To think London has become a parody of itself?

[NattyBrickMember]

Everything is overpriced, gentrification is out of control, and the chaos somehow feels unbearable and iconic at the same time. AIBU to think London has become a caricature of what it used to be - like a city pretending to be itself for tourists and TikTok?

I dont really use london anymore, only thing i would miss is one of my yoga classes....we walk down our little high street, dodge the druggies, beggars, scammers...walk around the big expensive cars illegally parked on the pavements owned by customers from the albanian mafia cafes....toodle past the fake mafia barbers, vape shops.....its all over the uk from what i have read and seen....we will be happy to move out in a few years !

Love London. Lived there 20 years. Have travelled all over and firmly believe London is the best city in the world!

I moved out of London into Hertforshire for a decade. My god what a fool I was. Back in London now and loving it. Certainly one of the top cities of the world up there with Tokyo, Paris and New York.

Londoner here. Born and bred of Londoner parents.
Don't recognize the London you are describing. This is an amazing city, full of people from here and all over the place going about their business, trying to get on. Like everywhere else?

I wouldn't quarrel with you on this. The bus strikes over recent years have been awful for those of us who don't have an easily accessed underground, I rarely go into the West End now, though the South Bank is easy to access by overground train.
We lived in an area just south of the river for many years until the gentrification destroyed the place that we loved. After living in a city in the southwest for 15 years we've come back again - not to the centre but to an area of West London/Middlesex which is still at least a little interesting and safe. There are huge new developments here which could be seen as good for the area but in reality many of the flats will never be occupied, even in our outer West London area.

And yes@beencaughttrollin, the smell of cannabis is all pervading. Dealers roam around, parking their large cars on street corners in all parts of our neighbourhood and the police are totally disinterested. I think that central London drug deliveries are more discrete, but I'm sure that the very wealthy idle occasional occupiers of properties worth megamillions have their own sources of supply.
The parts of London close to the the centre are definitely not for people even on many professionals' salaries now, which is a shame. When I first came to London in the late 60's you could live near the centre, not in any great style but it was possible. Now you have to be very well off and even then you can't live in the "real" centre where it was possible before.

A relative and her family lived in fashionable south London for a while but have now retreated to suburbia. In the 60's we barely thought of these parts of south London as somewhere we would want to live, they were sometimes rough, sometimes studenty, or often simply undesirable except for the areas near the large parks. Now they are just over-gentrified, ultra-expensive ghettos for young professionals who will eventually move to the country or some sort of stockbrockers' suburb.

sounds as if your opinion is based on the tackier parts of Oxford Street