Why is everyone hating on London

[greenwichvillage]

Recently a lot posts I read on social media is about how much people hate London. Its has been called all sorts of names - cesspit, dirty, crime ridden and the foreigners have taken over. They don't recognise London anymore and they are glad they have moved to whiter areas with cheaper housing.

For context, I have lived here all my life, lived in North West London and now live in Southwest London. I admit there are parts of London that have deteriorated, equally there part parts of London that are really nice. Yes it is expensive to live in and properties are expensive but that does not make it a cesspit.

I love living where I am and I love all that London has to offer. I'm not English but I am British and I'm not white and I feel really safe here in London. Yes there are problems with crime, but there is crime everywhere.

I have been to other areas in the UK and really none of it appeals to me, I have been to beautiful country side and small towns and cities and tbh I would get bored after two days there. But I would never go as far as insulting it which people seem to do quite a lot with London.

I think Farage/ Reform and Tommy have a lot to answer for.

@Devonshiregal

And if you take off those blinkers and look with honest, objective eyes, you might understand what people are saying. Even if you are happy with rubbish and graffiti, you must surely understand that other people have a right to find it upsetting? I mean how does people not liking rubbish lying around offend you so much that you have to find weird ways to disprove the validity of their feelings by calling them racist?

I don't think anyone who lives in London would disagree with that. Parts of it are obviously filthy, there's far too much graffiti etc. You can't live here and not notice this. Not liking rubbish isn't what makes people a racist, obviously.

The point is that all major cities in the UK (and a lot of our towns) have equivalent problems with rubbish, graffiti, homelessness, drug abuse, public drunkenness, antisocial behaviour, scruffy town centres, against a background of wider social deprivation. You find me a sizeable town in the UK without graffiti or homelessness. It's a UK-wide issue.

But people don't start threads on Mumsnet or Facebook saying "Why is Birmingham/Cardiff/Bristol/Glasgow/Leeds such a shithole?"

It's always London. London has become a cypher for what a particular type of person thinks is wrong with the UK. Although objectively speaking it's far less bad than many parts of the UK which are actually far more deprived. But it taps into a certain set of assumptions.

I can't give a scientifically rigorous answer to why people seem to feel more excited about London than they do about other UK cities because I haven't done extensive research. But it's hard to avoid the suspicion that the far right dislike London because London disproves the idea that multiculturalism has failed the UK. We're always being told by the online right that multiculturalism is what's wrong with this country. London, where people by and large rub along together OK regardless of their ethnicities, nationalities, demographics and faiths, disproves this argument.

Yes because every other city in the UK has only a white British population 😂

If they are it's because Khan has installed LTNs all over it. He's now hellbent on pedestrianising Oxford Street. I don't see that causing ANY problems at all! 🙄

Born, raised and worked in London for some 40+ years. I have seen it rapidly deteriorate in recent years - streets dirty and unsafe, crime up and police stations closing, just an all-round bad 'energy' and Khan is doing absolutely nothing to change that.

But people don't start threads on Mumsnet or Facebook saying "Why is Birmingham/Cardiff/Bristol/Glasgow/Leeds such a shithole?"

Probably because they aren't our capital city! Obviously.

There isn't anywhere near the amount of focus on those cities as there is on London, which is literally the centre of finance, industry and tourism in the UK!
It's watched on a global scale - and currently the rest of world thinks it's pretty shit!

I grew up in Cornwall in the arse end of nowhere. Nowhere near the coast. 2 buses a week! Nothing to do and nowhere to go. If you've ever seen "this country" our lives were just like that. Everyone knowing everyones business. No decent job opportunities.

I moved away as soon as I could. Initially I was in the home counties but have now lived in London for 20 years. It's not "perfect", no place is. But I have everything I could ever want on my doorstep. There are lots of green spaces if I want nature. It's actually easier to get to the coast than it was from where I grew up, if I want to do that. Yes the public transport is a bit rough around the edges but it's reliable and cheap.

A big one for me as I age is that I have a good hospital 10 minutes away. A relative still living in that rural area died after a heart attack as they needed an air ambulance to get them to hospital (as it was so far) and it just took too long.

I'm aware we have gangs and crime. Do I ever see it? No not really. I won't ever leave. I have everything I want right here.

If you've ever seen "this country" our lives were just like that.

that's how is brilliant!

that show!

Sure except London is the capital city, has historically had and currently has money pumped into it and yet it’s just as, if not worse than other cities. And the idea that it’s proven multiculturalism works and so everyone who doesn’t live there is sitting there stamping their racist feet crossly because they’ve been proved wrong is just mad. YES there are racist people who have decided immigrants are the absolute trouble with this country (and this is spurred on by the media and government) but it’s not like London is the multicultural city and nowhere else is?? There seems to be this (ironically bigoted) idea that the rest of the country are just small minded morons who come to London and freak out because they see someone with darker skin than themselves… have you been to Manchester? Or Birmingham? Or Liverpool? Like there are in fact multicultural places outside of London. And so as to the op’s original question people are down on London because it’s ropey and shouldn’t be. And then there are racist people. That’s not the same thing. And one doesn’t exclude the other.

@Thepeopleversuswork exactly - I would be more than happy to start a why is XXX such a messy dump thread but tend to think it just attracts lots of defensive locals who quite rightly know the ‘better’ aspects of where they live - it’s ‘always’ London they start it about and to be frank I know it’s of the major cities reasonably well with the exception of Newcastle where I’ve only been once- and I would take London over most of them anyday.

Pedestrianising oxford street is an excellent idea

@Devonshiregal

There seems to be this (ironically bigoted) idea that the rest of the country are just small minded morons who come to London and freak out because they see someone with darker skin than themselves… have you been to Manchester? Or Birmingham? Or Liverpool? Like there are in fact multicultural places outside of London. And so as to the op’s original question people are down on London because it’s ropey and shouldn’t be.

I have been to Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool. I lived in Manchester for four years and I go to Birmingham frequently for work. I'm fully aware that all of those cities have significant non-white populations. But those cities don't regularly generate screeds of posts about how awful they are.

You say London is "ropey": but again there's no empirical evidence whatsoever that London is "ropey" compared with any of those other cities (or others for that matter). Like all of those cities London has pockets of deprivation and it has crime. But on any objective measure, it's more affluent than all of those cities and the crime levels are certainly lower.

Manchester, to take one example, had a higher crime rate in terms of crimes per person, in 2023/2024, than London did. London doesn't even make the top three in the UK according to this source I'm looking at (Statista).

There just isn't any credible explanation for the idea that London is "ropier" than other cities. It's just prejudice.

Exactly. If I started a thread on here laying into Swansea (to take a completely random example) I would rightly be told I was a snob and a bigot and people would queue up to give examples of what's wonderful about Swansea and statistics that demonstrate how wrong I am. And so they should.

If anyone says anything positive about London it invariably leads to accusations that we are "London centric" that we never open our eyes, that we live in a bubble, that we haven't stepped outside of London for years and that "real people" don't live there. In more extreme cases followed by the inevitable rant about it being a "shithole", a "sewer" and a "cesspit" and, as night follows day, an unpleasant segue about how horrible our mayor is.

Somehow other people are allowed to defend their home towns and feel pride in them and we're not.

Yeah, course it is. Remind me where in London you live again? Because I'm guessing it's not the backstreets of the West End that will literally be gridlocked with buses and taxis if this goes ahead.

As per usual, people fail to look at the bigger picture.

I live in Walthamstow and a few years ago someone in the High Street got run over by a bus and an enormous crowd of people got together and lifted it off him. This is the reality.

I mean you could say Peterborough. It’s a shit hole. London commuter hot spot as well.

But unlike London the whole of the uk hasn’t heard of Peterborough.

People always want to hate on something. I migrated to London from elsewhere in the UK and think it’s great.

So your main concern is for people who live in the west end of london? Isn't the west end already clogged up with traffic? Isn't the bigger picture to reduce motor vehicle use over all in cities, as they are already doing in other parts of the world?

How come it's so full of tourists from all over the world then?

Indeed. I've walked past the Tower of London earlier today and it was mobbed. I shudder to think what South Ken tube is like.

I'll point out that Edinburgh is also a capital city, also full of tourists and also has many parts which could usefully be described as shitholes (I know it well) but I have yet to see one similar post about it, yet alone the number directed at London.

Plenty of people suppprt ulez. Plenty of people also use public transport to visit friends.

In-laws are right outside Newcastle and I go there only to take the train to Edinburgh instead.

Edinburgh and London are way more friendly than Newcastle, ime.

@Thepeopleversuswork I’ve lived all over , lots of nice areas including leafier nicer bits of London and am originally from a midlands mining town - and the only place ( we live in Bath) I actually miss living is London - ( we do go a lot for work stuff though) I liked the fact that every weekend I could go to different areas on the tube/ train so easily - be it Notting Hill or Walthamstow or Hampstead Heath or Richmond or Spitalfields or Greenwich - it gave a lot of easy variety. My caveat is it’s a much easier place to live with a good income, knowing a few friends and/or secure housing -

I don't like any big cities tbh. As for London, I'll leave my comments until after Stabfest 25 aka Notting Hill carnival this Saturday.
I don't understand why folk take knives to a music festival. I live in the southwest and we had no stabbings at Glasto.

So you think that everything about London can be summarised by one annual cultural event that most people don't go to and have little knowledge of? Seriously?

Although two million people do go to it, so IIRC that's around ten times as many as Glastonbury.

No. Not everything revolves around a festival. But I like music. Its the only city one I know with so much violence.