What do you like or hate about living in London

And for those of you who have left, what would it take for you to return .

I would return to London in a few years' time for the right job opportunity. 

I love the pubs, the food scene, the general buzz of energy, the architecture, the museums. Always get a spring in my step when I'm back there.

Although there are some parts that are really rather pleasant, have excellent schools, are readily accessible to work even if there is a strike, have 3 Waitroses within easy walking distance and people generally drive MPVs of some description.

Love - pretty much everything about it, even the things that annoy me, I'm often quite grateful for, when I finish internally kvetching about some temporary irritation.

Hate - see above.

 

Being able to phone a friend to meet for a pint and then stroll a short distance to suitable pub rather than having to plan in advance and then ensure that one of us can drive and collect the other, etc.  Also handy being able to nip to the supermarket across the road to pick up something you've forgotten.

Personally what I hate is even the Greater London suburbs are still rammed with traffic and people on a Sunday . Only this Sunday at 6PM I had to buy some food stuffs from little Waitrose as the main supermarkets were all closed. The traffic was horrendous,on what was two thirds of a mile journey and there were people everywhere. I just wondered what they were all doing 

I like the history; the diversity of the buildings; the old side streets with buildings from 200 years ago right next to new builds.

I hate the number of cars and just how rammed everything seems to be. 

Indeed Wibble but there aren't any other cities I'd choose to live in on the basis that they are all so small you can reasonably live in the country and nip into town.  London is the only one in the country where it takes an hour just to drive from suburbs to centre.

love - there is always something happening - something for literally every whim or fancy. You can always discover a new nugget about the history and still wonder what's next. It keeps you curious. 

hate - crowd, aggressive cyclists and van drivers, the pace

Love - The buzz, the theatre etc, the choice of restaurants and things to do in general, the ease and frequency of public transport, the architecture.

Hate - The tourists. They just get in the way. The house prices. Getting out by train requires schlepping all the way in to the centre.

Love

 

- whatever you want you can get. Suddenly fancy trying Laotian food? There’ll be about 10 restaurants and lots of reviews.

- as a lawyer you feel closer to the centre of the legal world there. Working in the regions you always feel looked down on. The standard of your regional colleagues supports this.

Hate

- just ridiculous wealth inequality. You could be an MC associate and still feel poor compared to an unemployed council home owner, because of the cost of living. It’s the only place you’ll regularly have inexcusable levels of wealth thrust in your face, eg Arabs driving sports cars down Oxford Street.
 

- a combination of lots of other things: more violence, more pollution, people are more aggressive in public, too congested. As others  have said, I wouldn’t want to raise children here.

 

"- as a lawyer you feel closer to the centre of the legal world there. Working in the regions you always feel looked down on. The standard of your regional colleagues supports this."

god imagine caring about this sort of thing 

Love pretty much everything about london, but the culture, architecture, variety of people, breadth of experience are right up there. love that I don’t own a car. 

hate - the constant and unending roadworks that are screwing up bad traffic even further (see point about not having a car). Hate that air quality is getting bad in some parts (although not my hood). That’s about it. 

Love: the parks and Hampstead Heath, the restaurants (particularly the vast number of good mid range and neighborhood places - London probably has the best selection of those anywhere in the world). The pubs, the gigs.

Hate: the truly fvcking mental house price thing that means even if you are quite well off you have to live somewhere that doesn't feel properly safe/nice if you want more than a shoebox worth of space.

The traffic.  The traffic has really killed most of my personal pleasure about being in London and makes the house price thing far worse when you have kids.  It takes fvcking hours to get across town.

 

 

 

The whole house price thing is only partly true,prices are at there lowest for 5 years or so and still falling . I just find that so many professionals are unrealistic about where they want to live and what they want to live in . 
 

still very affordable houses and flats to be had In mitcham,Mordern ,Roehampton, Dagenham and Redbridge, and Sutton to name a few. If you want to live in Hampstead or Chelsea as a five year PQE lawyer you are going to struggle to put it mildly .

Yes Linda.  For example I can drive from 10 miles outside Tunbridge Wells to the centre of Tunbridge Wells in 25 minutes in total unless I pick a small period each morning afternoon when the local rush hour is on.  From suburban London to the M25 invariably takes me half an hour even at 6am on a Sunday morning with no traffic.

"For example I can drive from 10 miles outside Tunbridge Wells to the centre of Tunbridge Wells in 25 minutes"

But what would you do when you got there?

"From suburban London to the M25 invariably takes me half an hour even at 6am on a Sunday morning with no traffic"

Maybe invest in a satnav?

Diablo, places like   Twickenham, and Sutton are definitely in London, as they are London Boroughs, notwithstanding towns within them have SM, TW postcodes as opposed to SW something postcodes. Mitcham is in the London Borough of Merton and has both SW, and strangely CR postcodes.

Bentines I don't want to live in Dagenham personally, but if I was desperate to get a foothold on the property ladder, I would definitley look there. Its about cutting your cloth accordingly really

King I’ve got a satnav but it’s 15 miles from me to the M25 and a chunk of that is 20mph limits so not possible to get there much faster.  On a bad Sunday afternoon it’s over an hour in traffic.

As for TW I’d clearly go to the Compasses for a pint with the usual suspects.

It's shit.  

Head out into Hertfordshire or the Chilterns and find somewhere where you can buy a half-decent property for £300k and not have to worry about getting stabbed on the way home from work.

hate:

the greed and conspicuous consumption

the bottom bumping/ people elbowing you out of their way on the roads, about jobs, houses, the lot

the local authorities and the fact they’re flat broke and all stick no carrot and unreasonable about you just going about your business.

love:

people on the underground, such style and individual fashion

edgy

no one ( hardly anyone) is 300 lbs

you can get or do anything 24/7 (except for tradesmen)

the buses, LOVE the buses

@OP

Asking what there is 'to love about London' is a bit like chucking a copy of the Old Testament at (the head of) a new trainee and telling 'them' "Read it, understand it and summarise on a page of A4. We will need your answers later today in the boardroom."

@OP

Asking what there is 'to love about London' is a bit like chucking a copy of the Old Testament at (the head of) a new trainee and telling 'them' "Read it, understand it and summarise on a page of A4. We will need your answers later today in the boardroom."

I'll give it a go:

Adam is a bit randy

Eve is unsatisfied

Cain is a bit of a cvnt

Turns out god is a bit of a cvnt

God floods everyone except noah who gets his cock out

Leviticus gets very cross about spaffing and pork

Some bollocks about the egyptians

A lion doesn't kill someone

A whale doesn't kill someone

Moses suffers altitude sickness and tells people to chop off bits of their cock

Some bollocks about a giant

 

--> heads to Sparks notes.  Not too difficult to summarise the old testament in one page...  God created the earth, dont sleep with goats, take your kids phones away at bedtime, and dont drive a range rover.  Isnt that about it?

"I looked, and I saw a windstorm coming out of the north—an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light. The center of the fire looked like glowing metal, and in the fire was what looked like four living creatures. In appearance their form was human, but each of them had four faces and four wings. Their legs were straight; their feet were like those of a calf and gleamed like burnished bronze. Under their wings on their four sides they had human hands. All four of them had faces and wings, and the wings of one touched the wings of another. Each one went straight ahead; they did not turn as they moved.

"As I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the ground beside each creature with its four faces. This was the appearance and structure of the wheels: They sparkled like topaz, and all four looked alike. Each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting a wheel. As they moved, they would go in any one of the four directions the creatures faced; the wheels did not change direction as the creatures went. Their rims were high and awesome, and all four rims were full of eyes all around… Spread out above the heads of the living creatures was what looked something like a vault, sparkling like crystal, and awesome.

Particularly like the description of the rims, like a Subaru impreza from about 1999

What sails said.

@ thirdfuse I just don’t understand London is one of the most safest cities in the world. The vast majority of London is very safe even those areas with “low” property prices .

Their faces looked like this: Each of the four had the face of a human being, and on the right side each had the face of a lion, and on the left the face of an ox; each also had the face of an eagle. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate....

Personally what I hate is even the Greater London suburbs are still rammed with traffic and people on a Sunday . Only this Sunday at 6PM I had to buy some food stuffs from little Waitrose as the main supermarkets were all closed. The traffic was horrendous,on what was two thirds of a mile journey and there were people everywhere. I just wondered what they were all doing 

heh at this. I expect they are all making the same unnecessary short journey as you because they can't be arsed to walk. 

Megalolz at people living beyond Zone 2 trying to claim they live in LDN.

A 500sq ft studio built on a brownfield site in Docklands just doesn't cut it.  

 

Tottenham has been abandoned by any right-minded person and operates as a sort of satellite of a 3rd world country.  

They could easily film the next series of Narcos there.  

It's one giant no-go ghetto with a few areas of extreme wealth where dirty money from Russia, the Gulf and Asia buys huge swathes of the centre. 

It's bandit country and deadly after dark and is full of knife-wielding, drug-dealing ghetto boys.

The edges are scummy and chavvy.

It is overpriced and unaffordable. It's awful to commute to and within, but there's no alternative  as most of the legal jobs are based there. One doesn't want to do conveyancing so one doesn't have to work in a shit town in Surrey or Essex. Commuting at a cost of around £4,000 a year is little consolation for money saved on paying £1200 a month for a fridge-like room a shared terraced house in N or S London where there's a sink estate around the corner.

Public transport? Overcrowded, though short journeys by bus are okay, but the tube is awful. 

It is polluted. There's too much traffic. Dirt. Litter. Cars should be banned from Zones 1 to 2. There are too many people. Many companies should relocate outside London as should many Govt Departments. There should be rent controls, as some quarters of Berlin are imposing. 

An ugly city with ugly architecture, a total mish-mash except for the 'old' City, legal London, and some parts of Chelsea and Mayfair.

One gets black smuts in the nostrils having travelled on the tube. 

Door to door, home-office/office-home is up to 4 hours a day commuting. There is no chance of ever owning property closer in to reduce the commute. 

However, one has made one's (limited) choices and one has to live with them. Better days will not come, so one shouldn't wish for them. 

If the world stopped drilling for oil , the dirty money will leave London and property prices in London may crash, which will be a good thing. However, that won't happen in our lifetimes. 

We left in 2008.  back then a 3/4 bed house in Chiswick was £600k.  Our current 4 bed detached house in Yorkshire would be £2m in Chiswick.  cost us £340k 2 years ago.  

in answer to OP this is the very simple point - doesn't matter the benefits, once you move out you can't move back.

Oh - and "It is overpriced and unaffordable. It's awful to commute to and within, but there's no alternative  as most of the legal jobs are based there. "  uhhhh?  yes there are plenty of legal jobs outside London.