Anti-London snobbery: the new London snobbery

Best strategy: Pretend you can’t understand their strange provincial dialect, then if they persevere just pretend they aren’t there.

Rudest thing: Never happened to me, I never talk to people who don’t live in London. Have you ever met a farmer? They wear horrible clothes and are always armed to the teeth. The combination of a heavy metal t-shirt and a pitchfork is guaranteed to unnerve.

Posted about 1 year ago by plum

Rudest thing: “You bloody Londoners, you all think you’re so clever”

To which the answer, of course, is “Yes, we are”.

The best strategy is to pity the poor fools. London is smelly, dirty and far too expensive but it has the best arts, the best museums, the best food, the best music scene and the best fun to be had in the whole country. And believe me, I spent the first 21 years of my life living elsewhere and I’ve never looked back since moving here.

Posted about 1 year ago by Unpremeditated

When I go home for Christmas, I silently laugh at all my pramface chums who never made it out in time. Mwah ha ha.

Posted about 1 year ago by Mamfer

I do the same as Mamfer! i come from a village in cambridgeshire – and although there are worse villages with people who havent even ventured further than the next village let alone to cambridge! I do get a lot of narrowminded comments about living london, although not rudeness as yet but they either seem uninterested or surprised that i could live here. but i love it! i just remember how many more experiences i have already had at 21 that many will never have due to fear and narrowmindedness!

Posted about 1 year ago by Ris322

Don’t even get me started on the whole ‘we should have the Olympics in Birmingham’, ‘we should have built Wembley in Bury St Edmunds’, ‘why don’t they move Parliament to Chorlton’? kind of stuff you regularly get from the brains of tabloidia.

Posted about 1 year ago by iainaitch

Oh, goody, rant potential.

I work on a team of people who commute in to West London from Cambridge, Leicester, Bingley and other godforsaken hell holes. I get a constant barrage of “why on earth do you want to live in this dirty, crime infested, tube doesn’t work, homeless people blah, blah, blah, too scared to get on a bus, hoodies, where’s my Daily Mail, can’t wait to get home safely to my Barret home”. I say SHUT UP, I love this city and if you don’t like it here why not get yourself a nice job in a crisp factory and stop polluting this office atmosphere with your whinging. HA!

Rudest thing said to my face was “you could sell your house and move somewhere nice”! I live in Honor Oak, it’s green and peaceful, my neighbours are lovely, it’s 9 minutes into London Bridge, I can see Canary Wharf and the Natwest Tower from my front garden. I like it.

I get similar nonsense when I go home to Cornwall, the landlord of our local was ranting on about bl00dy Londoners the other day because somebody asked for something not on the menu, I pointed out that the poor girl had only asked to swap the ham on a ploughmans for some cheese and actually judging by her accent she was probably from Manchester not London. I’m now being categorised as a Londoner for my bad attitude.

My strategy to get the jealous yokels to shut their gobs, buy a second home in their area with my big, fat London salary and price them out of the housing market. Or alternatively live a happy and enriched life in a beautiful city (and sneer at them a bit).

Posted about 1 year ago by KK

I find it just as annoying when people who do live in London, but who came here from foreign parts in search of a high salary (and I mean people who earn lots, not people who work hard jobs for minimum wage) whinge on about how horrendous the place is. About the tube not working, about the weather, about just about anything they can possibly think of, which is everything because they can find absolutely nothing good about London. Not even the fact they earn way more than they possibly could at home, because then they just whinge about the taxes they have to pay. Because no other countries have taxes you know. It makes me itch to go all Alf Garnett, but I don’t because I am English and therefore crippled by my compulsion to be polite, so I just smile benignly and say nothing.

Posted about 1 year ago by PrincessBride

Were all you proud Londoners born in London? I was and now I live in Wiltshire. You may find this incredible but I have not yet had sexual congress (invited or uninvited) with a blood relative or member of the animal kingdom. I like it here because of the pace of life and the lack of self-satisfied onanists (SWIDT).

Indulge yourselves all you wish in the delusion that the rest of the population of the UK is massing just outside Zone 4 waiting for you to let your guard down. I am content in my rural idyll here, just watch yourselves when you venture out to get a bit of the country air. We have a quaint old custom of shagging strangers and then eating them.

Posted about 1 year ago by Boris

Very happy that you’re happy out in the countryside, Boris, but not sure anyone’s said anything about a planned rural invasion. And no-one else is playing the ‘I’m more London than what you are’ game.

Though if they were doing the latter… I read the ‘potential’ in the first line of KK’s post as ‘polenta’. Thus I win the game, and am crowned Mr. Canonbury. Organic mung-bean smoothies all round!

Posted about 1 year ago by esotericbadger

Went to a Christening the other weekend up near Peterborough. Lots of rural types.

Woman said, after I told her where I lived, “Oh London? I hate london. So violent and so filthy.”

The conversation kind of finished, when I asked her if “butchering animals and spreading shit on fields wasn’t.”

Seemed to shut her up. And hopefully answers your questions.

Posted about 1 year ago by Pokster

Just before I moved to London I went to a friend’s wedding. When I told the woman sitting next to me – who I had met about 2 minutes previously – that I was planning to move here she said,

“London is awful. People just end up taking loads of drugs and having abortions. I had a friend who moved to London and it happened to her.”

I didn’t say anything rude: it was my friend’s wedding, and the woman was her brother’s fiance, but the temptation was strong. I decided to feel sorry for anyone who, while still in her 20s, felt that a twinset, pearls and a Maggie Thatcher hairdo was a good look.

Posted about 1 year ago by jd28

“Isn’t everything outside the M25 back in the ‘50s ?”

Seems to shut up the rural detractors.

Posted about 1 year ago by orac

I figure it must be awfully difficult to live so close to the greatest city in the world (and I’m American, so I think everything in Britain is very close to everything else in Britain), but not get to live IN that city. Rubbishing London, out of envy, is perhaps all these people have.

Up to a point, awareness of this sad fact allows me to smile and nod and keep my mouth shut. Pushed past that point, I simply point out the sad fact.

Posted about 1 year ago by MichaelStephenFuchs

One of my bitchy old managers, upon learning I’d applied for a job in London, promptly said “Oh, she’ll never get that”.Oh, how we laughed as she was the first person I told the good news to.

Posted about 1 year ago by Mamfer

You all need to stop whining. I’m at uni in Durham, which is probably the city in the country LEAST like London, and the only complaints of this sort I hear are from Londoners who miss the city. I’ve never heard any non-Londoners complain about the city. I love London an enormous amount, but that doesn’t automatically mean that the rest of the country is some appalling wasteland with nothing to see and no good conversation.

Posted about 1 year ago by ice

I don’t think folk are saying that London is the best place to live in the world or that they’re blind to its problems, just that it’s annoying that people feel qualified to slag it off when they have never lived there themselves. I get this all the time – but what about the crime/dirt/house prices etc etc… how would you know? You only ever come here for a night out? It seems to be one of the few places in Britain it is completely acceptable to slag off to people who live there and like it.

Posted about 1 year ago by anasam

Ah no, we’re being too touchy there, London’s nothing like the most slated. Liverpool, Glasgow, pretty much all of South Wales, Essex, the Isle of Sheppey, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Portsmouth – they’re all regularly written off as shitholes by folk who’ve never visited, and if the locals protest they’re just being chippy.

Of course, they are actually shitholes, but I’ve visited them all a fair bit so I can say that. But I can’t say it about Sunderland, Milton Keynes or Middlesbrough because I haven’t been to any of them. I have my suspicions though.

Posted about 1 year ago by Mockernee

In answer to boris’ question were we all born here? i have to say no i wasnt and i couldnt claim to be a londoner although i love it here! i also love cambridge but there are some attitudes that i hate. I am half country mouse half town mouse – i love both lifestyles but can you imagine how bored i was as a teenager when the last bus home was at 11pm or £20 for a taxi that takes you 10miles, so it is such a big change for me here and i love it and think that it gets a bad wrap but i also agree with mockernee that it nowhere near as bad as the abuse us southerners give the north or that given to the cities thay mentioned.

Posted about 1 year ago by Ris322

What about “I didn’t realise that there was anywhere outside of London?”?

Posted about 1 year ago by MissMary

“Shut up. It’s what you make of it you fool, and what do you mean “

Posted about 1 year ago by McDirts