UK-born Londoners, are your friends mostly British or mixed?

Shooling in SW London is very split by the private / state divide, especially at secondary. I'd say that divide is the most obvious - the money one.

Agree and it will be the case in somewhere like Wimbledon.

I do think it’s hard to make real friends as you get older & I actually got quite sick of making friends with neighbours, NCT group and school mums and everyone would leave. Covid was ridiculous, I think nearly half of my dds class left. It’s easier to prioritise my old friendship group as I know the majority are settled & staying.

I mean that there is no reason to feel there is any barrier to making friendships based on nationality and, in fact, I have very close friendships with London-born people who never considered my background.
You describe having difficulties forming them so our experiences are vastly different. Since I haven't felt or experienced what you have, I can only conclude that there is a way you feel or things you experience which are specific to you as a person.

I get what you are saying, but also look at how you make friends.

My view:
Schooling in SW London is very split by the private / state divide, especially at secondary. I'd say that divide is the most obvious - the money one. SW London is for the wealthy, and the poor. Not so much in the middle.

Then there is the parent group dynamic. In the UK the primary school parent community is quite strong. Secondary is much more arms length.

London has some particularly strong nationality groups, which makes sense due to a shared language, cultural references, values etc.

SW London has a growing wealthy Chinese (Hong Kong) community, but also the older nationality communities Korean (New Malden) Polish, and religion based ones with the Buddist temple and Mosque in Southfields, and of course the various Christian churches with the Catholic ones being more likely to have international attendees. Schools split by religion - so that would affect who you interact with.

Even social things like sports clubs or hobby groups tend to particular types of nationality, sex, wealth.

So the question is how do you meet people? Private sports club? Rowing club? Stables? At the non religions state primary gate? Kids sports club? Adult running club? Book club? Religious community group? Tinder? Brownies?

I'm in a mixed UK (non London, non religious) and international (Catholic) marriage with a mixture of Londoner, UK, International (especially but far from exclusively immigrant country of origin) friends. Made through a combination of work, NCT, Church, schools, sports clubs, kids clubs, neighbours. We have been in SW London for quite a few years though. It takes time.

I was born in London and grew up here although my parents were immigrants and I am not white. All of my friends are very international and I have very few British born & raised friends. My friends have been made through creative interests, sports, and through dc's school. I live in central London and have lived around this area for decades, though I spent 10 years outside London. I am in my 40s and not in contact with any school or uni friends. School friends were mostly immigrants (I grew up in a diverse, deprived part of inner London). Uni friends were mostly middle-class white British. My friends as an adult tend to be from middle-class/wealthy backgrounds but generally not from the UK, and not usually from the same ethnic background as me.

It's mainly British but with a good range of other nationalities and cultures. My son is always embarrassed that we have no other 'roots' apart from British and Irish. Many of his friends are mixed culturally with parents from different parts of the world and speak different languages.

I haven't lived in London for 30 years but most of my friends were white British then. DS now lives there and his friends are much more mixed, although as he works in hospitality he does meet a lot more people from all over. I would say that all his close friends are white British though. Birds of a feather..?

Yep, always stayed in the same area. Some of my girlfriends have a mixture of husbands, but they aren't my close friends.

I hate to say this... but I've lived in London all my life and all of my close friends are white British. Most of my friendships are with people I went to school with and there was only one black guy in my whole year... who is a friend, but not a close one.

It did throw me! The whole "never seen a black person". They mean no harm. They just never met any.

A good 75% of my primary school (80s) was black, so that is what was normal to me. A few of the boys went on to play for Chelsea FC. My secondary school was more of a mix, predominantly white but with some Mexican girls, and a lot of Europeans. It's when I went to uni with the international course I mentioned that I met lots of different nationalities.

I love the north but it was extremely alien to me that so much of it (NE) had never seen black/Asian people. But it is rapidly changing now. In the last 2 years there's been a huge upsurge in all sort of nationalities moving here. I love it!

That maybe an issue specific to you. In 12 years of living in London I not only can pop in unannounced to see my English friends but I have keys to most of their houses, sat countless pets and children, slept on their couches after a relationship breakdown and hosted them on mine in similar circumstances. And never once a question about my nationality came up.

But it’s largely because they have deep friendships already, they already have relatively local family, they have friends from childhood, they have family friends. Many people in their 30s actually aren’t looking for new deep connections unless they’ve moved to another country and need to build their life.

Our friendship circles are pretty mixed. The two families we are closest to are both originally from Romania. They are awesome human beings. Hard working and really nurturing to their kids and their kids friends and just incredibly understanding and patient. We also have a family we are very close to who is a British Muslim who married an Egyptian Muslim. They are so much fun. I don't think they are very strict in their faith- they fast at Ramadan but she doesn't cover her head and we always share a bottle of wine together when we meet up. Otherwise my old school friends who we meet up with are all British, distance means we see them less frequently though.

Scottish born Londoner here - I would say it's a big mix but most friends I've made in London are overseas. My husband is Australian so lots of those, then Romanian, South African, Brazilian, Portuguese, Mexican, Italian, Kiwis, Ghanaian. Also lots of 2nd gen friends who are British with Indian, Pakistani, Nigerian, Cameroon, Sri Lankan, German backgrounds. I grew up in an area without a huge amount of immigration but actually a lot of my close school friends have ended up with people who've immigrated here or are second gen. I'd say it's very mixed and my experience of making friends has been very different to yours in that everyone is from all over the shop!

Londoner born and bred (Irish parents).
Very mixed friendship group.

My four best friends of many years are all London born and bred with various backgrounds - one White British, one mixed Irish/Nigerian, one mixed Irish/Mauritian and one Jamaican. My school mum friends are Turkish, Algerian, Albanian, Indian, Italian.

My husband is a born and bred Londoner of Guyanese/Jamaican parents and has a very mixed friendship group, too.

I’m in my 40s and grew up in a very diverse inner London area. It was usual to mix with all sorts of different people and cultures.

My husband is London born and bred. He has a mix of british and international friends. He has quite separate groups e.g primary schol neighborhood friends are all british, whilst post grad uni friends are mostly international.

I'm British born and British heritage and lived in London for many years although I don't live there now. My husband is Russian so I knew a lot of Russian people in London. My two closest friends were Taiwanese and Pakistani I was also friends with Scottish, Irish and Iranian people. Now we live in Scotland and most of my friends are Scottish.

Born in London in the 70s, only moving north a few years ago.

My degree in London was International Economics, and most of the students on it were from the continents of Europe and Africa. I kept a lot of those friends.

Over the decades, I've had a fair few jobs, and my friends made at work are literally from all over. English, a lot of Trinidadian, Jamaican, American and Canadian, Romanian, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese, Indian, Moroccan, you name it.

I feel lucky to have been brought up in London and to spend so much of my life there. Just isn't for me these days. Sometimes in the north, people will tell me they've never met, for example, a black person before, and it is mind blowing. My partner's cousin is black by marriage, and partner's stepsister's daughter cried when she met him, and stated that that was the reason. The girl was around 4 at the time. Crazy.7