Do people say this about other places?

Yes.
Oldham.
The only reason people have been is if their team played Oldham Athletic.
The good thing about Oldham is that it has good links to motorways and transport away.

To be fair, she has presumably never heard anything about 'Essex girls', and Essex is pretty much London, according to some

You’ve you’ve seriously never heard anyone being rude about the north? Never heard the awful tropes about people from, for example, Liverpool?

How very London centric of you!

This ⬆️ Precisely.

I used to have a friend who once stated quite aggressively that everyone from the south of the U.K. was a snob. She was from Leeds, and we were all living in Oman at the time.
Dh is a Londoner, born and bred, I am from ‘general’ southeast. I said, ‘So do you think dh and I are snobs, then?’
’No!’
’Well then.’

But I know she still thought all southerners were snobs. She had some sort of massive chip on her shoulder.

London is too big for people to perceive a remark like that as personal.

If they said ‘oh you’re from Dollis Hill? What a shithole’, that would be rude.

I think it’s great that some people are immediately rude about your home town. It tells you everything you need to know about them. Rude, ill-mannered, thoughtless and egotistical. You can then avoid them for ever more.

You should try being a Northerner living in London. I get comments like that relatively frequently. People seem to think you live in a cave and dont get fresh bread or garlic in the North.

Im from Luton literally no one even people from there have ever said anything nice about it 😂😂😂

I’m from New Jersey, known since the 70s as the armpit of America. An English acquaintance described it to me as the Birmingham of America which made a change.

I'm from the northwest and everyone from the south makes a face when I say where I'm from and says something like "I think I changed trains there once". Some places are just considered not very nice by a lot of people. A lot of northerners dislike London, a lot of southerners think the north is all grim.

The tourists and second homes are not in Glasgow or Greenock or Paisley or Inverclyde.

I mean more to live in, rather than visit. Like on here if someone says they are relocating here and where is a nice place to live people are a bit ewww.

I love Preston

Yes they do. I’ve seen and heard plenty of rude comments about the North from people in the South including comments about there being no culture and mocking their accents. It’s incredibly rude regardless of who is doing it and which town or city they are insulting. You are much more likely to notice it when people insult your particular city though.

That was your experience and I’m telling you MY experience which is that over the decade I’ve lived in the south people have done insulting impressions of my accent frequently and mocked it. You’re saying that never happens and that southerners don’t even think about us - when my experience shows the opposite. I wasn’t saying that what happened to you wasn’t true, I fully believe it, but your opinion of southerners attitudes to northerners is false for many as my experiences show.

Most southerners aren’t like that - like my DH and friends and colleagues. But many are and are extremely rude to and about northerners.

Yes, I imagine it does come from the harrying of the north and subsequent centuries of disgust for the north as the centre of industry (you only have to read Gaskell’s North and South so see the attitude circa 1800s) or the fact that regional accents weren’t featured on the BBC until the last decade.

It’s outdated and a grudge but it is most definitely upheld by people on both sides… and it’s the northerners that often face social disadvantage because of it.

Have you read the threads where people ask about leaving London? According to Londoners there's no culture anywhere else, everyone outside of the capitol is racist and there's no jobs. So the hatred goes both ways.

Even ignoring London there's a stated dislike for competitor cities. E.g. Oxford vs Cambridge, Glasgow v Edinburgh. Most of the time it's jocular.

I've had it said to me about the town I grew up in. I only left a few years ago. I visit now and I can see why people said it.

I think it's because it's perceived as punching up

I agree. London is a proper international city - possibly the international city, it is the hub of many of the industries that make the UK tick as well as of UK politics, if you can make it in London you can make it anywhere, and all life is there. It so obviously is a fantastic buzzing place that provincial Pam or Pete having a pop is neither here nor there.

What do you mean ‘nope’. That was my experience !
As to mocking Northerners accents. Never in my world in the South did anyone I know sit around mocking Northern accents.
We don’t talk about you particularly. Let alone laugh at your accent. I certainly don’t recognise your sentiment either about nothing to do up there. I think that is what you would like people to be saying. But they don’t.

And as to justifying disliking Southerners. It has nothing to do with poverty. There are rich and poor all over. Seriously.
I suspect it goes back further and stems from the appalling harrowing of the North. And Northerners have got into a sort of stuck record for complaining about the South. And do not seem able to get out of it.

I was once told that slagging off London was different to slagging off anyone else's home town because it is the capital which means it "belongs" to everyone. I disagree and find it rude and I match that by saying, "Don't let us keep you."

I once told a southerner where I was from and they told me they'd been before and it was an absolute shit hole 🤷‍♀️

So whys it full of tourists and 2nd homes?

Its rude, narrow minded and ignorant. But i guess its just a silly trope much like southerners saying its grim up north

I think it’s culture shock. London is so overwhelming if you’re not used to it. I love it, but I do understand why lots of people find it so painful. I can remember my DD being terrified in a big crowd at Covent Garden, and refused to move (she was 18!) She was scared that she’d bump into someone. I told her to just put her head down and walk and she said “I can’t! I’m too northern!” 😂

On the flip side, try being scouse. I don’t think there’s a single city in the UK that people are so quick to denigrate the place and its people.