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?

I always said that I would emigrate if I had to leave London. God willing and if I follow my (five year) plan it will happen. London is starting to eat itself and is too expensive for me to enjoy to the max. lack of, or stagnant social mobility is another thing too. I'm worse off than my father who came here in 1960. That wasn't supposed to happen! I can't spend the next ten years in the same position because of my love of London (if not the people, who are getting coarser and less witty by the minute). Other people manage to leave where their navel string was cut to go and live elsewhere, so can I. My father and three of my grandparents did and they sure as hell loved where they were from.
The money aint running for too many people in London and I don't want to be confined to my council flat in Zone 2 because I really do not want to buy what I could afford in zones 4-6. If it aint got the postcode on the road sign, it's only GREATER London to me.....or the sticks with a shopping mall. I'm wicked to myself, I know, but the thought of living in say, Dartford makes me cringe!

I think London is years ahead in terms of being more cosmopolitan and accepting of people from different backgrounds etc, and also in general, there seems to be more of a "current" feel. Sometimes feel like I am stuck in an episode of heartbeat elsewhere in England where different is viewed suspiciously.

"Great Defensive Traffic Jam"

Love this!

That makes it sound as if everywhere else is the same.

There is a vast difference between different parts of the country outside of London. And within London there are big differences.

(Crosspost - replying to Zip)

London's constant flow of people keeps it fresh, it's always been the case, and that makes it attractive.

I worked in a company of 42 people, 5 were foreign nationals, 35 were UK migrants and only 2 of us were native Londoners. I doubt you could say the same about any company in, say, Basingstoke.

I agree what's as I haven't been everywhere - just comparing specially dorset and London and it feels like I've travelled in time. Dorset is beautiful with gorgeous beaches but living there was like getting in a time machine down the M3 and going back 50 years.....I think we were a bit naive in London not to realise. For example, Asian food in London means Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Sezhuan Chinese etc and in Dorset.....it's one ominous looking golden wok which seems serve as general take away ...,.however saying that its much cheaper and gorgeous beaches/countryside but just a bit if a shock when you've lived in a cosmopolitan place ( although doesn't make me cosmopolitan myself)

You've got a kind of fictional impression of London there op.

It puts me in mind of Richard Curtis and the world he depicts in his funny little films which are actually nothing like reality, but the forriners do like to think us Brits/Londoners actually live like that.

Sorry to comment on a remark from a while back but someone said:

"you can get everywhere by public transport quite quickly, but an hour commute is the norm because of the distances."

By the standards of the rest of Britain, the distances within London are tiny. For example Balham in Zone 3 to the City is less than 7 miles. The reason for the long commutes is the slow pace of transport.

I used to have a 12mile commute that took 15mins (by car). 12 miles would be crossing the whole city in London and take forever.

Isn't every capitol in nearly every city, totally different from the rest of it...

we Londoners spread scary stories about the place to try and keep a check on the population.

It hasn't worked because despite the filth and crime and hideous expense it is a great place to call home.

For the record my x4 DC go to a brill state school, we can't afford paint let alone a painter and cleaning my home saves on exercise classes.

I don't recognise my bit of London there, OP. And i'm middle class.

Hmm, well I live in one of the outer London boroughs that is more or less totally ignored by the media (apart from when we have an occasional stabbing or one of our councillors says something stupid) and I don't really recognise your picture of it at all.

One of the oddest things about living in London is when you go to a wedding or other event where you end up chatting to strangers, and they give you an angry lecture about 'that London' as though you are personally responsible for the time they got lost on the Tube or whatever (we don't even HAVE the Tube round here... )

Yanbu. But my cleaner is 10 pph. She was charging 8.5, but I told her she has been with me three years so why not make it 10.

YANBU.

London is made of the very poor, the poor, the rich, the very rich and the middle, like the country as a whole. I live in a poor area for sure. Stabbings and crime happen regularly, and my DC go to a school where they're on FSM, in fac the school has one of the highest FSM rates in the borough- and we're in Tower Hamlets, where 56.5% of sec school kids are on FSM. We live in a council home but it is a lovely one tbf- mang of the DC's friends aren't so lucky in that respect. The last place we lived in, also in London, there were four stabbings in our very short time, in our street- one of which was witnessed by my children and I.

Rich? Lol.

YABU, I mean!

All life is in London. Every income bracket, every nation in the world, every profession, every type of person is represented here.

But our problem is that we have ALL of the mega-rich billionaires skewing our house prices.

I agree with that Mintyy

London is diverse. In every area- just ethnicity or religion. People are poor, rich, average, well off, everywhere. Many times people can live very close to each other with entirely different incomes and experiences. Some places are beautiful, clean and posh, other areas are the complete opposite. It's hard to say 'London is X' because London is made from so many different thins and people.

There is a real problem with the super-rich colonising parts of London, making housing unaffordable for everyone else. On that I agree. Everywhere has rich people, but no other city in the UK has this community of the elite who have so much power (and pay so little tax) and really affect the quality of life for those around them.

But they are still a small minority, even in London. Most of London is not super-rich. Much of it is extremely poor. It is very diverse, and that makes it really hard to generalise about Londoners. We do pay a ludicrous amount of our wages to housing and commuting costs (if I earned my salary in most other parts of the UK I would have a nice detached house and a car - and you bet I'd be getting in a cleaner!). We do have long commutes - mine is nearly 3 hours per day, and that's not unusual.

I've lived in London all my life, yet it doesn't feel as though I've lived in the same place all my life because the postcodes vary wildly. I've done Zone 1 posh, Zone 6 suburban, Zone 2 inner city, Zone 3 grim gritty deprivation...

Love London! So much vibrance & life - what's not to love?

We moved out of zone4 to just outside zone6. It's so quiet, so deserted we crave for the urban buzz. Can't wait to go back to (greater) London. Glad that we're just renting, so we can move.

There are good thing in both places, just depends on what each person prefers!

Or I could have just posted: what Mintyy said!

BohemianGirl I live in the same area. Although I agree that locals are outpriced, I still don't know of anywhere in london that's as cheap as round here, so I think we probably suffer from that less than the rest of the capital.

I love the diversity round here though, it seems much more genuinely 'mixed' than other areas of London I'm familiar with, which seem to have different cultures living side by side but not actually mixing that much.

London is the place it is because it has always had people settling here from all over the world. I see it as positive.

For the spreadshit ...
Don't employ a cleaner
State schools
Paint my own lounge (or will once I get round to it)
Commute is 45 mins by train or about an hour by bus

I don't recognise the London in the OP.

I work in Central London with plenty of people with 2 hour commutes but that's because they live in Milton Keynes / Brighton / Oxford etc. Compared to the public transport in many other parts of the UK, London is nirvana. My commute from Zone 3 is half an hour door to door.

The problems with London are exactly the same problems with the rest of the UK - increasing gulf between rich and poor, outsourcing of industries and services to developing countries and the economy polarising towards banking, finance and media. Oh and very poor salaries - subsidised by govt and credit culture and the assumption people will make equity in their houses.

Oh and housing is equally unaffordable in the rest of the UK if you live anywhere vaguely desirable. Compare Cornwall and Devon house prices with the average salaries earned there.