Quote:
Originally Posted by GuitarBizarre
Generally speaking, within Britain Londoners are seen as a bit of an anomaly. There's a peculiar insularity about the area that leads to a few common (Not universal, but certainly common) traits and assumptions.
Most particularly, because London is so large, but so dense towards the center, Londoners in my experience can lack certain perspectives. The most obvious example is that while someone from Manchester or Sheffield would never commonly ring a company up and blindly assume they're speaking to someone local, who knows the area. Londoners will do that a lot. I'll get a phone call from a London area at work and people will ask me to give them directions to very specific places in London, referencing landmarks and street names immediately, before I even get a chance to tell them I've no idea where they're talking from, or indeed about. People from local towns and such will also define their location by a distance from London, or by their proximity to a side of London.
I've also had friends who've lived in London for extended periods tell me that in London the attitude that they've ended up having to take towards things like walking along a busy street, is to practically consider other people dangerous. Not make eye contact, to withdraw into your personal bubble as much as possible to avoid confrontation or interaction with other people. Now obviously I don't think any big city is really going to make you feel welcome and befriended on the street, but London was described to me as peculiarly so.
I'm sure there are other aspects of London that are bizarre too. Its simply so much bigger than anywhere else in the UK that it kind of makes its own set of social rules that don't apply anywhere else.
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Being a Londoner, we are the most unfriendly people in the UK and sure we do see London as the be all and end all of the UK and I guess the social rules that you're referring to are very much in evidence compared to the rest of the UK. It's one of the biggest melting pots of the world, so it's going to have its own set of rules. There are also subtle differences as well, for people from different parts of London even down to how they talk and how the people from different parts of London perceive their city. The lack of interaction I'd agree with, right down to hardly ever speaking to your neighbours.