WOT - UK guys - money question

[martinw]

Great fun city..........but heaven help you if you suffered a heart attack on the street because people WOULD simply walk straight past you.  It's not that Londoners are unfriendly (get to know them and they're as hospitable as any Brit), it's just that they're always too consumed with their own existences.

I think that's a pretty fair description.

I disagree. I'm no fan of any city, but I have lived in London, and I worked there for a year as a despatch rider.
In that time I made a lot of friends, and got a lot of help.
I fell off my CX500 in some street in the City one day (think I was EC1 going W1 POB!  :) ) and a posh young yuppie guy in a business suit piled in to help me pick that big old piece of junk up, in the rain, covered in muck and bullets.

A few months later I got knocked off the bike by a van in a street in Battersea, near a market. The (mostly black) stall holders rushed over, helped me up, put my bike on the stand and detained the van driver until he coughed up insurance and other details.

People are people in my experience.

[ToneMonkey]

Great fun city..........but heaven help you if you suffered a heart attack on the street because people WOULD simply walk straight past you.  It's not that Londoners are unfriendly (get to know them and they're as hospitable as any Brit), it's just that they're always too consumed with their own existences.

I think that's a pretty fair description.

I disagree. I'm no fan of any city, but I have lived in London, and I worked there for a year as a despatch rider.
In that time I made a lot of friends, and got a lot of help.
I fell off my CX500 in some street in the City one day (think I was EC1 going W1 POB!  :) ) and a posh young yuppie guy in a business suit piled in to help me pick that big old piece of junk up, in the rain, covered in muck and bullets.

A few months later I got knocked off the bike by a van in a street in Battersea, near a market. The (mostly black) stall holders rushed over, helped me up, put my bike on the stand and detained the van driver until he coughed up insurance and other details.

People are people in my experience.

And if you look at that against when I came off my bike on a country road (leaning in to a corner and had to sit it up otherwise I would have had a BMW badge lodged in my forehead).  About 6 cars drove past looking at me sitting there hurting and the only bloke that stopped was an Aussie in a Bedford Rascal delivering flowers.  BMW was long gone.

I think that everywhere you go, there are a certain percentage of nice people and a certain percentage of arseholes.  There's goingto be more arseholes in London, there's more people.  Although the vast majority of people I've met in London have been alright.  There's no way I could live there though, way too busy for me.  I went down for a party at new year and had to cross the North Circular.  When I was stuck at the lights, the equivalent of the entire population of this village drove by in one go.  :?

[PhilKing]

I grew up in the country in Yorkshire (just outside Bradford in 2 different places, Calverley, which was still very much a village, and Saltaire, which had joined to Shipley to make more of a town).  My job in England had me working in serveral towns, including London, and they never bothered me.  In 1980 I moved to New York, which was a culture shock in many ways, but I have lived here on and off since then.  In late 1988 I moved to London with work and lived first in the Isle Of Dogs (pre-Canary Wharf), and then in Bishop's Park in Fulham.  I moved back full time to the the USA in 1991 and was back working in New York.  In 2004, I moved back to London with work and was there about 15 months, living in Fulham again (though this time in Imperial Wharf).  I also spent a lot of time in London from 1981-1984 because I was working on projects for the London office.  Through the years London has got a lot more crowded and the infrastructure is severly strained (the number of times there were problems on the tube in my last spell there wouldn't be accepted in New York).  I never had problems there (or in New York really, other than 2 tw@ts who tried to mug me at 3:00PM when I was coming out of work in 1992, they didn't think I would fight back and they really didn't know how loud I can shout - I can trip the noise meters by myself :D ).  I do know people who have had problems in London late at night when they were worse for wear through drinking, and this has gotten more common through the years.  Having said that, I am a cyclist and used to ride to work, and very rarely had problems with drivers or pedestrians and always had a nod or wave from most other cyclists.  Most people do keep to themselves a bit but that is the same in New York (possibly even more so here).

Big Cities have their own dynamic and just because of that the people are more in a rush and don't talk to strangers as much (think how many strangers you meet in a day in a city versus in the country and you can see why!).  However it doesn;t mean that people are not friendly.  When I moved to New York at first I didn't know anybody, and within a few weeks had made many friends, though my being English might have helped with the ladies (one of the few places where a Yorkshire accent is an asset).   The same thing in London, though perhaps people don't start talking as easily in London.

In terms of safety, I think you develop more awareness in a city (New York had some really bad neighbourhoods when I first moved here), and I do think that the balance has switched between London and New York, where I don't think about safety in New York as much as I do in London.  Either way, you will either like cities or hate them, I don't really think there is an inbetween.  If I could live anywhere then I probably would pick a villa in Italy on the Amalfi coast, which probably means that I'm still a country boy at heart, but I don't mind living in a city, and both London and New York are exciting in their own ways.