No, that’s third out of the three for me.
I’m afraid London has become a city of two halves. One half the well off and affluent and the other half the poor and disadvantaged. Everyone in between is moving outside to the suburbs and travelling in to work. You now have to be very street savvy in London to avoid becoming a victim of crime. The majority of crime is unreported as in most cases police do not attend and due to the cuts a lot is no longer investigated. Add to that closure of police stations on a scale never seen before. The London most older people remember no longer exists I’m afraid. I can speak from experience having served 32 years in the Met and with two daughters who are serving detectives we worry about every day.
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That is sad, it doesn’t seem like London is a nice place anymore…
It’s an ok place, and has lots of good things about it. It’s just not a perfect place (where is?) and if you go imagining it is all super-cool and friendly you will be disappointed.
I don’t think I would imagine that any big city is going to be friendly. Nowhere is perfect indeed, but it seems like there are just so many better work opportunities in the UK, I hope that doesn’t change any time soon!
Two of my children live and work in London and enjoy it very much. My daughter has even bought a flat there. Their cost of living is horrific but they both have well paid jobs with salaries that are higher than they would be for doing the same job elsewhere.
My daughter spent four months in Paris and adored that but unfortunately although her firm has an office there they employ very few British staff there. She keeps her fingers crossed though as her firm has her flagged as being a French speaker.
Thanks Maria. Variety is a wonderful thing!
For my money… it would come down to where I would actually be living and what were the folk like in that immediate neighbourhood.
Big cities can be exciting, wonderful places… but if you don’t have somewhere friendly to call Home… to lay your head at the end of a wonderful, exciting day… that is just no good at all. My opinion, that’s all.
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Maria, I lived and worked in London’s East End (Hackney) in the 1950s and it’s character has changed so much everywhere. It used to be a working class city as well as one for millionaires. I earned £7 a month in a live-in hospital training job and was able to get free theatre and opera tickets as a student. On the rare occasions I paid, the price of entrance (to the cheapest seats for an opera at Sadlers Wells) was 5 shillings (25 pence). Every Londoner was an equal of every other, top-hatted or wearing a fishmonger’s apron. Now, working class people are being pushed out of affordable homes by property speculators and foreign money-launderers.
IMO the buzz you can hear is the sound of blue-bottle flies attracted by the decadent stink of London’s putrescence. London is rotting from the inside out.
Birmingham is a much more typically British city than London, as is Glasgow. These places are owned by their diverse and culturally coherent inhabitants, shared generously with visitors. Visitors to London are only welcomed for the money they have to pay for the privilege.
Sorry for the bile, but the London many of us knew who lived there while it was still alive, and not embalmed with funny money, feels like a tragedy.
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