I Loved Living in London - So Why Did I Leave?

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[00:00:02.180] - Oliver (Host)

I live in Valencia, in Spain. And when people ask me where I'm from, I normally just say London. But the reality is, I'm actually not really a Londoner. I'm from a small town just north of London, in a county called Hertfordshire. But no one has ever heard of my town, even in the UK, nor the neighbouring city. So essentially, I just say I am from London. I moved to London after university, and I lived there for over a decade, although I had a couple of years here and there living abroad as well. But although I thought the city was an amazing city, I also was quite happy to leave at the end of that time. And that's what this episode is about. I'm going to talk about some of the best things about London, some of the things that I feel like I need to defend about London and the UK in general, and also about the reasons that I eventually decided to leave. But before that, welcome back to English and Beyond, the intermediate version of the podcast. I've been so busy this week on the Spanish side of the business that I haven't had time to write, that I haven't had time to develop a proper script for this episode.

[00:01:14.530] - Oliver (Host)

As always, there is a free transcript available for this episode, which might be really important with this one because it might be meandering, it might be without a clear structure. So you can find that transcript, you can find vocabulary flashcards for the episode, a vocab list, and also a couple of vocab games at morethanalanguage.com. My name is Oliver. I am an English and Spanish and sometimes Latin teacher. If you want to send me an email, you can do so at oliver@morethanalanguage.com.

[00:01:48.980] - Oliver (Host)

So there are a couple of things straight off that I feel like I need to defend about the UK and especially about London. Now, when I talk to people in Valencia, when I talk to people in Spain about where I'm from, they always say two things to me: one, aren't you lucky to have escaped the London weather? Two, aren't you lucky to have escaped British food? And they may, to an extent, be right. We'll see whether I can convince you otherwise. To take food first. I think personally, and I know this is a controversial opinion for everyone else in the world, but I actually actively quite like British food.

[00:02:28.400] - Oliver (Host)

It's not even that I think it's just unfairly maligned, unfairly criticised. I actively like it. I think that the thing that often is not understood about British food is that it's true that it is much more for comfort eating, which I think makes sense because, as we'll talk about with the weather, it isn't the warmest country in the world. And so sometimes you want something nice, simple, convenient, and tasty. And I think British food is really good at that. But I think there are some things in British food that are legitimately just really good. My favourite breakfast in the world is an English breakfast or Scottish breakfast, as my mother would say. I also love scones, scones with jam and clotted cream is an amazing afternoon snack option. Similarly, from the same region of the UK, from Cornwall, I love Cornish pasties. Cornish pasties are so convenient and they are delicious. I think that they are amazing if you find a good one. Then, you know, you have things that I recognise are not the most impressive gastronomical inventions. But again, comfort food like Shepherd's Pie, I think, is really, really good. Something ridiculous I read an article about this week, jacket potatoes, which you can combine with anything and is so easy.

[00:03:43.240] - Oliver (Host)

Most importantly, the thing I genuinely miss about the UK in terms of food, or two things, really - the first is sandwiches. If you go to a supermarket in the UK or a sandwich bar, then you can find like that a really, really nice sandwich, really good quality. In Spain and other European countries, that's just not the case. The on-the-go lunch options in Spain are way worse. And yes, I know that's because people in Spain respect food and they cook proper lunches. But sometimes if you are busy and/or in a rush, then you just want something tasty, relatively affordable, convenient, and I think sandwiches in the UK are really, really good. So I do miss that. And in general, lunch options,  kind of, lunch options where you're not cooking at home. And then secondly, because the UK's food culture is not the most respected in the world, we could say, and because I think that we are quite adventurous in terms of the things that we like to eat, we have food from all over the world available in the UK. And I think you can really tell, not just in restaurants, where I think, kind of, if you want Indian or Chinese or Thai food, the options in London are way better than in lots of other continental European cities, but also the selection in the supermarket is really, really good. If you want not even exotic, but slightly unusual food in Spain, at least, that's really hard to find. So something like halloumi cheese from Cyprus, that is really, really hard to find in Spain. You have to go to like a specialist market, that kind of thing. And then lastly, and I recognise I'm spending too much time on food, I think the other reason that people think food is so bad is that when lots of tourists come to London, one of the first things they want to do, and I speak from experience, is go to a traditional British pub. And the trouble with that is that they will often choose one of the first ones that they see on the street, and that will often be no disrespect to them, please don't sue me, a Wetherspoon's. So Wetherspoon's is a chain of pub where the point of a Wetherspoon's is not to have an incredibly good quality pub meal, but instead, it is essentially to have a place where you can get drunk with your friends extremely cheaply. So it totally has its place, especially in British culture.

[00:06:00.940] - Oliver (Host)

But you're not going to get the best food. You're going to get cheap food. You're going to get food that we say in English, lines your stomach. That is, it stops you getting too drunk, too quickly. So that is the point of a Wetherspoon's, not to get an incredible example of a Sunday roast. You need to be a bit more discerning about where you go for that. So for example, I think going to the Wetherspoon's is the equivalent of going to McDonald's or Primark and then being surprised that the food is not the best food in the world.

[00:06:30.230] - Oliver (Host)

And then we're going to talk about the other much criticised aspect of Britain, the weather. I have a little fact which might be quite interesting for people. There is more annual rainfall in Rome and in Paris than in London. I know the Italians will say to me, and they are totally correct. That's because in Rome, you have very few rainy days, but it rains a lot when it rains. But I just thought it was quite an interesting fact. But in Paris, the only month of the year where there is more rainfall in London than in Paris is November.

[00:07:01.440] - Oliver (Host)

So the Parisians, at least, can stop telling me how bad London weather is in comparison. But it is quite grey. I will accept that it is quite grey in London. There is not that much sun, which I recognise for most people is the real problem.

[00:07:14.940] - Oliver (Host)

Actually, the greyness of the weather brings me on to my next point, which is about the architecture. So London is surprisingly beautiful. And I never really appreciated this when I was living in London, because when you live somewhere for a long time, you stop seeing it almost, and you stop travelling around the city. And the only times that I did really appreciate it were, one, when tourists came to visit, and two, when I would go abroad and I would marvel the buildings that I was seeing there and then think, well, actually, we have very similar stuff in London, and I just don't appreciate it. And I think that speaks more to the very human problem of just not appreciating what we have, right? But with the first point, with the tourists coming, my partner's cousins, who are Spanish, they came to London, and it was the first time that they had come out of Spain, I think, the first time that they had left Spain.

[00:08:09.200] - Oliver (Host)

They could not get over things that were totally ordinary to me, like terraced houses. Instead of blocks of flats like we have in Spain much more often, terraced houses in little London streets in the north of London. And they found it so beautiful, and they were taking photos every five metres. And that was really bizarre eye opener me, because obviously a terrace house for me, is nothing. So a terrace house, in case you don't know, is where you have a line of houses in a row, and a terrace house is simply one of the houses in that line, as opposed to a detached house, where it's just a house by itself on a plot, or a semi-detached where it's two houses like that by themselves, not in the line. But in some countries, terrace housing is apparently really interesting, especially, I suppose, if you're from a city from those countries with, as I say, the high rises. The last point that I want to talk about for London, I reference the fact that very rarely do you actually end up travelling around London. And that is because, like in every big city, people are working very hard, long hours a lot of the time.

[00:09:14.900] - Oliver (Host)

And then adding to that, they have a long commute. So commute is the journey that we take from home to the workplace, to the office, wherever you work, and then back again. So when I lived in London for the last five or six years, I was a teacher, and my commute was more than an hour from my home to my school as a teacher that actually has some advantages because it meant that almost never did I go out for dinner and end up sitting at the table next to a family of one of my students. I never had to deal with that. Whereas the teachers who lived near the school had that constantly. So the student's excitement of seeing the teacher in their natural habitat. I never had to deal with that. But I did have to deal with this commute, which feels, even if you use it efficiently, it still feels like semi-wasted time. I used to mark my books, my exercise books on the train, or I would do language learning. I would do all sorts of things, but it is still quite an annoying thing to have to go through. And in London, it makes a big difference where you live and where you're commuting to.

[00:10:24.040] - Oliver (Host)

The London underground, the tube, to my knowledge, is the first subterranean metro system system in the world. And you can tell, because in the older lines, there is no WiFi, no internet connection at all on the trains, no air conditioning, or no air conditioning that you can actually notice, at least. What you do see occasionally is a very old, sad-looking fan at the station just blowing the hot air around. And it is quite hellish in the summer in some of the older lines. I used to live on the Jubilee Line, and the Jubilee Line was quite modern. I lived for three months only in Bethnal Green on the central line, and that was absolutely terrible. It was, you know you'd get on the train, everyone would be dripping in sweat. You'd be pushed in (packed in) like sardines, we say. You'd be standing on the platform first, waiting to be able to get on the train, and you wouldn't be able to get on the first or second train. And then you'd push into the train. People would push in behind you, obviously. You'd have your face in someone else's armpit, and it was just a thoroughly unpleasant experience.

[00:11:33.140] - Oliver (Host)

Whereas if you live on a more modern line, it's okay. So it depends on how lucky you are with your commute, because obviously, most people at some point change jobs. And that actually the commute brings me to my final point, and this is the biggest reason why I left London, the size of the city and the fact that I find city living so exhausting or big city living so exhausting meant that it was just impossible to do all of the things that you might to do. Yes, there are so many different things to do in London. There are so many opportunities to go to the theatre, to see musicals, to see weird exhibitions, to go to museums like the British Museum, increasingly controversial, and to take advantage of these things in London. But it's such a big city that it takes you forever to get anywhere. One of the things that people ask me here is, do you miss your friends? And the reality is that I do not miss my friends because now that I live in Valencia, I basically see them as often as I saw them when I lived in London. Because everyone was so busy, because everyone, as they got older, we were getting married, having children, and then you move out of the centre of the city, further out to the outer zones, which means it becomes even more of a trek, even more of a journey to cross London to see your friends.

[00:12:54.580] - Oliver (Host)

You just simply, I at least, maybe other people are more social than me, I don't know, but I wouldn't see my friends more often, each friend more often than every three to six months. That basically is what I see them now. When I go back to London, I stay relatively centrally in central London, and it's easier, ironically for me, to see people commuting from Valencia than living in London. And so living in Valencia, being married to a Spaniard, having met lots of Spanish people, I now actually see way more of my friends on a daily basis here, a weekly basis here, because they live, I don't know, a 30-minute walk max. That has been really, really advantageous to me in comparison to living in London. So that is, I think, the biggest reason why I left London. It has an amazing cultural offer. It has loads of things to do and to see. But in reality, because of the size of the city, because of the exhaustion of the commute, because of how expensive everything is, you actually don't take advantage of the things that London has to offer.

[00:13:59.460] - Oliver (Host)

So I've I've done this episode because I'm conscious of the fact that lots of people listening to this podcast are listening because they already live in the UK or the US or other English-speaking countries and they want to improve their English, or they're thinking about moving to one of these countries or visiting one of these countries.

[00:14:17.180] - Oliver (Host)

And if you do move to the UK, there is an extremely good chance that you will move to London because 40% of London's population was born abroad. It is an incredibly diverse city, full of people from all over the world, and for that reason, with varying levels of English. So if you are an English learner who is going to go to London to visit, to live, to work, anything, you will be in good company. There will be lots of other people in the same boat. So I hope this episode is helpful. Goodbye. Thank you for listening, and see you next time.