Maybe It’s Because I’m Not A Londoner

It was walking around St Pancras station that I realised that there was a flaw in my arrangements for meeting my friend. She had nominated a cafe in the station as a good meeting place and I had unthinkingly assumed that it would be easy to find. It is a station, how hard can it be to find a cafe? However, St Pancras is a huge station with no end of shopping areas and very little apparent coherency. Also, take a step wrong and you are in King’s Cross.

In ‘The Tale of Charlotte the Liberator’ (available to buy here), I wrote about how English people would not understand how extraordinary it was for a Welsh person to step off the train in London, Birmingham or Manchester. There are just so many people! This was written after visiting Manchester for the first time in a few years, but it does also apply to London. If you are not used to thousands of people massing around you suddenly and pushing past you in a hurry, then it is a shock. At first experience, it can confirm a suspicion that they are all very rude because they are not stopping to talk to you.

It is possible to see Londoners as rude, especially. When I briefly lived in London, I used to say that when I bumped into people I would apologise just to confuse them. Some people have told me that the busy-ness of London excites them, but for me I find it quiet alien. London is the one city where friends rarely offer to put you up too. If I am travelling somewhere, I always ask friends in my social network if I can stay with them. I have stayed with friends in Edinburgh when at a conference in Edinburgh, in similar circumstances I have stayed in Belfast, Lancaster, Coventry, Bristol ... and so on. However, Londoners are habitually too busy for such things (if I accidentally insult London-based friends with this, I apologise and I will come and stay with you next time). You can understand it – one friend was unable to meet me because she had to spend a day looking at flats to rent. Miss an open house rental event and the place is gone. The speed is just different to outside London.

In fact, there has been scientific study done on this. People from different places were asked to stand at a traffic light and wait to cross the road. The trick was that the traffic light would not change when they pressed the button to cross. The researchers were interested in timing how long it took between the first press of the button and the second. The result was directly related to the number of people who lived where the person lived. People from villages and small towns waited much longer between presses than people from big cities, who would usually start pressing the button impatiently after a few seconds without change.

I have experienced this myself. Returning from a weekend in Aberystwyth in west Wales to Cardiff, I realised how impatient people queueing in Cardiff were. I had not seen it before. Now I live in a small, semi-rural town, my driving may be a little more daring (there is no-one coming the other way on country lanes) but I am also aware that I find large groups of people impatient and intolerant. On this trip to London, it happened just outside Reading. When I left the train toilet, the woman standing outside muttered ‘At last!’ at me and the man standing in the corridor greeted me indignantly with ‘there is a queue!’ Frankly, I should have told him that I had a rare bowel condition which meant that I had to spend a long time in the toilet and it might also make the toilet unusable for the next 48 hours. Were people really so rude? Did the dividing line for impatience pass through Reading?

I am actually of the opinion that Londoners are not rude, sad though that conclusion will be for anyone who lives outside the M25. I am reminded of the zoo-owner John Aspinall’s remark that what is extraordinary about human-beings is how peaceful they are. He reflected that if you forced eight million tigers to live in the same space, the results would not be the same. I think that living in any city makes you shut off a little to other people because there are so many of them that you just have to do that. For the rest of the world, this comes across as rudeness when you do not have the time or patience to interact with everyone you meet.

That said, I would never choose to live in a big city again. A friend who lives in the south-east of England reflected that when she came back from holidays in Wales, she could smell the pollution. I did not let on that I could smell the pollution in Cardiff when I leave the train that has taken me in from my small town.

I also remember travelling around Ireland and finding the final drive into Dublin after spending a week in small towns after leaving Belfast quite bewildering. Suddenly there were out-of-town shopping centres everywhere and the bus driver who decided to miss out my stop to make up for lost time could not really care. However, when my travelling companion and I arrived at the hotel in Dublin, it was the first place that asked us if we wanted a twin room or a double room. Everywhere else had assumed that it was a twin room because we were two men travelling together. It was a reminder that big cities are also places that people go to for tolerance.

I saw this in Cardiff not so long ago. I was walking with a group of friends through the backstreets of Canton and one of them pointed to a shop and said, “That’s the Danish bakery”. It was by no means remarkable to him that there was a Danish bakery or that Danish people lived in Cardiff. Outside big cities that kind of natural blending of cultures does not seem to happen quite so easily. How many lesbian and gay people have you met who start their stories with escaping a small town upbringing to go to a city where their sexuality is accepted and even celebrated? My little town did have a Pride event last year, but it did also lead to letters in the local papers complaining about ‘gay people forcing their lifestyle down our throats’ (though also a complaint the next week that the newspaper had accidentally re-printed a letters page from the 1950s).

I have made my peace with cities and all their busy-ness. It may not feel like something that I want to be part of, but I am not quick to condemn city-dwellers as rude and impatient. They may come across that way to the rest of the world, but there is something in the tolerant mixture of cultures in cities that actually speaks of something different.