Of the top five most used phrases before I left Lampeter - a hill enclosed town in West Wales - for London, four included the words ‘careful’ and ‘dangerous’. Unsurprising perhaps, in light of recently released Home Office figures in which, at 124 offences per 1000 people in 2006/7, London tops their survey of regions by crime rate. The report’s authors are quick to point out that this figure is likely to be inflated by factors such as a large visiting population relative to London’s resident population, though such qualifications are easily drowned out by high profile murder cases, especially if, as has been too often the case this year, those involved are startlingly young. London’s unique position as capital, and therefore as a potential, though rare, target for extremists of all persuasions, compounds tensions otherwise felt in all urban areas, and so while the total recorded crime in the city actually fell by 6 per cent compared with 2005/6 (the largest fall for any UK region, Home Office figures), fear of crime remains largely unabated. A report just published compiled by government adviser Louise Casey has found that the majority of people believe crime is on the increase, and that the courts are too concerned with the rights of criminals. Add the longest working hours and some of the worst commuter conditions of any EU country, and more surprising is that tired and stressed Londoners talk to each other at all. Yet they do, or at least they do with me, and not just to issue some generic ‘good morning’ while rushing out the door towards the Tube, as RatedPeople.com’s poll suggests.
Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad City?
Flashing the hideously out of date photo on my Young Person’s Railcard I took a train to search for a room amongst the capital’s one million. With a crude sense of direction replacing an A-Z, I got lost everywhere, often, as my meagre accommodation budget ensured, in places which seemed daunting in both their unfamiliarity and their bleak grey uniformity. What I eventually did find was lots of good examples of dire living spaces, but not without the help of many obliging, friendly individuals who came across as wanting to guide around London’s labyrythine streets someone lacking their own, prized local knowledge. In Bermondsey landlord Jaime called me back time after time to make sure I found a room he could quickly let anyway. A Leyton mother with two kids in tow, not knowing the road I was looking for herself, offered to phone her husband so he could direct me. Having just finished for the day probably the last thing Slawek wanted to do was go back to his Canning Town portacabin office, restart his computer and print off maps and directions, while the reason for it stood drenched, useless, and dripping on his carpet. But he did. And exactly a week after moving down another human female spoke to me on the Tube, praising me for my choice of T shirt. Admittedly I did jump a bit, but that was only because I was reading a high up poster and didn’t notice her until she was very close and audible.
Golden Hello
I now live in Stratford, stadium town for the 2012 Olympics and a series of sporting events that will bring together people from all over the world in a microcosm of what London manages, more or less successfully, day in day out. The visiting athletes will be united by sport, but also by high pressure jobs and strenuous schedules, so it’s unlikely that they will have time to go around borrowing cups of sugar from one another. But as with their hosts, an innate unfriendliness should not be inferred from a lack of air kisses in the Olympic Village. In fact, positivity is key to their success; in April the British Psychological Society’s Annual Conference concluded that, ‘dwelling on the negative…can disrupt [the sportsperson's] ability to perform actions that would normally be automatic’. Transposed onto the daily lives of full-time Londoners, where, according to the Louise Casey report, at least one type of anxiety, fear of crime, is a key feature, and the disruption occurs in our ability to engage in a level of congeniality that might otherwise be automatic.
In the second most expensive city in the world (after Moscow according to Mercer’s 2007 survey), cheap room hunting is more a test of endurance than a sport, but if the Sirens in Lampeter or on the front page of The London Lite had managed to distract me with their singing about how Londoners prey on the vulnerable like grannies on Werthers, I might have ended my four day odyssey without knowing how friendly London can be (or I might still be drudging through an industrial estate in Canning Town). When needing help I asked for it because I believed I would get it, and I did. That said, having spent some time living and working in this high-speed, densely populated urban sprawl, after a 50 hour week my own positivity is in short supply So is my ability to sit down without falling asleep. Maybe this is why Londoners swap fewer words with their neighbours. After work, the commute and directing the lost and hapless around the capital they just have no energy to gossip with The Jones’. Whatever the many, likely mundane, reasons why people here chat less to her-next-door that are tied up in this latest survey pointing once again to the unfriendliness of the place, from me at least, for stopping to lend a hand, a phone and a whole office to a newbie, London’s men and women earn solid gold Olympian medals for proper, off the cuff niceness.
