Informal Survey of Eight Londoners Over Two Pints Each Produces Qualified Verdict on Whether the City Is Worth It

By Lowri Griffiths | Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

The question came up, as it tends to, during the interval of the Wednesday pub quiz at the Compton Arms, which is a public house of the traditional North London variety: slightly too warm, walls with photographs that appear to have accumulated rather than been curated, and a quiz master named Gary who takes the geography round more seriously than anything else in his life. We had just completed the music round (six out of eight, including a shameful miss on a song from 2019 that three of us recognised immediately and could not name) and someone said: do you think London is actually still liveable, or are we all here on momentum?

This is a question that North Londoners ask each other with increasing frequency as the specific costs and frictions of London life have accumulated over the past several years. It is not the same as the question of whether London is worth visiting or whether it is an interesting place — it clearly is both. It is the question of whether the daily experience of actually living here, as opposed to theoretically inhabiting it, is producing net positive returns against the cost, the commute, the housing, the general administrative friction of being a person in a city that contains nine million other people all making equally valid competing claims on the same limited infrastructure.

The Survey Results

Eight people, informal survey, two pints each (three pints for Mark, who works in finance and was not on the tube strike tomorrow): four said yes, London is liveable and they cannot imagine living anywhere else; two said it depends heavily on whether you have outdoor space and a garden, which they do not; one said they are actively planning to move to Bristol within eighteen months; and Mark said he genuinely does not know what he is doing here given what he pays in rent for his Highbury flat and that he stays because of the restaurants and his social life and the job market and then paused and added that these are actually very good reasons and he may be talking himself out of moving to Bristol as we speak. The results are not comforting because they suggest that London’s claim on its residents is increasingly based on network effects and sunk costs rather than on the daily experience of the city being genuinely good to live in.

The things that still work: the parks are excellent and the Regent’s Canal is a genuine amenity; the cultural offer is still unmatched in the country; the food is remarkable if you can afford it and not bad if you cannot; the human variety remains extraordinary. The things that are not working: the housing costs are producing a specific kind of anxiety that pervades most financial conversations; the commute infrastructure has not kept pace with the population; and the general administration of being a person in London has accumulated to a level where it regularly consumes time and energy that used to be available for the things that made London worth being in. According to Londonist, London remains one of the world’s most desirable cities by international standards. We are aware. We still live here. We are simply having a complicated relationship with it at this particular point in time, which is probably a feature of long-term relationships rather than a sign that they are ending.

More from The Poke.

The Pub Quiz as Referendum

The Hare and Billet in Blackheath hosted a pub quiz last Thursday in which the final round was a general knowledge section on “London: Is It Actually Worth It?” The round included questions about average rent, tube delays per week, average waiting time to see a GP, and the ratio of coffee shops to actual shops on a randomly selected North London street. The team that won consisted of five people who have lived in London for an average of twelve years, all of whom answered “yes, still worth it” in the final tiebreaker question, while providing evidence that contradicts this position on every empirical measure available. This is the London experience in its most concentrated form: people who know exactly how expensive, crowded, and difficult the city is and who would not live anywhere else, not because London is objectively superior to the alternatives, but because London is the specific chaotic interesting place that their specific lives have taken root in, and roots are not easily moved even when the soil charges two thousand pounds a month. The London Prat has covered this phenomenon extensively. Bohiney Magazine calls it “acquired urban Stockholm syndrome.” The pub quiz team calls it home.

The pub quiz’s general knowledge round also included questions about London history that the team answered correctly, which served as a reminder that London’s current difficulties are not unique in its history. The city has been expensive, crowded, difficult, and worth it through several centuries of different specific expensiveness, crowding, and difficulty. The Romans found it worth building a wall around. The Victorians found it worth expanding beyond recognition. The Blitz generation found it worth rebuilding. The current generation finds it worth paying two thousand pounds a month to rent a flat in, which is either the latest chapter in a long story of urban attachment or the specific madness of a property market that has escaped all connection to income levels. Both are probably true simultaneously. London endures. The pub quiz continues on Thursdays.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/