[bshimmin]

100% this. Some people simply do not like London - they stand atop the tube station at Oxford Circus and look at the succession and repetition of massed humanity (to quote Waugh) and think, "How unpleasant." Even if you're making a six figure salary, if you find that many people - and everything else that goes hand-in-hand with that - unpleasant, it will grind you down; that salary won't cheer you up every time you're having a horrible, hot, sweaty commute, or you're staring in misery at your lack of garden, or wishing that the other tenants in your building would stop stealing your copy of The Economist.

I personally like London very much, but eight years of it (and now just a day every two or three weeks) was plenty for me.

[m-i-l]

I grew up in a small town in Scotland, and my mother was always going on about how terrible London was. So much so in fact that when I finished university I was looking for a job anywhere in the world except for London (even had a telephone interview with a company in Palo Alto before I knew where that was). But as things happened I eventually ended up in London. And I do think that moving here was one of the best things I've done.

My mother had of course never lived in London, just visited once as a tourist. And if you are a tourist you are likely to end up in the busiest, noisiest, smelliest and most expensive parts. But once you live here for a while, and realised how enormous it is, and how many completely different experiences you can have and how many different things you can make of it, there really is something for just about everyone. And now I've settled in a relatively quiet and green area, even my mother is willing to concede that maybe London might have some nice parts.