To be annoyed at people who live in a London Borough but insist they don't (i.e Im in Surrey, Kent etc)

[Rosehip10]

As in people in places such as Richmond, Kingston (insisting they live in Surrey) or places such as Bromley (insisting they are in Kent).

These places may used to have in a different county but have been part of greater London and a London Borough since 1965.

Is is snobbery? They usually drone only about postal towns which also no longer exist.

@CleopatrasMum I'm also in Bromley and don't agree. There is no Kent in the address. We may not have the tube but it takes 20 mins to get to Victoria station by train. The comment about the toilets in the centre of town being in a private shopping centre is erroneous - they are central, free, well maintained and open to the public.

It may not be perfect, but it's definitely part of London.

It was Bromley in the 80s that caused tube fares to rise massively on the premise that they didn't have a tube station.

I'm curious - can you expand on that?

I've lived all my life in Bromley and Lewisham. I find it quite odd that so many people still say that Bromley is Kent when it has been a London borough for 50 years. Yet, Lewisham was Kent until the 1890s and I've never heard of any older people referring to Lewisham as Kent.
Upthread outer boroughs were referred to as concrete Kent as opposed to rural Kent. This is not true of Bromley as parts of it are completely rural and it is strange that it was included in London in 1965.
Postcodes are not related to local authority areas. As a child pre 1965 I lived in Beckenham Kent (now part of Bromley borough) and my address was SE26. Crystal Palace SE19 is in four different London boroughs.

If you are in our most central park or our library and you or your child needs the loo you have to leave where you are and trek into the (privately owned) shopping centre.

Mate I live in Lewisham and the loos are in the shopping centre too, what's wrong with that? It's hardly a massive trek is it?!

Regarding Bromley and tube fare rises in the 80s, I'm not aware of that but believe the Tory Bromley Council (not the residents) campaigned to abolish the left wing GLC under Ken Livingstone, which Thatcher did.

@StCharlotte
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fares_Fair

Bromley council probably did it at the request of central government (It was central government who refused to allow the GLC to subsidise British rail fares in London in addition to tube fares which would have meant all boroughs would have had cheaper fares on tube/train)

There's no tube anywhere south of Merton. It's the London clay. And the irony is the most southerly tube is the Northern Line.

Staines is deprived? 😂
It has a Waterstones!

@bohemia14 I have lived in Bromley all my life and the postal address has always been Bromley, Kent. We have a BR postcode but, yes, we are also a Greater London borough.

The toilets in the Glades are free, yes, but the public ones opposite the library and in the Churchill gardens were closed down a few years ago and I am sorry, but i disagree that it is not a trek if you are in the park or library. Certainly it is if you have kids.

Anyway, as I said before that part of my post was fairly off topic (and is just my opinion).

@CleopatrasMum Kent is not part of the address. Counties are not included in addresses by the Post Office, although Bromley isn't in Kent anyway. But it really doesn't matter :-)

I think you’re confusing ‘having a shit council’ with ‘not being in London’.

Fancy ...

Well bugger me! I just googled the whole postal address thing and it turns out that IAM WRONG. For 45 odd years I have addressed all letters to Bromley Kent (despite knowing it is a London Borough), and it turns out I am a proper Londoner after all. I blame the bloody nuns at school (and my mum) and I apologise to @bohemia14 and anyone else who tried to say this all along. At least I will finally know which box to tick on those online questionnaires - I have dithered over London or South East all my life.

Oh sorry. Cross post with @bohemia14.

I think you’re confusing ‘having a shit council’ with ‘not being in London’.

turns out I was confusing a lot of things. But yes, this is probably one of the many.

that's probably because they are British if they got citizenship

They don't refer to themselves as British either similar to my friends parents who will always refer to their birth country as where they are from eg India, Jamaica, Ireland, Nigeria, Romania, etc.

To be fair, Bromley does feel way more like Kent than London. I think the feel of these places is the biggest cause of confusion. It's quite subjective though. - I remember talking about Shaun of the Dead with a colleague who was convinced the whole film was shot in 'a little village somewhere'. I was like "it's LONDON!!! How could it possibly be anywhere else?!!!" But he was from somewhere smaller so that was how he perceived it.

Ok I know fuck all about London and in all honesty am not even sure what a borough is, but surely the rule of thumb could be - is it on the tube? And if it isn't, it's not London?

Only a non-Londoner would make that assumption @thatmustbenigelwiththebrie. It barely goes south of the river (London clay), so there are huge swathes of the city which don't have the tube.

What I find wedirder is meeting people who say they are from London eg Brixton or Clapham & then I say oh what school? etc it may be my one & then they say oh I moved to London in my 20s. If I moved to Manchester or Liverpool I wouldn't say I was from there

I find this weird too. I live the borough of Croydon now and am undecided about its London-status, but having been born in and grown up in London, DH and I are most assuredly Londoners.

I don't find that weird when i'm in London because "where are you from?" Is often another way of saying "where are you living?" If you're at something that attracts people from all over the city.

but surely the rule of thumb could be - is it on the tube

Well that would be absurd given half of south east London isn't on the tube. Where I live in SE London you can be at London Bridge in 10 minutes via train, it's definitely London.

The tube does not = London.

@smellybelly1 if you moved to America and got citizenship would you think of yourself as American?

PS being from multiple different cultures is a not mutually exclusive situation. Some of us embrace all our cultures but if someone from one of the cultures asks us where we are from due to skin colour/accent etc we most likely say the culture that we think they are trying to find out about.

I don't know, does America allow dual citizenship?

Even if it doesn’t. Would you?

@MiddleClassProblem
I don't think so, I'm not sure I would ever see myself as American. Does America allow dual citizenship?