"There's a hole in the world like a big black pit, and it's filled with people who are filled with shit, and its morals aren't worth what a pig could spit, and it goes by the name of LONDON." - Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
"London is a great place to live, if you don't know any better." - Me, just now.
I lived in London from 2004 to 2016, apart from a year abroad at the Sorbonne in Paris, and a hiatus staying with my old man in High Wycombe immediately after law college due to terminal shortness of cash, but I did 12 years in the Great Wen, as it used to be called. Now, I've seen the light and escaped somewhere far more congenial (Devon), and in retrospect I should have done it earlier.
See, London has a reputation when you're young of being where you go to seek your fortune. The streets are paved with gold. Cosmopolitan wondrousness, the best museums, the best night life, the best culture, the great and the good and the famous, the City with its ultra well paid jobs and the "engine" of Britain's economy. Then you live there and the gold is simply the glow of arc-sodium lamps on wet East End streets, the cosmopolitan wondrousness translates to inter-ethnic tension in all directions, the museums are full of tourists, the nightclubs are all overpriced meat markets, the culture is pretentious, the great and good and famous all live miles out in the suburbs or Surrey, the City is full of overpaid cocaine-sniffing cuntwits and a job in same has a culture of cockwaving, casual sexism, and compulsory unpaid overtime to the point at which you have no life outside work. And that's just the good bits. Thanks to the market going stupid, nobody can afford to live there other than in a shoebox in places like Hackney or Lewisham or Tottenham or Barking or other places renowned for knife crime and massive drugs, and in which all the available properties are falling down because they were built to a price as emergency housing post-Luftwaffe and post-slum clearance and have been ill-maintained ever since and/or are beyond their designed lifespan by now, or unless they are stupendously rich. Or, of course, unless they are dirt poor, in which case they are herded into Soviet Lego sets branded "social housing" and forgotten about by a local authority which, in the words of the legendary Theodore Dalrymple, "makes an 18th century aristocratic landlord look positively caring about its tenants."
And it's not just the property that is massively overpriced. Everything else is. Thanks to parking space being at a huge premium and traffic being stupendous, driving is impractical. Attempts were made to rectify this with the congestion charge but that simply rearranged the deckchairs on the Titanic. I recall with some distaste trying to navigate a Transit Van, when moving out the city for the last time, from Devon to Greenwich, and queuing for hours before, during, and after Vauxhall Bridge and noticing that thanks to the C-charge the entire city's traffic was diverted through side roads too small for purpose but the main highway along the Chelsea embankment was empty as a cinema showing a Shia LaBoeuf film. Whoops. As a result, very few people drive in London and most rely on the much vaunted public transport system to get anywhere. To be fair, the tube and buses are not bad considering the volume of people going through them on a daily basis. However they're massively expensive. As in, sixty quid for a weekly ticket from zones 1-4 expensive. And they're stuffed beyond bursting and being on them is a trial with waves of hatred bouncing around the place, people treading on your feet to beat you to the last seat, people with music on their phones with those stupid in-ear headphones that spray Ed Sheeran's latest work to the rest of the fucking carriage, as if we weren't already sick of the ginger guitar-twanger without yet another rendition of "Shape of You" to add to the fifteen you've suffered already on The Radio 1 Breakfast Show with Nick Grimshaw (aka that simpering fuckwit who loves the sound of his own voice) that morning while you were queuing for a bacon and cheese bagel for breakfast or whatever. And then just as you're comfortable and have zoned out everyone else, some boot-faced dangerhaired harridan screams at you for "manspreading" because you dared to have your knees stick beyond the edge of your seat even though there's nowhere else to put them because, in turn, the only place to put your briefcase where it won't get stolen or pissed on or similar is between your legs.
Ugh.
Also, because London, every single chain, supermarket, whatever, puts its prices up. Even Wetherspoons. Cost of a Spoonies roast chicken and chips spectacular in normal land? £6.75. Cost of same in London? Twelve quid. Even though it's the exact same dinner. Even the local Vertical Drinking Establishment in London is expensive because it's London. Continental Fighting Lager anywhere else would cost £2.50, but in London... lucky to get change out of a fiver, mate. To make matters worse, said Vertical Drinking Establishment will have pretentions of grandeur.
This is, of course, because of the unfortunate effects of gentrification. I lived in Hackney for the majority of my time in London, and in that time it went from being slums but honest slums (I was a regular at the local transport caff where I could get a pie and chips and gravy at lunchtime for a fiver and be well fed for an afternoon of keeping the locals in their homes), to a pretentious hipster haven. Gradually the independent businesses folded to be replaced by pop up fusion street food stands, overpriced cafés, wanky pubs, crunchy granola and alternative health emporia, pseudish "art" galleries, shitshacks full of nostalgia tat and where you could make your favourite childhood chocolate bar into a milkshake... the list goes on. Meanwhile, the locals, being priced out of this, are ghettoised into their decaying Council blocks where they are forgotten about by powers that be (of all parties, I hasten to add) and left to rot and kept out of sight of the hipsters that are being encouraged to go there. I remember on a nocturnal bus ride back from a heavy metal concert at 4.00 am, full of Hobgoblin and botulo-burgers from a van, posting to Facebook from my phone that London is becoming increasingly cyberpunk, what with the gleaming plate glass and steel skyscrapers atop or overshadowing decaying older buildings, massive and increasing wealth inequality, CCTV and mass surveillance everywhere, and a local government that promises "regeneration" but basically shovels things it doesn't like the look of (homelessness, especially) into someone else's bailiwick - and there's 33 boroughs in London so there's plenty of scope for the Caaaahhhncil to make it someone else's problem.
Speaking of cyberpunk, a stable of cyberpunk fiction tends to be that everyday stuff in it is sub-standard, i.e. 3D printed nosh, water that tastes weird or is polluted or both, and similar. London is like that. With 7.5 million sets of kidneys to go through, London water is pure (are you surprised) but rather... ammoniacal to taste. Granted, you won't get cholera from drinking it (well, not any more) but it does taste uncomfortably as if it was someone else's piss just last week - which, of course, it was. And as for food, well, the stuff in supermarkets is okay but if you go to local shops it's uncomfortably hit and miss. One week you might get a batch of habanero peppers that are beautiful and tasty, the next week they might be actually made of rot inside and have big juicy maggots in them with no visible entry holes.
It's not the cleanest city in the world either. Now I'm not saying it has to be like Singapore or other Stepford Cities, but come on... anywhere where going outside and walking a mile to university (as I did in my first year there) causes your snot to turn black probably needs to clean up its act. And once again, ironically the congestion charge has simply pushed this problem away from the centre to the further reaches.
But that's not the worst part of London - the people. Oh God. The people. Londoners are invariably rude, pushy, smarmy, pretentious, mad, or all of the above. You don't get smiled at other than the enforced rictus of corporate obligation by baristas and such. Nobody talks to you in the street other than to sell you something, threaten you, or demand your money (with or without the threat of being stabbed as an accompaniment.) Nobody even makes eye contact on the bus or tube, and doing so is a good way to receive a terse "whut!?" from them. In the workplace, people expect to be rung back or e-mailed back immediately and if you don't it's taken as an affront akin to you slapping them in the face. In bars and clubs, conversations quickly devolve into money and/or virtue signalling. Striking up a conversation with a rando in a bar or club is met with defensiveness, as if your only motive could be to sell them something, start a fight, or declare an intention to have mechanical, unsatisfying sex with them later on (though to be fair, this is the only reason a Londoner would ever have to talk to a rando in a bar or club.)
And while all this is going on, the attitude the average Londoner displays to people from "the provinces." Anyone from the North is a racist neanderthal who keeps coal in the bath. Anyone from the South West is an inbred dolt. Anyone from the Midlands is thick. In the aftermath of the Brexit vote in 2016 many were the schadenfreude-laden cryposts on Facebook about how London should declare independence from the pussy-grabbing racist Brexiteering provinces, not realising that the rest of the UK hates them so much with their attitude and sense of entitlement and obsession with money that they'd happily sell London to some other country if they had their way just to be shot of the place and its sneering, superiority-complex-laden inhabitants. There's a reason that in Withnail & I the two protagonists tried to desperately lie that they weren't from London.
I'm just glad I'm out the place. I might visit now and again but I'm not going back to live there. I can't afford to anyhow, despite being on a wage that is considerably higher than the UK average salary.
When a man is tired of London he is tired of life, eh? Maybe so, if you're rich like Samuel Johnson was. For the rest of us, don't bother.