to think that there is the UK and then there is London?

[Bogeyface]

These are generalisations based on MN, personal experience and friends btw, so they probably wont stand up to scrutiny!

Seems to me that London is a different world! In London you pay £20ph for a cleaner, other people paint your lounge, you put private education above having a nice home, half an hour on a train is "around the corner" and 2 hours on the train can still have you in the same town.

And then you get non London, which means £10ph is pushing it for a cleaner (she had better be good!), you paint your own lounge, you move to get a good state school or supplement a crappy school with home ed, half an hour in a train gets you to the next town and 2 hours gets you to the seaside!

Absolutely not a criticism of Londoners or their lives, I adore London and wish I could afford to live there! But I do feel that there is a wide gulf of "normal" between Londoners and the rest of us! I sometimes think it should be classified like The Vatican, a country within a country! Might work taxwise for Londoners, thinking about it!

AIBU?

Bochead - are you serious? I live in south east London and I don't know anyone who sleeps in their lounge or buys boxes of 30 mangoes or specifically chooses a dark coat because of public transport, and I know loads of people who wear shoes in the house! Am scratching my head at the different 'Londons' which exist!

Well I never use public transport although I do use dartford market and share my produce round my neighbours! Its still cheaper to buy from a market.

Don't know anyone who is s o over crowded the y sleep in their lounge though. Although there is a hot-bedding flat down the road that is rented out by taxi drivers - seems to be an awful lot of shift patterns going on.

absolutely adore London, my dsis lives there and bloody love to visit.

definatly wouldn't want to live there though.

however there are very many diverse cultures and experiences in other cities and rich and poor alike.

Most people sleep in their lounge due to high housing costs meaning overcrowding is the norm. My old neighbours really envied the fact I got my own bedroom when we moved

Most people? that is nonsense. some people are overcrowded, but not most by a long stretch.

No one wears their shoes in the house, not because they are terribly house proud but because the pavements are covered in dog poo (or at least you hope it's dog poo!). By the same token you need a dark coat if you travel on public transport (good luck finding a parking space, much less affording it if you don't

Again, nonsense.

Asking for directions just isn't something you do when visiting a new area, because no one is likely to speak English. Visiting an area you last visited 5 years ago can be very strange as it will look totally different due to becoming a regeneration zone

Yes in some areas there are new buildings going up, because lots of people want to live here, what with it being such a shithole.

No one is likely to speak english? that's crap as well.

I see you've just left London, you must be in the stage of convincing yourself and anyone who will listen that you've done the right thing and London is awful.

I'm in London. Wish someone could paint my sitting room - I do my own painting as do most of my friends. And yes, I do know ( working) families who are very overcrowded and where the parents share with one or more children or sleep in the sitting room. The markets are great, there's loads to do, you can get everywhere by public transport quite quickly, but an hour commute is the norm because of the distances. And while I think the tube is expensive, it is cheaper than bus fares on ( say) the Isle of Wight or Norfolk and much more frequent.
Parking is a nightmare, so most people use public transport into town.
But the best thing is the huge variety of people and opinions - would hate to live anywhere where everyone looks and thinks the same as me!

It seems to me that it is still a hotpotch.
But I would still say the the op has got some points.

Comes in a little late and sits next to Zoe with popcorn and a hot dog!

We've do our own painting but do have DC in private school (probably why we are not paying someone to do our painting ).

The population of London is so much higher than the next biggest city (around 7x higher than Birmingham) that it is bound to have a very different feel. Its population density is much higher and its very diverse.

It is like a mini city state in some ways. I am also worried that it will become more polarised with the "bedroom tax" and shortage of social housing.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-25138760
It is hard for people on average incomes to afford to live in London because of accommodation prices.

I love living in London, there is so much to do and as I am married to an immigrant it is nice being somewhere that is mixed (I do know that other parts of the UK are mixed). I wouldn't want to live in parts of the home counties that were very WASP as I don't think DH would feel comfortable.

Not sure where these cheap veg markets are in London;all the ones I've seen are small and you get much better in provincial towns. The streets are full of dog cack though.

I liked London to visit, but the shine is wearing off after a few years of living here. Mainly because the stupid rents prevent you from affording any kind of social life.

hotpotch? hotchpotch?

I live in London pay ten pounds an hour for a cleaner, no-one in my group of friends can afford private education and I painted my own sitting room.

I am absolutely baffled by Bochead's post.

I live in an acknowledged shitty part of London, high crime rate, high poverty yet none of that is remotely true in my experience.

I've never met anyone who doesn't wear shoes in the house.

'Most people' sleep in their living room?

Could I just add that our cleaners are more than £10 an hour and we have some lovely private schools around here that parents send their DC to.. Also as DH and I both work(ed) long hours on ML now and both of us are rubbish at decorating we did have decorators and would do it again.. We live is West Yorkshire by the way!

I live in a shitty part of London having moved from the equally shitty part which I grew up in.

I think that media etc pushes this view of London - the £500,000 houses, Chelsea tractors, posh butchers.

The reality is that most Londoners I know and work with don't live like that. We probably live more like the OP and the rest of the country. We seem to be forgotten about - we live in houses that cost under £250,000, earn average salaries of £25,000 and don't know anyone who could even consider private school, let alone pay for it.

The only people I know who live I expensive houses do so because the prices of their houses have gone up considerably, not because they have pots of money.

'Most people sleep in their lounge'. Really?

I could discuss the life of the affluent in west end glasgow,won't be universal experience for all
You see disposable income,employment,etc all differ.as household income and location
Your op is a segment of life for some,but not for all.not all londoners live like that

I love the way that this is based on the cost of a cleaner!!! I mean, what percentage of the population has a cleaner anyway??

I think Londoners bar the very rich generally have a lower standard of living than the rest of the UK. The comment about sleeping in a lounge isn't that far from the truth when I remember flat hunting in south east london to find a 2 bed priced at 290k was the size of a shoe box with a lounge converted into the main bedroom! Bearing in mind to pay for this delight of flat would set you back nearly 9k in stamp duty alone as so much of the measly accomodation in london falls into the 3% stamp duty bracket.
Most people commute for an hour to get to work (mine is 1hour ten) reducing leisure hours in the evenings. My old commute from zone 3 SW was so busy I regularly had to wait 2-3 trains to squeeze on, it was almost unbearable and a reason for moving.
Moving away from london when you work in the centre isn't an option for most as commuting costs rise sharpy (£28 a day including tube from my parent's house who live in a suburb) and time spent commuting increases. You then also lose all the benefits of living there, such as local entertainment, shows, gigs markets etc.
I love london in its own way, but the wages don't make up for the increase in cost. I think london should be treated as a separate entity yes, as far too many people are falling into poverty or being pushed out, it will eventually be a place for only the very rich, who perhaps are the ones that can afford a £20 cleaner!

YANBU.

I would go further and include much of south east England in that category.

From here (Cornwall) it all seems so very manic!

It has roughly the same population as Wales and Scotland put together, it's almost a nation of its own.

Oh yeah every child in London is in private school....wtf

I live in central lodon (zone 2, closer to 1 than 3). To comment on your specific observations:

1. We have a cleaner but we pay her about £10 an hour. She has been with us for years (and has had some payrises in that time). I am feeling guilty now that we must be under-paying for her.

1. Our DC go to private school. We have not priortised this over house size becuase the difference in cost between our house and a house which is meaningfully bigger in our area would require more than the cost of the school fees.

1. I have a short commute. I could buy bigger further out so it is fair to say that I have prioritised short commute over large house. I do though have friends who live elsewhere in London and it is about an hour drive to visit. I think nothing of doing this. Where I grew up (fairly rural) one set of grandparents lived an hours drive (40 miles rather than the 10 miles in London) and we visited them only about 4 times a year becuase of the distance.

1. I would pay to get my lounge painted. I would do this whereever I lived (budget permitting) because DH and I are rubbish at such things. Or my dad does it when he visits (which is probably what would happen if I did not live in London and so had lower salary).

My relatives would agree that it is a different world. The 2 things that horrify them are (1) fact that we do not have off-street parking despite expensive house, and (2) fact that our house is a terrace and there is nowehere to keep the bins apart from the street front.

I'm a Londoner born and bred and I love it, though I admit I've had times when I didn't.
There is so much to do and see, much of it free. It's architecturally eclectic and has people from different backgrounds, cultures and lifestyles living cheek by jowl...council estates next to £4million pound houses round here! If you like the great outdoors you're only a half hour train journey from the green belt.

I think London IS different to the UK, in the same way that Sydney is different from Australia and Bangkok is different to Thailand.

No one I know paint their lounge, and I've never lived in London

Having said that, a certain London seem to be a different part of the world/society. We spent a week in London this summer, but after half an hour of listening to our friends illustrating with enthusiasm house prices and school fees in Hampstead, I was ready for a revolution (and believe me, I am not remotely frugal).

Other than that, I think London is a wonderful, vibrant city. We live in Italy now, and are always impressed by the quantity of YOUNG, beautiful people in London.

Everything inside London is civilisation.

Everything outside of it is a howling wasteland, populated by fur wearing barbarians who wear flat caps and ride whippets (in the North), speak as if having suffered cider related brain damage (in the West) or are wannabe squires with a xenophobia against anyone who doesn't wear wellies and ride horses (the South).

For some reason my girlfriend drags me beyond the Great Defensive Traffic Jam to a charming, quaint little collection of thatched huts called Bristol and tries to tell me it's a city. Obviously it isn't. I can see green from the centre, not safe green like a London Lime tree, but the wild unfettered green of rurality. Horrifying.