[flower-giraffe]

Canary Wharf is surrounded by poverty in a brown field redevelopment that has been a permanent construction site for over thirty years. It is not really representative of London.

London is an expensive city, you’ll need several million pounds for a decent family home but if you can afford it it’s an absolutely fantastic place to live.

Unfortunately the lack of affordable housing makes it less likely to be so in the long term.

Arguably it is developments like Canary Wharf and the associated planning concessions that have fuelled the London property market to make it practically unaffordable for the vast majority of people that do the real work.

[walthamstow]

> London is an expensive city, you’ll need several million pounds for a decent family home

Just not true. I grew up in a 4 bed house in a zone 4 area where such houses still go for under a million, especially if you're willing to do a bit of work.

It's a perfectly nice area, good schools, parks and trees, 30min train to central, what more could a normal family want?

[HPsquared]

If you have several million pounds, you can have a nice life literally anywhere. For the same money, you'd have a better quality of life outside London.

[sealeck]

Not really because most good things in the UK are in London (theatre, sports, clubs, museums, architecture, etc).

[denton-scratch]

Theatre: London is certainly better than the provinces, if you like that kind of thing. I don't.

Sports: neither spectator nor participation sports are a London speciality.

Clubs: if that means nightclubs, Manchester had a much better club-scene than London when I lived there (mid 90s). I'm too old for clubbing now!

Museums and architecture: people visit museums and gawp at architecture when they're visiting a place. Once you've seen a museum, you've seen it. Sure, it's pleasant to live among nice buildings; but most of the London cityscape is not anything I'd call architecture.

I lived in Central London for 20 years. I hated it for 17 of those years. It takes an hour to get across town on the (stinking) underground, which is the quickest way. Traffic is the most-aggressive of any place that I've driven in the UK. People are unfriendly; nobody lives in London to make friends, they live in London to make money. Everyone's in a hurry, presumably because they want to make a lot of money so they can leave.

[sealeck]

I find that people are much more friendly in London (they are certainly a lot less racist in general, which is lovely). It's the premier city in Europe, and very international which is lovely.

It has such a great mix of things – you are constantly surrounded by history and there is always something going on.