"Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."
A few months ago, I managed to breach the barriers and move down permanently from the North to our nation's fair capital. A lot of the people at my (southern) university had no concept of The North; one proudly exclaimed to me that he'd never been further north than Milton Keynes Bowl. What's scary is that people who have lived in the capital for longer than a couple of years forget what life on the outside is like; they think it's quaint that Manchester has Piccadilly and Victoria as well, as if they're inferior copies of the real thing. Perhaps most tragically, they lose sight of the fact that most of the country outside of the moat isn't really like London at all.
London is a bewildering place to a newcomer. It's not just the big things that are noticeably different, such as the diverse racial profile or the ludicrously inflated prices of drinks, food, travel and entertainment. The way the public transport system seems to be sustained by advertising West End plays on the escalators, the absurdly flash cars that I've only ever seen in Top Gear that weave in and out of lines of black cabs and buses, the abundance of tourists with multiple cameras and bumbags. It's the minutely small things that really draw my attention. In particular, the little bits of paint on the road at zebra and pelican crossings telling people to look to their left, their right or even both ways. At the risk of sounding like a total ingenu, what is the point of these? I did the Green Cross Code as a kid; I know to stand back from the kerb and look both ways >>
- Samuel Johnson
To be fair, Johnson lived just off Fleet Street. Had he lived in Hackney or Romford, he might have found it a little more fatiguing. But his words ring truer today than ever before: London has become such a multi-cultural, multi-lingual hub that you could conceivably spent all your days in London and never eat or go out at the same place twice in a year. The need to leave London for new experiences is scant as more and more cultures move to the capital and bring their distinctive flavours to the sapid blend that is London life. The M25 has become more of a moat than a ring road, its turgid gridlock a deterrent to leaving and an obstacle to entry.A few months ago, I managed to breach the barriers and move down permanently from the North to our nation's fair capital. A lot of the people at my (southern) university had no concept of The North; one proudly exclaimed to me that he'd never been further north than Milton Keynes Bowl. What's scary is that people who have lived in the capital for longer than a couple of years forget what life on the outside is like; they think it's quaint that Manchester has Piccadilly and Victoria as well, as if they're inferior copies of the real thing. Perhaps most tragically, they lose sight of the fact that most of the country outside of the moat isn't really like London at all.
London is a bewildering place to a newcomer. It's not just the big things that are noticeably different, such as the diverse racial profile or the ludicrously inflated prices of drinks, food, travel and entertainment. The way the public transport system seems to be sustained by advertising West End plays on the escalators, the absurdly flash cars that I've only ever seen in Top Gear that weave in and out of lines of black cabs and buses, the abundance of tourists with multiple cameras and bumbags. It's the minutely small things that really draw my attention. In particular, the little bits of paint on the road at zebra and pelican crossings telling people to look to their left, their right or even both ways. At the risk of sounding like a total ingenu, what is the point of these? I did the Green Cross Code as a kid; I know to stand back from the kerb and look both ways >>
