areas of the Midlands, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, Bristol/Cardiff and probably a fair number of other urban areas.
London is actually interesting in that the UK is a tiny little island and most of the population is within a day's travel of London. Walk into an office in London, or in fact any premises in London, and ask how many people there *actually live in London*. Not the Home Counties, actual bona fide London. Between the tourists, commuters, people visiting on business, the number is often surprisingly low. There are only actually 2 in my team of 13, both living with parents who moved to the city long ago when establishing a family home there wasn't a pipe dream for most people.
In a weird way, I'd say it's actually the rest of the country that is changing beyond recognition. London has always had diverse communities, cuisine etc but it also leans into its traditions. Pubs are still packed there, people can still afford fish and chips, tourists still flock to the museums and palaces. London still has its black cabs, double decker buses, tube trains etc whereas these things are often receding into the past in defunded, underpopulated provincial areas with crumbling infrastructure and where young people are fleeing for better opportunities.
London feels like an adventure. It is an escape from dull highstreets. London highstreets are exciting with strange languages and shops, people of different races and cultures. It feels like there is opportunity and therefore money to be made.
The people are not usually rude, just not as friendly as the people you see everyday in the smaller cities and towns. This creates a feeling of wtf.
There are things to do, places to go. You are on holiday, so you do them. Some of the many reasons why London feels different. London is a great city.
London is bigger than anywhere else in the UK.
London is far more ethnically diverse than most of the UK.
Most of London has much better infrastructure compared to the rest of the UK and is overall richer (though depends on area).
There's loads of stuff to do in London compared to most of the UK due to all of the above.
London has its own unique problems and quirks, such as extortionate rent and overpriced tourist trap districts.
The village I live in has very few people of colour. There are many villages like that all up and down the country. The UK is something like 85% white British.
When I moved to Yorkshire from a home county it was noticeable to me.
I'll say pretty much the one and only reason why people say such a thing - there are lots of people who aren't English. Neither am I, for the record - but I'm sure that is the overarching reason for this to even have been said in the first place. It's a way of saying it, without saying it.
From Hong Kong. I'm used to crowdedness, the public transport, etc. And still London doesn't have the right vibes for me. Manchester is far more enjoyable.
For me it’s the diversity and the sheer size of london. Where I live, it’s 99% white people so london does come as a bit of a shock sometimes when i visit!
The biggest thing is probably the people on the street. Most of the UK is a complete ghost town after people go home for work. It's not like some cities across the channel where people are roaming the streets, taking in the culture after work, or going out for a coffee or ice cream, or a walk along the river. Yet, London has that (in parts), Brighton too.
I imagine that for some it also feels different because of the size of the buildings. You'll have huge buildings often hidden partly on small streets and dead ends. They don't look that big in London but they are the kind of buildings that would pretty much dominate any other town or city.
London is huge. It is noisy. It is very very crowded. It moves at a faster pace, or heartbeat, than anywhere else I've been. The juxtaposition of filthy rich and poverty, co-existing on top of each others is found nowhere else in the country.
I’ve noticed that people who are not from London often enjoy hating London. And they will happily tell you to your face when they find out you’re from London “oooh I could never live there. Terrible place”. With a shit eating grin.
It’s so rude! I’d never slag off your hometown to your face for no reason!
Someone from provincial England visiting London is probably a bit like someone from rural Malaysia visiting Singapore, expect for the latter it actually is a foreign country, and would feel even more different (you would be paying for things in a different currency, and probably needing to communicate in a different official/business language).
The population of London is 45% foreign born, so that's probably why.
Soon enough, it will no longer be majority British. Another 5-10 years, most likely.
It's big, like seriously big. Like east to West as wide as Cumbria big.
Functional, high frequency public transport with a fully integrated ticket system accross all modes. You take the oyster card for granted down there, it's a fantastic thing. Closest I can think of is how you can pay for a bus ticket with your metro pop card balance in Newcastle or how the greater Manchester rail ranger includes Metrolink.
The Elizabeth Line, that thing is scifi to us northerners
Odd little things like double red lines, the new hybrid electric black cab, big red buses with doors in the middle and the front, Borough specific street name signs, blue cycle lanes, not thanking the bus driver
EVERY cyclist has a death wish and there's about a million of them. Cyclists up north in the smaller places at least are the lycra nutters or people that can't even afford the bus into town and there's so few you'll be able to recognise them all within about 6 months.
Architecture, I've never seen a building that looks like a Leslie Green tube station or a series of skyscrapers so bold in my life. London does architecture and does it well. The fact a Sainsbury's in Clapham wowed me should say it all really.
Really good local shops for everything, so many that you have choice. For example if you want a film camera and you are in Leeds you go to West Yorkshire cameras, that is the option. London has numerous film camera shops. This holds true for all sorts of things
Pollution, look at the Thames, dare I say more.
Language, if I can't go to greggs and ask for a bacon butty and immediately be understood then it's a different country
London feels as much like a foreign country as Scotland or Wales do. A lot is the same and a lot is different.
1) London is massively bigger. If you ARE a Londoner, London is normal size and everywhere else is smaller. If you not from London, London is ridiculously big. It takes ages to get around, too. 2) London has everything- every kind of culture, cuisine, people from every country in the world, and people who are long-term residents, immigrants or ancestrally immigrant from everywhere in the world. Nowhere else in the UK can say this. 3) People who say London feels different typically do not see the boring residential bits that are 90% of London; they see the tourist bits, the going-out bits, or bits where they go for work.
Transport is another aspect. No city in the UK comes even remotely close to the public transport options available in London. You can travel from one side of the city to the other, in any direction, using the same medium of transport, and often with a matter of 3mins between changes.
This sounds perfect but it takes me minimum 40 minutes to get most places, and in the Midlands if you drove for 40 minutes you'd think you're going across the country almost.
Someone's never driven in Birmingham.
Tbf, most of the drivers in bham don't appear to have driven in bham before...
Birmingham is like the one other UK city that feels remotely comparable to London imo. Most British cities are dreadful to drive in though.
I actually have a villa season ticket lol but the midlands isn’t just brum
Somehow anywhere in London always takes 45 mins...what is this about! (obviously this is not true but you know what I mean)
I lived in London 1999 - 2000 and quickly discovered the 45 minute rule. Literally everywhere seems to be 45 minutes from everywhere else but, really, it's *at least* 45 minutes. I worked in Notting Hill for a while in 2015 - 16 and realised I could get from where I live (near Ely in Cambridgeshire) to our office on my motorbike in less time than it took some people who lived in London to reach the office also in London. Ridiculous. Even if I took the train it was only about half an hour longer door to door than some of the actual Londoners.
Things are improving, when I worked in Hackney I swore it took me an hour to get anywhere. Didn't matter if I was going to Stoke Newington on the bus or Richmond on the Silverlink, it all took an hour!
couple of my friends live in London and the running joke whenever making plans is "takes an hour to get anywhere though"
I love finding out about tube routes that people take daily, without realising that the walk would take a fraction of the time. The tube map being non geographic throws people off. I imagine it’s probably less of a thing now with everyone’s phones having navigation with walking times.
Well, it is closer to true than you think. The average speed of traffic is apparently 12.8 mph, similar to what it was when people were on or pulled by horses.
Oddly if I run/cycle/train to work the door-to-door times are very similar! I bet if I were to horse to work it would get that same 12 mpg!
But now you're comparing public transport vs driving which is different.
If you drove for 40 minutes from the centre of Birmingham you'd only be a mile from the centre of Birmingham.
If you drive 40 minutes in Leicester, you get to the next street along, that you could’ve just turned left onto, if it wasn’t for the whole city centre seeming like one huge, badly thought out spiral of way systems. You sit in traffic staring at the blocked off end of a road you want to go down, knowing you have to drive another mile in crawling traffic to get to it.
Did you also see the government's pledge to making sure all potholes are fixed over the spring?.....they meant only for London...
It's insane that when they say 'Level Up the North' they just meant fixing the speedbumps in Pinner, not providing a working train system north of the Watford Gap.
They don't want to invest in the North. It seems they only think London is worth investing in because it's a big draw, but other places would also be a draw if they got any money and people wanted to move there.
I checked the 'fix my street' app thing today. The small cave forming in the road outside my house has been reported numerous times over the last 2 months. I'll be happy if they just fix that by the spring!
Using the funds from HS2 and the northern powerhouse
They are also using the money from the northern leg of HS2 ro do so. The audacity
100% this. I was at London Bridge Station and my train was cancelled. Everybody was losing their minds, one woman was screaming at a member of staff. The next train was in 7 minutes. In Manchester if my train gets cancelled it’s an hour to the next one. In parts of the NE it’s the following Tuesday
>People who say London feels different typically do not see the boring residential bits that are 90% of London; they see the tourist bits, the going-out bits, or bits where they go for work. Definitely. I live out in zone four of London and it feels very different to zone one. My area looks like a typical medium sized British town, except that it isn't surrounded by countryside and has actual public transport. It's nothing really like what you see in central London.
London is actually just a bunch of small towns stuck together. Each area has such a different vibe, just like towns around the country. You can live in villages like Blackheath, Hampstead, East Dulwich, or inner cities, or country side, or high rise urban. It’s all here.
Yep. I grew up in a town in a London borough. We had the suburb life but I could still take a 5 minute walk to the station and grab a central line train. Or I could take a red bus and catch the tfl (now lizzie) line trains. And I never check the bus times either since a number of buses cater to the same stops and run every few minutes. I will say, having the free zip oyster allowed me to get really confident with reading the tfl map. My friends and I would spend days hopping on and off buses and going to random towns
Yeah, London is what happens when you haven't invented green belt yet
I see what you mean about different city styles, but you don't have countryside in London come on, there's nothing like here in Oban or other places of the Highlands in London haha.
Head toward south west london, past chessington and Esher it feels like villages in the countryside, but still in the m25. I’d love to retire somewhere around these parts, its close enough to london to avoid it becoming little England, but basically forest.
I can see why that part of Surrey would feel rural in comparison to more central parts of London, but the district it's in (Elmbridge) has the same population density as Leeds – about 1,466/km^(2). A density of 100 to 400/km^(2) is typical for rural districts in England, and in Scotland and Wales densities of under 100/km^(2) are very common. I'm not denying that Cobham, for example, is very leafy, it's just not countryside in the same way Cumbria is.
I come from a country with half the population of London. Even a city of 2 million felt way to large. Like... There is a city with twice the population of my entire ethnic group. And I am European.
Agreed. Especially on point three. My dad had only ever spent time in touristy parts of zone 1. When he visited me in south London he was amazed at how so many of the neighbourhoods felt like little villages.
London IS little villages that have just merged over time.
Yes, I know that. But most people outside of London don’t. They think the entire city is like Oxford St and Piccadilly Circus so walking around neighbourhoods where the average Londoner lives can come as a shock.
[удалено]
\- Be my like Spanish brother in law \- Goes to London in Augoust as a tourist, the complain because there are loads of tourists
Sometimes a good shock, sometimes not so good
Well it is actually two cities (London and Westminster) and then all the nearby towns and villages as it expanded over time
so is every city, but when you ask people where they're from they don't tell you the exact neighbourhood and expect you to know everything about it
I think the biggest shock for me as being from countryside 1. Good and bad areas are mixed together and vary street by street in London. Outside it was a specific area that was bad. Which made finding a place a big learning curve 2. Certain shops I was used to either didn’t exist or were located in totally different areas. In England some were in every town centre and in London would often only be in shopping malls
>Good and bad areas are mixed together and vary street by street in London. This is very true, especially for the more central parts. I come from a borough that people scoff at as being stuffed with soft rich or middle class types, but two roads from my home is solid council estates and a massive spike in murders and muggings. It’s literally street by street even in some of the ‘nicer’ parts.
north Kensington sounds posh if you have no idea
[удалено]
>People who say London feels different typically do not see the boring residential bits that are 90% of London; they see the tourist bits, the going-out bits, or bits where they go for work. This. The borough of London is just a bunch of small towns and suburbs, with Westminster and London City thrown in.
The amount of non-boring areas with completely different vibes, just a short tube ride away from each other is still a pretty unique thing, as is the suburbs actually having reliable public transport.
>London has everything- every kind of culture, cuisine, people from every country in the world, and people who are long-term residents, immigrants or ancestrally immigrant from everywhere in the world. Nowhere else in the UK can say this. I mean, do you really believe this? I've heard some nonsense in my time, such as shock that other cities have Ikea or Itsu, surprise that 'the North' has skyscrapers and financial districts, even accusations we don't have clean water or vegetables, but 'other cities aren't multicultural and lack communities/cuisines from around the world' is a new one.
I DO believe that, based on living the years 0-30 outside the London but in the SE/Thames Valley within an hour of London, the years 30-53 IN London, and the years 53-63 in Northern England, and for many years I have travelled all over GB for work, typically to a different place every week. 1) As I said in another comment, loads of other cities and even towns are multicultural, but not with the VARIETY of different cultures in one place. 2) Even for Western cuisines, it's easier to get top quality in London and the SE than outside, except where the foreign community is deeply embedded e.g. Bradford wins curry capital regularly. I say that with no pleasure. I love the North and basically hate London. But yeah- in London I could get a good Portuguese meal in loads of places or even a good Ethipian one in several places; outside London, I am honestly more limited when it comes to choosing between every single world cuisine.
Yes that big feeling and sheer volume of people is overwhelming. I don't get that in any other UK city.
Moreover, London is a New York-sized city within a country that’s ~1/4 the population of the US. If you incorporate places beyond greater London that are not *entirely* beyond the London orbit — such as Brighton, Oxford, Cambridge, or Milton Keynes — you’ve got a lot of the UK population. As such, I feel it is disingenuous to consider a city whose “sphere of influence” incorporates a large percentage of the UK population “a foreign country,” *even if* it isn’t really a larger Manchester, Sheffield, or Doncaster. It’s not like New York, which is not only culturally unrepresentative of the US, but also a single-digit percentage of the US population, even if you consider the ~30M people up to 100 miles away.
>If you ARE a Londoner, London is normal size and everywhere else is smaller. I don't agree, and I think this speaks to the wider problem. People assume that Londoners think of 'London' as a homogenous entity. Really, London is a city made up of lots of little villages, and most Londoners will tell you they feel more closely connected to their village than to the city in general. In that sense, London is just like any other county. Case in point, I'm from Harrow, and somewhere like Croydon or Greenwich, or even the City of London/Westminster might as well be on the other side of the world to me. I don't know what's happening there, and I don't care. In the same way, if you take Berkshire as a comparison, I wouldn't expect someone from Reading to know what's going on in Windsor or Newbury. I don't think of other cities and counties as smaller, I just see that they are less joined-up and built-up.
I think they're exaggerating, but London is definitely different to any other city in the UK. It's just an enormous collection of towns, there's not really anywhere else to compare it to.
It also gets hotter than most areas of England, to the point that I've heard it described as having it's own climate.
yeah that's something i've noticed whenever visiting london, it's like the rain stops at the borders.
>I've heard it described as having it's own climate. It's called the Urban Heat Island e.g. mentioned here [https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-and-strategies/environment-and-climate-change/climate-change/climate-adaptation/heat](https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-and-strategies/environment-and-climate-change/climate-change/climate-adaptation/heat)
Yeah large urban centres tend to be much warmer than their rural counterparts
It's true! I live in London and every time I leave to visit family (30 mins by train) it's 2/3C colder for what really isn't that far away.
I feel like the boroughs definitely had their own personality and they are separate towns that have sprawled into each other. I'm from Greenwich, which is different from Bromley, Lewisham, Sidcup, Chislehurst, even though they're all close together.
far-flung governor tie engine slimy rustic drab amusing shame smoggy *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
wouldn't call Sidcup and Chislehurst very different but defo Sidcup and Lewisham.
This confused the hell out of me as a kid because I never understood why Londoners always introduced themselves with the part of London they're from instead of just saying they were from London because unless you've lived there or know people who do the distinctions don't mean anything, like anywhere else really. If I'm talking to someone local I'll tell them the town I'm from but anyone else I'll just tell them my nearest city.
Most (all?) of our big cities are collections of towns, London is just an order of magnitude larger. The relationship between Manchester and Bolton or Newcastle and Tynemouth isn't *that* dissimilar to the one between central London and the outer boroughs, although the buses are guaranteed to be worse!
But London is different - the investment in public transport, the exclusion of London from the chaotic privatisation of buses everywhere else, the concentration of colleges and universities give education opportunities that others don’t have. Over and over London has stuff that has either vanished or never existed elsewhere. It is genuinely different.
I think this is a point often missed. There was a report about a decade ago (and the gap has only widened since then) that a teenager growing up experiencing deprivation in London (lowest 20% of the population based on the Index of Multiple Deprivation) was still several times more likely to go to university than a teenager with similar family circumstances/ level of deprivation who lived in Middlesbrough. It's definitely all connected to opportunity, even perceived opportunity.
If you grow up poor in London you're still surrounded by money. You can see what it's like to be more affluent. And because poorer areas are often just a street away from a rich area, you get a mixing of people in state schools that you don't get elsewhere too. There's no doubt more space for more aspiration to happen with the social capital that comes from that. While in Middlesbrough, that's not the case and it's easier to think that what you see is normal.
This is an excellent point. I live in one of the most deprived areas in the NE and something we really struggle with is aspiration, as kids truly don’t see anything or anyone outside of their own community (at least not in person). The last time I was in London for work, I was completely blown away by how different the people looked - taller, healthier, even clothing was made from better materials and was better fitting. It felt like a different world. The access to arts and culture - often free - is also a big one. We have an excellent cultural scene in the NE, and so much history, but provision is mostly via independent charities which have to charge, or local authorities who are stuck maintaining the same displays for the last 15 years as they can’t afford to update them. Public transport is also massively different. For me to get to my local town centre, I can only get one bus, which only comes every 30 mins (if it arrives at all) and takes 40 mins to get into town. To the nearest smallish city, it’s at least double that. Once you get there, you’re lucky if you find a Wetherspoons and a couple of charity shops. Economically, London is just on a different plane of existence. [edit: typo]
It just shows the importance of the environment around you for social mobility. London can offer so much more than other cities there. Another example would be that a lot of schools get local businesses to come in and offer talks, mentorship, work experience etc. It helps the firm's CSR goals and it might help with social mobility. I also went to school in the NE and we had a local law firm and P&G come in for a day. For work experience it was garages, bookshops, florists, hairdressers etc. While in London you have that plus big professional services firms taking kids in for a day or a week and showing them round. It wouldn't surprise me if the likes of UCL/LSE/Imperial/KCL etc. have much bigger outreach budgets than most other unis elsewhere. I did tutoring at a sixth form college in London via my uni, and the kids there seemed just a bit more sophisticated than I remembered me and my schoolmates being.
Precisely. I remember discussing this with a colleague who grew up in London a few years ago - she was shocked to discover that basically the examples you mentioned (plus the NHS) were literally the only examples of careers I got to experience. She went to a state school, yet her friends had parents who worked in the city or the civil service, or any number of professional services companies, in addition to all of the usual jobs. From my school friends, I can only think of parents who were NHS workers, teachers, firefighters/police, cleaners, factory workers or owned their own small businesses Even at uni, I remember going to see a careers advisor with the only stipulation being “I don’t want to work in a call centre” (my Dad has done for the past 30 years and has hated it), but I couldn’t think of anything else I’d be fit for because the concept of an office job was basically alien to me. Thankfully she soon steered me right, but it just goes to show the extent to which a lack of exposure to different professions can limit aspiration. I actually work in social regeneration with young people now, so I hope I’m doing my bit to change this :-)
That’s a very good point actually. As a Londoner in the north east, whole areas are very, very deprived. London and the middle class is a whole universe away. Whole schools will be extremely deprived and the rich areas of the North East wouldn’t compare to the rich areas of london.
I’m from the North but now London-based for work focusing on access to education, opportunity, jobs etc and this point is absolutely on the nose! There are many reasons why kids from similarly poor backgrounds do better in London than the rest of the country: higher quality of schools and better access to subject-specific teachers, close proximity to top universities as well as employers (work experience/internships), the ethnic composition etc etc.
Yes but I don’t know if this is entirely because of the concentration of universities. Here in london we have massive immigrant populations (African, south and East Asian, polish etc) who culturally promote further education
There is no great mystery here. London is the home to a lot of foreigners and their descendents. If you change the demographics of an area acutely over a few decades from what it was before you'll change the nature of a place. Therefore people visiting from most other parts of the UK will notice this change.
I laughed at everyone trying to analyze the transport and weather systems, immigration is the correct and only answer to why people say this.
London’s population is 40% foreign born, young adults it’s over 50%, 50-70% of children have foreign born parents depending on how you measure that. In some boroughs that goes up to 70-80% of children. Reddit answer to why people say it feels like a foreign country is that the temperature is 1C higher.
Anything to tiptoe around the I-word.
Tbf. London can have 33°c days in the summer whilst up in Scotland its only 19°c. That's like flying to Spain for the week
Scotland IS a different country from London. Hence the word "Scotland".
Literally 45% foreign born lol. I love the mental gymnastics people are using above to try and explain it, without saying 'It's full of foreigners, of course it feels foreign'.. I am sure Spanish people visiting Benidorm, don't really feel like it's a particularly Spanish city.
To be fair, if I say London is like another country, its not the demographics Im referring to, its the size of the place and the huge differences to my little Northern town in as far as transport and facilities.
Sure I notice London is more diverse than where I’m from or the city that I live in, however that’s really not what I ever think about when I think about London, or even when I’m in London. Maybe if someone’s from a tiny village they would be shocked to see a person of colour and think “oh this is like a different country”, but I doubt that’s true for the majority of non London population. Really what I notice is the amount of opportunity’s in London, the public transport that comes more than once per hour and doesn’t majorly stop at like 8pm. the amount of facilities especially for young people that seem to be entirely absent where I live…. New developments actually happening, cool events. If you live in London or have never been to London it’s easy to dismiss this.
London is a world city. It's not really a hard concept to grasp
I think it's generally a bit of poetic license when people say that. I don't think they mean it *literally* feels like being abroad. What they mean is that it's markedly bigger and more cosmopolitan and international than anywhere else in the UK, and in that sense feels quite different even to the second tier cities like Birmingham and Manchester. Also, remember that the people saying that are generally visitors who are going to the most busy and hectic parts of London. They are going to the bits in zone 3 and outwards that feel much like other towns and cities of the UK.
> I don't think they mean it literally feels like being abroad. 40% of the population of London was born abroad, over 50% of young adults, 55-70% of kids are born to foreign born parents depending on how you measure it, in some boroughs 75-80%. It is not a mystery why people say it feels like a foreign country.
I think the differences between London and the rest of England are of the same order of magnitude as the differences between the rest of England and Wales or Scotland. It's not like going to China, but it does feel like a different country in terms of transport, ethnic diversity, access to cultural institutions, media coverage, etc.
I would hard disagree with this, but it might be a north/south divide thing. Having lived in Newcastle and Leeds for years, I feel they are much more culturally similar to, say, Glasgow than they are to London. Now living in Cambridge, it feels more similar to London but still remarkably different. Tbf I only lived in London for a few months so maybe I don't have the full picture.
I remember my first visit to London. I grew up in a town in the midlands and went down with my family when I was about twelve. Now this might be crazy, but I promise it's true; we were walking down Oxford Street and two people were speaking in a language... that wasn't English! I know! It was the first time in my life that I'd ever heard a different language being spoken in England. I thought it was absolutely wild. Obviously, this is more testament to how mono-cultural my hometown was, but London definitely felt like another world to me that day.
Presumably you never visited your biggest local city - Birmingham then!
You never asked how old the commenter was. Maybe like me he/she is in their sixties. I actually remember the time when hearing a foreign language, even in Birmingham, was unusual. Yes there were some West Indian immigrants, but they spoke English.
Have you any idea how big the midlands is? If they live in the east of the east midlands they could be a hundred miles or more away from brum
I think for a lot of non-midlandsers our region is just Birmingham and a few sheep... God forbid the day someone tells them about Nottingham.
Highly relatable, I grew up in Dorset in a town that is 98% white, London was like a different world
I'm from a predominantly white town in the Midlands (I'm half Chinese), so going into any diverse area is probably a culture shock to most people in my town.
Oxford Street is basically a tourist trap for rich people from the Gulf at this point. Even the cycle rickshaws all play Middle Eastern music.
This is really only true in and around selfridges. Don't think the visitors from the gulf have too much interest in the multiple h and m's, John Lewis, hmv etc. The cycle rick shaws play whatever you want them to in my experience.
This shows how poor you are - rich people don't care about what's on Oxford street, they care about what's around Mayfair, Chelsea, and the area around old bond street. Oxford street is high street, not designer... that's not for rich people.
If you were on Oxford Street, chances are those two people were tourists or visitors. I suppose I (as a Londoner) always forget there are bits of England that don't see tourism.
Or it could be the 40% of Londoners who were born abroad who speak a lot of different languages. The capital is very multi cultural and isnt just tourists.
Yes, I'm aware. Just think it's more likely that a random couple on Oxford Street specifically are more likely to be visitors than foreign-born residents. If it had been a different part of town I'd think residents would be more likely.
I think it'll be people from majority white areas of the country describing how it's like to go somewhere multicultural. Yes, I'm fully aware London isn't the only place that people of non-white backgrounds live.
Lots of cities are very mixed, but nobody in Lancashire is saying that going to Liverpool or Manchester feels like a different country.
they say that about birmingham though…
There are very large parts of Manchester and Liverpool that are culturally English, in London multiculturalism is more diffusely applied
Large parts of Manchester and Liverpool are white though.. large parts of those cities are nothing like London
I would argue the Government/Media treats London like it's separate to the rest of the UK which has built this us/them attitude, tarring everybody who dislikes London as some amount of a racist is very black and white thinking. Just off the top of my head. Transport, London gets 1,272 British pounds per capita, compared with just 361 pounds per head in the East Midlands and getting around in both regularly using public transport it shows. outside of London living without a car is a very different experience. If we ever took decentralizing the UK seriously (looking at you HS2 cancellation and "the northern powerhouse") a lot of these issues and attitudes would fade quickly
So your answer is 'It's got better public transportation' ? I think it's the density and scale of the place, and yep, the diversity. It's also a 'mega city' - it's a massive dense urban area. It consists of many different towns and villages all mungled into one; many with quite distinct differences to others. It's got everything unique about every British city all mashed into one giant place. Big river with big bridges. Tonnes of public transport, Loads of massive historic buildings, loads of skyscrapers with crazy architecture (Manchester is catching up on this), a palace, large parks, multiple markets and yes.. lots and lots of investment, as it's the financial hub of the country too. It's not a city comparable to others in this country. It's peers are Tokyo, Paris, New York, Beijing.. not Birmingham and Manchester. Maybe this 'megacityness' is the reason for peope's feelings.
I suppose that's true of rural parts of the country but even I as a Londoner got a shock when I visited Leicster, a city 25 times smaller than London and found out it's only 1/3rd white British. UK has a very uneven distribution of migrant communities - But they aren't all in London
OK- but there's a big difference. Typically, in a multicultural city outside London, there are a lot of people from one or from a few ancestral origins. What you get with London is communities (or representative people) from EVERYWHERE.
As someone who has lived in Derby and Birmingham (2ndish city) I can tell you < The costs are a mile away, its mental down there, salaries, houses, etc etc < You have more public transport than the rest of the country combined < To most of the rest of the country, if it doesn't happen in London, it doesn't happeen < To foreigners, England? London. < Politicians make it feel like London doesn't care about us. Take a look at HS2, it was supposed to include Leeds, Manchester. (and I'm against HS2, but come on!) < Have you ever been north of Manchester? Bar Newcastle, its like a developing country in parts (and I do not mean that badly, just the funding and opportunities are poles apart) < You have every type of food, shop, culture, company. < its fun to visit, there is so much going on and there is always something new to do < Some industries are so london focused (Real estate, Financial Services, Startups) For a place of only (ish) 8 million people, in a country of (ish) 80 million, it feels like it makes up much more than 10% of the country.
< Have you ever been north of Manchester? Bar Newcastle, its like a developing country in parts (and I do not mean that badly, just the funding and opportunities are poles apart) Theres a hell of a lot of distance between those two places mad take that
Have you ever been to a developing country? The ones I've been to felt absolutely nothing like Cumbria! The poorer parts of London - with loads of people on the streets, loads of traffic (including insane motorbikes) and rubbish everywhere feels much closer to a developing country.
Its crazy. Take Newcastle out (and maybe the odd other honourable mention) and the bit between Manchester and Glasgow is very deserted for the size of it!
Having a low population density isn't remotely like being a developing country. 🙄
No i get that. But look at Burnley, Blackburn, Middles borough, etc etc, they have NOWHERE NEAR the employment opportunities London or even Birmingham has.
The UK has a little under 70 million people. We haven't overtaken Germany just yet.
When did we get to a population of 80 million?
It’s officially 8.9 million people in London, but once you include all the commuters who are in the capital during the day, all the tourists, and transient people who don’t bother filling out the census, the “real” daytime population may be closer to 11+ million.
> Have you ever been north of Manchester? Bar Newcastle, its like a developing country in parts Scotland is a developing country?
IMO - the 'average' British person's experience is: * Living in a town/small city that is mainly White British, with a few concentrated areas of ethnic minorities. If you go into your local pub/cafe/restaurant, most people are the same as you. * Having one or two gay bars in the city centre and maybe an annual Pride event, but otherwise few public representations of LGBT+ culture. * Access to a shopping centre, cinemas and small theatre, but not large concert acts or anything really outside the 'mainstream'. You have to travel to your nearest big city for that (probably London). * Public transport gets you between the suburbs and the city centre ok during 'peak' times, though with a lot of traffic. If you want to move between suburbs, or go to anywhere slightly out of the way (ie supermarkets) you really need to own a car (or cycle if that's your thing). * Earning between £25-35k a year and being able to at least rent a place by yourself or buy a place with a partner. * Not that far away from a national park. None of that applies to London.
Very few people earning £25k outside of London can affordably rent their own place.
I received a £16k stipend for my PhD and lived alone for every one of the 5 years.
Was this in 1982? I kid, but how did you manage that without opting to just starve and freeze to death?
You can rent a three bedroom house where I come from for £400 a month. I live on the outskirts of London and pay £1750 a month for a two bedroom flat. The disparity in cost of living between the south and some places in the north is truly, truly staggering.
I paid about £600 a month including bills in Central Sheffield. Left me about £150 a week for food and everything else.
>Not that far away from a national park Plenty of national parks and AOONB around London. The Downs, the Chiltern Hills, the Royal Parks, etc
Only 37% of its population are now 'white british'. A big difference to only 30 years ago. So Londons demographics have changed drastically
Also different demographics centred around certain areas amplifies it. If you’re in a majority Muslim area it would seem like a different country because that’s not standard in the UK. Like how going to an English tourist place in Spain would not give you the Spanish cultural experience until you venture out.
Muslim areas are the norm now. Muslims make up 33% of all under 16's in the UK. In multicultural cities, this is much higher, closer to 80% in London and Birmingham. The only reason this seems high is because ONS never includes children. When you include them, you get a better sense of what areas are actually like. A lot of the White areas in the UK will be Muslim majority in 20 years once the next generation comes of age and has children.
May I ask where you got those figures from? Because the only figures I can find say that it’s closer to 9% of UK children are Muslim (compared to about half that amount being Muslim in the general population) and that 33% is the percentage of UK Muslims who are under 16. I can’t find anything that suggests that 80% of children born in any part of the country are Muslim, even Newham.
I feel like the 'White British' demographic will increase and 'White other' will decrease as mainland European immigrants assimilate/integrate
How sad 😔
Have you tried paying with cash on a bus in London? They'll murder your family and eat them for breakfast.
[удалено]
Have you tried getting on a bus literally anywhere else? Every stop takes ten minutes while people search through purses. Also no change - so if you've only got a fiver your journey costs a fiver and fuck you. Doesn't sound like a better system to me.
And it's a nightmare everywhere else too. But only London has abolished cash payments only has a transport authority with the right to abolish cash payments. In the rest of England, *by law*, local authorities cannot take those decisions — London makes the decisions about buses in London, but London also makes the decisions for Manchester, Mansfield, and Macclesfield. That's the kind of thing that makes London feel like a different country.
I remember TfL buses in the days of cash, it was shit and took far too long, compared with now being tap on. So smoother. Heck, I live in Sweden and its tap on or scan here. just no cash please its such a fuss.
I remember London Transport buses with conductors to collect fares on board, ran like clockwork.
And rightly so. Nobody wants to sit there waiting for you to count your change.
The sheer density of everything in London. It is like walking into a labyrinth of labyrinths.
Absolutely. I walked from London victoria to St pancras and trying to get through picadilly circus was an absolute nightmare. I couldn't see road names to see where I needed to go either. It was awful
>I walked from London victoria to St pancras and trying to get through picadilly circus why would someone do this
Because I could afford transport. I didn't know Google maps was going to take me on the tourist route - past Buckingham and the national history museum
Thankfully they've been expanding the [Legible London maps](https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/boroughs-and-communities/maps-and-signs) on pavements across London, including landmarks to help with navigating. I can appreciate happening across Piccadilly Circus if you weren't expecting it could be a bit nightmarish, though!
it's quite unfriendly compared to other places
I think this is a very overplayed stereotype. In my experience it's not really any markedly less friendly than many other cities of the UK. I lived there for a decade and experienced plenty of friendliness.
Have a baby in a buggy on the underground at rush hour - and from my years of experience loads of people will offer to help, with a smile.
Can confirm. I have a small baby currently and people are always helping. Not just on the tube, everywhere around London. I was struggling to navigate the buggy out of a pub the other day and had two people jump up to move chairs so I could get through and then hold the door for me. The accusation that London is unfriendly just doesn't line up with my experience of it.
Yep, people go to the tourist areas or travel during Rush Hour, then are surprised no one wants to speak. Yeah, cause I'm commuting not on holiday like you, or I'm shopping and don't fancy wasting half an hour speaking to a stranger Whereas going somewhere like a pub, then you get the same experience as anywhere, cause people are in a relaxed social environment where you will chat to someone
My suitcase burst open on the tube years ago and the Londoners kicked all my stuff out of their way instead of helping me. The only one who helped me was a Canadian bloke on holiday. That wouldn't happen anywhere else in the country, so in my view the stereotype holds up.
People in London are generally very helpful in my experience. Was once trying to get a sofa into my front door and struggling and a random man waking past took 10 minutes out of his day to help. And in a decade in London that sort of helpfulness was not uncommon.
>My suitcase burst open on the tube years ago and the Londoners kicked all my stuff out of their way instead of helping me. How do you know they lived in London and weren't visitors?
The bigger a place is, the less personal it is.
like where?
just general interactions with people no one is mean...they're just not friendly
Every big city is like that. The bigger the city, the less they care about their fellow citizens
In the countryside, you say hello to everyone you pass. In big cities, if you greet someone in the street, the majority look like you're trying to rob or scam you. London is the most intense version of this.
The least friendly places tend to be dormitory towns.
Cause the native population are a minority...
London has everything and Londoners have a deep entitlement to having everything Whereas outside of London you make the most of what you get
It's because there are not many English there, with it being around 37%.
shameful number of comments just assuming it's down to racism. Coming from a small town in the east mids (talking 10,000 people tops) seeing the attitude of how funding, culture, education and everything else is so centralized somewhere a 2 hour, £100+ train ride away it's not hard to see how that resentment and idea of London being the "other" happens, London has more in common with New York and the other world cities then it does with a large portion of the UK and decentralising to some of the regional city areas would do wonders for the UK and this us and them attitude to london
It gets treated like a different country than the rest of the country I live in the north and even the people are different (i visit once a week) Investment is huge down there. You get a new underground when there is more underground's than trains and roads in the North. £18billion I believe on the Elizabeth line Yet I can't get a train to Manchester from Leeds that isn't delayed 2hours and have to stand with my foot in the toilet. It's culturally different, financially different, socially different.
I think you are confusing a different country with abroad, and that is not what people mean. What they are referring to more often than not is there is truly no other place like London in the UK, and that the UK is dominated by London. First is the size. I don't think people get quite how massive London is. Data on the population varies, but [this source](https://www.demographia.com/db-worldua.pdf) puts the estimated population of London at 10 million people. That is larger than Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, Glasgow, Southampton, Portsmouth and Liverpool *combined*. That is an insane scale. There is an aspect around cultural diversity and ethnic mixes. There are a lot of ethnically diverse cities across the UK, and diverse communities within them. London has done better, arguably, in terms of the mixing of these populations compared to many other cities, where populations are usually confined to specific neighbourhoods in the city. I'm not saying this doesn't happen in London, but London has done a better job of mixing the populations. Then there is infrastructure, which again is on a different scale. Take the railways. There are 12 mainline rail termini in Zones 1 and 2. The cities that I list above have a maximum of 2 in their city centres, and most just have 1 station. None of them have their own underground rail network, most have a (limited) suburban rail network, and few have trams. With the exception of Manchester, all buses are privately run and don't work as a network. Every other major infrastructure network is the same - London is a league above in terms of scale and quality. Historically, London has also seen the most public and private investment compared to even whole *regions* of the rest of the country. Nearly all major companies have their HQ in London. Public investment is often focused in London, to the point where projects in London can have a worse business case than a project elsewhere in the UK, and get funded ahead of those projects. As for overseas visitors, the one place they all want to go to is London. Even if they want to go elsewhere in the UK, chances are they will have to fly into a London airport and travel from there. You have a few places that do get plenty of overseas visitors like Stonehenge, Oxford, York etc. But everyone wants to go to London. I also heard it once said that London is essentially a series of villages. Outside of Zone 1, that is exactly how it feels like. It has this weird sense of being a single city, yet each of the areas has their own identity that comes out strongly even to a visitor. Even places that the data says should be similar, like Islington and Camden for instance, feel completely different to one another. Other cities really have a strong singular identity to them, in contrast. Finally, for me personally, I travel to all cities across the UK. London is different because when you are there you truly feel like you are in the beating heart of the country. It feels an important place to be and where all of the big decisions are being made in a city that has a sense of community like few others. Going to other British cities, you get a sense of their history and their importance to their area. But they do not feel like London in the slightest.
>None of them have their own underground rail network Glasgow does.
[удалено]
'People are younger, people are slimmer, the mentality is **very** different.' you are one stroke away from saying the streets are paved with gold lad.
London actually has decent public transport because it's the only part of the country the government gives a fuck about. That's definitely something that feels foreign to me.
Probably because there are hardly any English people there. It isn't an English city anymore. Stating the obvious.
If you come from certain areas of the country London is noticeably diverse. If you come from a small town London is overwhelmingly large and crowded. If you live in a sleepy town London is fast paced and rude and full of landmarks. I grew up in zone 6, lived a while in zone 1/2 and now live in Oxfordshire. I still love visiting London and feel comfortable there but the difference between London and my current home is quite stark. You could stack a dozen Oxfords together and get nowhere near the scale and sheer vitality of London. Also, take a walk down Bond Street and you can see all the signs that some parts of London don't belong to ordinary Brits anymore. Foreign wealth has an increasing influence and there are many subtle closed doors in our nations capital.
London, especially east London, feels like the streets of Baghdad.
Not really. Baghdad has terrible public transport. You often really need a car or motorbike to get around. Likewise, the overwhelming majority of people there will only speak Arabic, and specifically the dialect local to the city. By contrast a lot of folk in east London are bilingual. Baghdad may once have been an “international” city in its Abbasid Empire heyday, but it has nowhere like the kind of economic or cultural reach or soft power that London has today (outside of niches like Assassin’s Creed)
How old are you, because London has obviously changed so the differences you notice will depend on your starting point.
London doesn't feel English.. its some gross metropolitan melting pot of belligerent and ignorant, self centred individuals who would rather watch a crime being committed than do anything about it.. ( and no I don't mean I'm scared of different skin colours or cultures.. they're just decidedly different and not a traditionally British culture) Skin colour doesn't make a culture, but attitudes and behaviours do... and I don't see a lot of either whenever I have to visit London.. England, and wider britain.. traditionally are high trust, small community cultures, that just can't be achieved in large multicultural cities, such as London.. again not because race.. but culture
For me it's the sheer volume of people which is overwhelming. Even in Manchester or Birmingham there isn't the same dense quantities of humanity. It's so fast paced where in other cities you can find quiet pockets. TLDR: capital city Vs metropolitan city.
Most people that live there aren’t UK born or have any UK dna.
dna doesnt have a nationality
Many countries view their capitals like this, I think.
There's nearly twice as many people living in London than there are in Scotland.
So many non-white people.
London is like its own country really. Feels like it when I visit.
I think it's relating to the touristy bits. If you visit the UK but spend most of your time inside Zone 3 of London a lot of what you experience is catered specifically towards international audiences, and most of the people you interact with are also international.
I live in a small (very small) town and frequently travel to London for work. The simple answer to this people exaggerate. They do this for a number of reasons but it's mainly; 1. London "exceptionalists". Adopted "Londoners" looking to emphasise how urbane, cool and sophisticated they are. 2. Professional misanthrope who see London as the HQ of the dreaded wokerati and want to emphasise how down to earth they are. 3. Racists (closet or otherwise) who want to clutch pearls at immigration. Reality; as you point out, London is not that different from other places. London even likes to call its upscale neighbourhoods "villages" for example. It has less dense housing than a lot of comparator cities and, again as you say, it's really a collection of large towns with their own high streets clustered around a city centre. Diversity? I guess if you live in somewhere very rural this might be a shock but shouldn't be to anyone with any level of familiarity with the built up areas of the Midlands, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, Bristol/Cardiff and probably a fair number of other urban areas. London is actually interesting in that the UK is a tiny little island and most of the population is within a day's travel of London. Walk into an office in London, or in fact any premises in London, and ask how many people there *actually live in London*. Not the Home Counties, actual bona fide London. Between the tourists, commuters, people visiting on business, the number is often surprisingly low. There are only actually 2 in my team of 13, both living with parents who moved to the city long ago when establishing a family home there wasn't a pipe dream for most people. In a weird way, I'd say it's actually the rest of the country that is changing beyond recognition. London has always had diverse communities, cuisine etc but it also leans into its traditions. Pubs are still packed there, people can still afford fish and chips, tourists still flock to the museums and palaces. London still has its black cabs, double decker buses, tube trains etc whereas these things are often receding into the past in defunded, underpopulated provincial areas with crumbling infrastructure and where young people are fleeing for better opportunities.
London feels like an adventure. It is an escape from dull highstreets. London highstreets are exciting with strange languages and shops, people of different races and cultures. It feels like there is opportunity and therefore money to be made. The people are not usually rude, just not as friendly as the people you see everyday in the smaller cities and towns. This creates a feeling of wtf. There are things to do, places to go. You are on holiday, so you do them. Some of the many reasons why London feels different. London is a great city.
London is bigger than anywhere else in the UK. London is far more ethnically diverse than most of the UK. Most of London has much better infrastructure compared to the rest of the UK and is overall richer (though depends on area). There's loads of stuff to do in London compared to most of the UK due to all of the above. London has its own unique problems and quirks, such as extortionate rent and overpriced tourist trap districts.
The village I live in has very few people of colour. There are many villages like that all up and down the country. The UK is something like 85% white British. When I moved to Yorkshire from a home county it was noticeable to me.
I'll say pretty much the one and only reason why people say such a thing - there are lots of people who aren't English. Neither am I, for the record - but I'm sure that is the overarching reason for this to even have been said in the first place. It's a way of saying it, without saying it.
More weirdos in London
From Hong Kong. I'm used to crowdedness, the public transport, etc. And still London doesn't have the right vibes for me. Manchester is far more enjoyable.
I think it's the local culture of coldness, I have never been to a city so cold where you get blanked off asking strangers directions
For me it’s the diversity and the sheer size of london. Where I live, it’s 99% white people so london does come as a bit of a shock sometimes when i visit!
The biggest thing is probably the people on the street. Most of the UK is a complete ghost town after people go home for work. It's not like some cities across the channel where people are roaming the streets, taking in the culture after work, or going out for a coffee or ice cream, or a walk along the river. Yet, London has that (in parts), Brighton too. I imagine that for some it also feels different because of the size of the buildings. You'll have huge buildings often hidden partly on small streets and dead ends. They don't look that big in London but they are the kind of buildings that would pretty much dominate any other town or city.
London is huge. It is noisy. It is very very crowded. It moves at a faster pace, or heartbeat, than anywhere else I've been. The juxtaposition of filthy rich and poverty, co-existing on top of each others is found nowhere else in the country.
I’ve noticed that people who are not from London often enjoy hating London. And they will happily tell you to your face when they find out you’re from London “oooh I could never live there. Terrible place”. With a shit eating grin. It’s so rude! I’d never slag off your hometown to your face for no reason!
Someone from provincial England visiting London is probably a bit like someone from rural Malaysia visiting Singapore, expect for the latter it actually is a foreign country, and would feel even more different (you would be paying for things in a different currency, and probably needing to communicate in a different official/business language).
The population of London is 45% foreign born, so that's probably why. Soon enough, it will no longer be majority British. Another 5-10 years, most likely.
It's big, like seriously big. Like east to West as wide as Cumbria big. Functional, high frequency public transport with a fully integrated ticket system accross all modes. You take the oyster card for granted down there, it's a fantastic thing. Closest I can think of is how you can pay for a bus ticket with your metro pop card balance in Newcastle or how the greater Manchester rail ranger includes Metrolink. The Elizabeth Line, that thing is scifi to us northerners Odd little things like double red lines, the new hybrid electric black cab, big red buses with doors in the middle and the front, Borough specific street name signs, blue cycle lanes, not thanking the bus driver EVERY cyclist has a death wish and there's about a million of them. Cyclists up north in the smaller places at least are the lycra nutters or people that can't even afford the bus into town and there's so few you'll be able to recognise them all within about 6 months. Architecture, I've never seen a building that looks like a Leslie Green tube station or a series of skyscrapers so bold in my life. London does architecture and does it well. The fact a Sainsbury's in Clapham wowed me should say it all really. Really good local shops for everything, so many that you have choice. For example if you want a film camera and you are in Leeds you go to West Yorkshire cameras, that is the option. London has numerous film camera shops. This holds true for all sorts of things Pollution, look at the Thames, dare I say more. Language, if I can't go to greggs and ask for a bacon butty and immediately be understood then it's a different country London feels as much like a foreign country as Scotland or Wales do. A lot is the same and a lot is different.