To wonder why people choose to live in London?

[Cantbloodyrememberthenameonthread]

I always wonder. And reading a recent thread prompted me to ask the question. Why do people do it by choice? People complain about the house prices (rightly), ulez, nursery fees, cost of everything being more expensive, commutes, tubes etc.

if you’re not absolutely tied to London for work or health or I guess family. Why do you choose to live there when there are so many cheaper easier lifestyle options in the country?

Well obvs Original Londoners get a special past for being morally superior beings.

Not at all. I have family in zones 1 through to 3. It’s all over priced craziness.

The traffic in London is no worse than other urban parts of the SE. It's 20 mph now on most roads anyway. I find it terrifying driving on 60 mph roads in the countryside - especially at night when you're always having to dip your lights and hope whatever is coming round the next bend does the same.

No idea how the poster is getting black fingernails - unless she's doing unsolicited gardening or something in her day trip. I wonder what happens to her in other cities. Heaven forbid she ever walks the streets of Paris or NYC.

There is certainly a massive angry chip on shoulder there.

My son has just come back from Tokyo. He said it was cool and busy and enormous! He felt it was much uglier than London but he loved it nonetheless. He prefers London, but I don’t think you can compare anywhere you see as a tourist with your hometown.

We love London but we see a very different side than many tourists who come for a weekend. My son will not have had a real idea of what it’s like to live in Tokyo, by visiting briefly as a tourist so it’s not a fair comparison in my view. I think you probably need to live somewhere to really understand the place.

In the UK we could def learn from the Japanese about litter and manners in public…

I love Japan but “x is cooler than y” is a very teenage approach.

The art, food and music in Tokyo and London are completely different.

Well maybe you need to download Wordle or something, it has many cognitive benefits.

£750k for a flat is not representative of London generally. We live in zone 3 near a huge park surrounded by good schools and quite fast trains straight into 4 central stations (Victoria, Cannon St, Waterloo & Charring Cross) and you could get a 3 bed terrace house with a garden for that here.

And my daughter has no chance of buying a property in her hometown

You could get a 4 bed in my area of London for that (granted it’s an area people are snobby about but it’s cheap!) my flat cost 200k and that was only 4 years ago.

See when I lived in London it was in Canning Town, which certainly isn't green and leafy

Yes very different. And as a result, Tokyo is much cooler 😀 I’m only 18 so thanks for that. Yay.

Just love that last sentence!

Except you’re not, so it’s a bit bizarre.

They probably do, but your assertion was that ordinary Londoners don't shop in independent food shops. Which they very much do.

👍

Everywhere has its plus and minus points. We don't have a tube line.

Cognitive benefits can't make sense of the insensible.

You get the wrong impression then and projecting your own limited perception and critical awareness on what is 'good' and 'bad'.

😂

That creates a very difficult family dynamic here. One DC was born in London, the other two weren't and neither were DH and I. I haven't told her yet about her special privileges and that she's entitled to the house. The other two were born in New York and Paris, respectively, though, so their privileges are decent too.

Yes, I moved to London about 25 years ago and it was a bit of a joky thing you did to visitors: after you'd been out/on the tube etc, get them to blow their nose and look at how black it was
It's not been like that for years now.

I remember seeing the black snot as a sort of badge of my new metropolitan identity (and I was living in a squat in Kilburn!)😀

Though washing your hair a lot (I had long, thick hair) was a bit of a pain.

An original Londoner is someone like in the article I linked you

So, a middle-class person as in the Victorian period? or a working-class person as in <<checks article>> … oh, also as in the Victorian period?
<<checks article again>> A white, working-class person like in the interwar period?
<<checks again>> or someone from the significant Caribbean settlement in the late 40s?

Going back further than the article, in about the 14th century it would have been Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Normans.
Further back again, around the 3rd century, the inhabitants were probably mostly Romano-British (a mix of Celtic Britons and Romans).

So, who is the original original Londoner?

I first lived in Kilburn too! Not a squat, but a damp basement studio. Happy days

Earliest evidence of Human activity dates between 4800 BC and 4500 BC at what is now Vauxhall bridge.
Later on Bronze age remains dating between 1750 BC and 1285 BC were found. Anything on the site prior to Londinium is believed to have been lost, though there has been little effort to find anything.
However, there is evidence of human ancestors in Kent dating to between 560,000 and 620,000 years ago, several 'cold events' have occurred since then so there could well have been proto-humans occupying the London area over 1/2 million years ago.

NW6 drew a lot of us in I see! Like a London gateway drug.