London Cultural Assumption

The imaginary belief that some people believe that LondonTown is the only real city in the UnitedKingdom, or at least the only useful part of it, and probably also the CapitalOfTheWorld. Citation is most indubitably needed.

Even though I'm a Londoner, I used to feel that the London-centric attitude in Britain was unfair, and that other parts of the country obviously had a lot to offer. Having recently visited Birmingham (the UK's so called second City), I'm no longer of that opinion.

But what about the rest of England?

I live in Oxford, and my feeling is that people there would agree that London is indeed the capital of the world, but that Oxford is the capital of the civilized world. -- AnthonyLauder

I once read that most Londoners have a strange idea that everywhere outside London is the same, and that some people in London even think that the rest of England is very small. I imagined that upon telling someone that I lived in Leeds, they might say "ha - that's in the North, you might know John James too - he's from the North, from Newcastle I think". Newcastle is nearly 100 miles from Leeds. It never actually happened, of course.

Strangely in some cases even traveling in the rest of Britain doesn't change this. I imagine there to be some kind of London DoubleThink that allows them to ignore the fact that they have just driven a couple of hundred miles. One Londoner visiting our office commented that we could get better value mobile phones from a certain provider. We told him that this provider did not cover Leeds, or indeed anywhere in the North. He said "But it goes out as far as Guilford now (maybe 15 miles from Greater London). We could not convince him that he was further than Guilford because Guilford was "Outside London", on the very edge of civilization. I have to say that this Guy was probably not typical - on another occasion he was sent to a branch in Wales but ended up in Cornwall because he thought he just had to keep following signs saying "The West".

-- On the other hand, you just invented a place named "Guilford". I'm not sure your story holds water.

{Probably "Guildford" was meant, which is about 15 miles southwest of Greater London. Godalming or Milton Keynes would have been funnier, though.}

It is a BritishCulturalAssumption that signs saying "The West", "The South" etc are a great aid to navigation, and should be given greater prominence than signs indicating the road numbers, the cities reached on the road etc.

There is also a difference in the use of language about going to London. People in the south will usually talk about going up to London, while those further north will talk about going down to London. Somewhere in between there must be a point where London is on the level. -- JohnFletcher born in the south, now living in Birmingham, and wondering what the anonymous person above was disappointed about. (The one referring to Birmingham)

This can be a problem in very large cities. There is a famous map showing the New Yorker's view of the world. Everything west of the Hudson river is compressed into the leftmost two inches of the paper.

A View of the World from Ninth Avenue, by the late Saul Steinberg. A NewYorkerMagazine? cover. Actually, half the map was devored to the rest of the world; it was rather vague, however.

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford. -- SamuelJohnson

Hmmm, I think you'll find that London has changed a little since the 18th Century. How much time did SamuelJohnson spend crushed on the tube with his face in someone's armpit?