Why is everyone hating on London

People always want to hate on something. I migrated to London from elsewhere in the UK and think it’s great.

I mean you could say Peterborough. It’s a shit hole. London commuter hot spot as well.

But unlike London the whole of the uk hasn’t heard of Peterborough.

I live in Walthamstow and a few years ago someone in the High Street got run over by a bus and an enormous crowd of people got together and lifted it off him. This is the reality.

Yeah, course it is. Remind me where in London you live again? Because I'm guessing it's not the backstreets of the West End that will literally be gridlocked with buses and taxis if this goes ahead.

As per usual, people fail to look at the bigger picture.

Exactly. If I started a thread on here laying into Swansea (to take a completely random example) I would rightly be told I was a snob and a bigot and people would queue up to give examples of what's wonderful about Swansea and statistics that demonstrate how wrong I am. And so they should.

If anyone says anything positive about London it invariably leads to accusations that we are "London centric" that we never open our eyes, that we live in a bubble, that we haven't stepped outside of London for years and that "real people" don't live there. In more extreme cases followed by the inevitable rant about it being a "shithole", a "sewer" and a "cesspit" and, as night follows day, an unpleasant segue about how horrible our mayor is.

Somehow other people are allowed to defend their home towns and feel pride in them and we're not.

@Devonshiregal

There seems to be this (ironically bigoted) idea that the rest of the country are just small minded morons who come to London and freak out because they see someone with darker skin than themselves… have you been to Manchester? Or Birmingham? Or Liverpool? Like there are in fact multicultural places outside of London. And so as to the op’s original question people are down on London because it’s ropey and shouldn’t be.

I have been to Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool. I lived in Manchester for four years and I go to Birmingham frequently for work. I'm fully aware that all of those cities have significant non-white populations. But those cities don't regularly generate screeds of posts about how awful they are.

You say London is "ropey": but again there's no empirical evidence whatsoever that London is "ropey" compared with any of those other cities (or others for that matter). Like all of those cities London has pockets of deprivation and it has crime. But on any objective measure, it's more affluent than all of those cities and the crime levels are certainly lower.

Manchester, to take one example, had a higher crime rate in terms of crimes per person, in 2023/2024, than London did. London doesn't even make the top three in the UK according to this source I'm looking at (Statista).

There just isn't any credible explanation for the idea that London is "ropier" than other cities. It's just prejudice.

Pedestrianising oxford street is an excellent idea

@Thepeopleversuswork exactly - I would be more than happy to start a why is XXX such a messy dump thread but tend to think it just attracts lots of defensive locals who quite rightly know the ‘better’ aspects of where they live - it’s ‘always’ London they start it about and to be frank I know it’s of the major cities reasonably well with the exception of Newcastle where I’ve only been once- and I would take London over most of them anyday.

Sure except London is the capital city, has historically had and currently has money pumped into it and yet it’s just as, if not worse than other cities. And the idea that it’s proven multiculturalism works and so everyone who doesn’t live there is sitting there stamping their racist feet crossly because they’ve been proved wrong is just mad. YES there are racist people who have decided immigrants are the absolute trouble with this country (and this is spurred on by the media and government) but it’s not like London is the multicultural city and nowhere else is?? There seems to be this (ironically bigoted) idea that the rest of the country are just small minded morons who come to London and freak out because they see someone with darker skin than themselves… have you been to Manchester? Or Birmingham? Or Liverpool? Like there are in fact multicultural places outside of London. And so as to the op’s original question people are down on London because it’s ropey and shouldn’t be. And then there are racist people. That’s not the same thing. And one doesn’t exclude the other.

that show!

If you've ever seen "this country" our lives were just like that.

that's how is brilliant!

I grew up in Cornwall in the arse end of nowhere. Nowhere near the coast. 2 buses a week! Nothing to do and nowhere to go. If you've ever seen "this country" our lives were just like that. Everyone knowing everyones business. No decent job opportunities.

I moved away as soon as I could. Initially I was in the home counties but have now lived in London for 20 years. It's not "perfect", no place is. But I have everything I could ever want on my doorstep. There are lots of green spaces if I want nature. It's actually easier to get to the coast than it was from where I grew up, if I want to do that. Yes the public transport is a bit rough around the edges but it's reliable and cheap.

A big one for me as I age is that I have a good hospital 10 minutes away. A relative still living in that rural area died after a heart attack as they needed an air ambulance to get them to hospital (as it was so far) and it just took too long.

I'm aware we have gangs and crime. Do I ever see it? No not really. I won't ever leave. I have everything I want right here.

But people don't start threads on Mumsnet or Facebook saying "Why is Birmingham/Cardiff/Bristol/Glasgow/Leeds such a shithole?"

Probably because they aren't our capital city! Obviously.

There isn't anywhere near the amount of focus on those cities as there is on London, which is literally the centre of finance, industry and tourism in the UK!
It's watched on a global scale - and currently the rest of world thinks it's pretty shit!

If they are it's because Khan has installed LTNs all over it. He's now hellbent on pedestrianising Oxford Street. I don't see that causing ANY problems at all! 🙄

Born, raised and worked in London for some 40+ years. I have seen it rapidly deteriorate in recent years - streets dirty and unsafe, crime up and police stations closing, just an all-round bad 'energy' and Khan is doing absolutely nothing to change that.

Yes because every other city in the UK has only a white British population 😂

@Devonshiregal

And if you take off those blinkers and look with honest, objective eyes, you might understand what people are saying. Even if you are happy with rubbish and graffiti, you must surely understand that other people have a right to find it upsetting? I mean how does people not liking rubbish lying around offend you so much that you have to find weird ways to disprove the validity of their feelings by calling them racist?

I don't think anyone who lives in London would disagree with that. Parts of it are obviously filthy, there's far too much graffiti etc. You can't live here and not notice this. Not liking rubbish isn't what makes people a racist, obviously.

The point is that all major cities in the UK (and a lot of our towns) have equivalent problems with rubbish, graffiti, homelessness, drug abuse, public drunkenness, antisocial behaviour, scruffy town centres, against a background of wider social deprivation. You find me a sizeable town in the UK without graffiti or homelessness. It's a UK-wide issue.

But people don't start threads on Mumsnet or Facebook saying "Why is Birmingham/Cardiff/Bristol/Glasgow/Leeds such a shithole?"

It's always London. London has become a cypher for what a particular type of person thinks is wrong with the UK. Although objectively speaking it's far less bad than many parts of the UK which are actually far more deprived. But it taps into a certain set of assumptions.

I can't give a scientifically rigorous answer to why people seem to feel more excited about London than they do about other UK cities because I haven't done extensive research. But it's hard to avoid the suspicion that the far right dislike London because London disproves the idea that multiculturalism has failed the UK. We're always being told by the online right that multiculturalism is what's wrong with this country. London, where people by and large rub along together OK regardless of their ethnicities, nationalities, demographics and faiths, disproves this argument.

I hate my own city let alone London with so many more people and thus many more problems. I don’t get the hype it’s just another overpriced overcrowded place.

Just like I wouldn’t visit Cornwall in the school holidays overcrowded hype but at least they have nice beaches. London has, smog and traffic and congestion charges, high phone theft just walking down the street, over crowded tubes and yeah nothing that appeals to me personally. A few green spaces or free museums don’t make up for natural beautiful coastline, lakes or forests.

@Violinist64 Boris Johnson presided over the knocking down of the whole of tin pan alley and various other awful planning decisions - he spent vast amounts of money on stuff that never happened and took credit for stuff that had all been done and dusted before he even took office . We lived in London during that time. He was rather good at blowing his own trumpet off other people’s work

The Mayor has consistently opposed the airport expansion though, it's out of his control (pending any potential legal action). He can control car emissions. You're right that wider emissions policy is inconsistent, but London can only do what is in its power to do.

Car ownership in London is falling overall, and of the houses that have them, the trend is for fewer houses owning multiple cars (so a clustering of cars in richer houses). Poorer people in inner London who are not car owners themselves are impacted much more by emissions. It's ok to make radical policy so kids don't die from breathing crap. 9 out of 10 cars were compliant in the outer boroughs at the time it came in so I just don't believe anyone can know loads of people who had non-compliant vehicles.

Edit to add- I do actually (just, technically) live in an outer borough, and I think I know one person who changed their car. They were fine with it.

Why does everyone hate London? Not everyone does.

@greenwichvillage My Mum is from London and I lived in London for a while in my twenties when it was deemed better overall so my opinion isn’t just based on the unfriendly couple across the road.

I think it’s the hypocrisy though especially with the airport producing emissions and people who live in the outer boroughs felt he shouldn’t have expanded it as they needed their cars for various reasons and couldn’t afford to update them.

But isn't it the city that is generating the tax - not Londoners in general- and the more the city generates the more Londoners get whilst elsewhere gets little.

I live in London, have a car (and also walk, cycle and take public transport) and I bloody love ULEZ. I don't think I've heard anyone mention ULEZ in person for at least 12 months and our street WhatsApp group the other day was having an exchange about how great 20mph limits were.

I live in a Borough where supposedly ULEZ was going to make a massive difference to mayoral elections and in the event more people voted for SK than previous, and voted in some green leaning candidates for the first time.

Why do people who don't live in London care so much about us tackling our filthy air? Very odd.

I was in New York last month. I have to say it gave me an appreciation of our tube trains which seemed much cleaner and run more frequently, with nicer platforms! No city is perfect I guess, especially the big busy ones.