London Felt Harsh Beneath Its Charm

2023-07-21 original Society & Ideas

This is a transcription of something I posted on Radiotalk. It was semi-automatically transcribed using speech recognition, so please forgive any parts that are hard to read.

“I’ve got a bit of time, so let me talk about what I felt in London.

I went to London last month, in May. Now, London — I love the Premier League, so in terms of football it’s a wonderful place, and I’m an Arsenal fan. That said, honestly, I felt something harsh there.

What I mean is, I went to London, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Copenhagen, and also Cambridge. But looking around, London’s dark atmosphere really stood out. That was my first impression. Quiet? A bit dark. Well, some of that is the weather and things like that.

I had an old friend there, so we talked. And, yeah, it came down to the gap between rich and poor. The reasoning might be a bit different, but overall I felt that wages haven’t kept up with the general rise in prices.

Wages are rising. But prices are rising far faster than that, and especially in central London the living environment inevitably gets harsh. He said something like, because the living environment is so harsh, he moved a bit out of London, to the suburbs.

But even so, it still seemed financially tough for him. He’s an associate professor at a certain university, so he’s fairly accomplished, and when I asked about his salary, he does get paid decently. But… that seemed to be the reality.

By the way, I was trying to go from London to Cambridge, but along the way — well, not exactly along the way, I postponed it by a day. The reason was that the trains had stopped. Suddenly. In the morning I thought, huh? The trains have stopped — so I pushed the date back.

The reason they’d stopped was a strike. Because of a strike by railway workers, the trains weren’t completely stopped, but the number of trains was reduced, and as a result the trains to Cambridge ended up running something like once every few hours. So I gave up. Of course, I could have forced it by taking a taxi or something, but since it was a business trip with some slack in the schedule, I figured I didn’t need to go that far, so I postponed it.

But still, when I got there — it was a meeting with a partner — and while talking with the partner, they mentioned that wage increases were really harsh, and, for example, they said something like, last week the teachers, the schoolteachers, were on strike.

Of course, I think the threshold for going on strike feels quite different between Japan and the UK. It was often the case in the US too. I remember Caltrain and VTA going on strike fairly often. I imagine that without doing that, wages wouldn’t stay at a level they could accept. But there’s probably hardship on the flip side of that too. Honestly. And then there’s the way I look at things — the city is dirty. There are clearly rundown areas. Yeah, I think that’s probably the flip side of it — no, flip side, no, actually more like the front side of it, I end up thinking.

In that sense, the Netherlands too — Amsterdam is a tourist spot so it was a bit lacking in some ways, but Rotterdam struck me as very clean. And then, Copenhagen. Copenhagen was also incredibly clean. It really felt like the one place, by Japanese standards of hygiene, that I could actually live in. That was a good place. A bit cold, though.

Now, going back to talking about England, London — I rode the subway a lot. I really love public transportation. When I go abroad, I really love riding buses and trains. Because doing that, I feel like you can really see the character and the situation of the area. I like observing that kind of thing.

The subway — the facilities are old, and the seats are incredibly hard, so on a 40-minute ride to the airport your body starts to hurt, and there were some sketchy-looking people using it too. It didn’t really feel like a very safe atmosphere.

By the way, I once tried riding the bus to Heathrow. What was it, I think it was the number 9 or something. By subway you can get to Heathrow in about 40 minutes — I’d booked a hotel in Kensington, so it would take about 40 minutes that way — but instead I took the bus, which took an hour and a half, almost two hours. In exchange, though, it’s incredibly cheap. So I tried it once. And because it’s so cheap, my impression was that a lot of airport workers were riding it. There didn’t seem to be many businesspeople. Well, since it passed through residential areas, people getting on turned out to live surprisingly close by, so there were probably a lot of those people too, but overall it felt like there were more workers.

And then, I’m not sure exactly who they were, but there were people talking about fairly intense things — people who, I’d guess, had come to the UK as immigrants. Maybe their kids, even. They were there. And, um, yeah, speaking in a language I couldn’t understand. Not English. There were some people who looked pretty rough, too. That was roughly my impression of London.

That’s about it, I think. Since I’ve lived in the US, I very often find myself wanting to try living somewhere else. And since I often travel abroad for work, I do think things like, I’d like to try living here — but unfortunately, London didn’t give me that feeling. No, it really didn’t.

The football’s great, though. The football is great. But we have kids, so when I think about the environment for raising children, or about retirement, and various things like that, I wonder — is this really the right area? The right kind of growth, the right economic conditions — is this really a place where you can get that going forward? Somehow it doesn’t feel like a good place. I became almost convinced of it. I ended up thinking it’s probably not that great an area. So, that’s the story of how London got crossed off my list of places to move to. That’s all.”

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2023/07/1547/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.