"What passport do you hold" seems to deny the existence of post-soviet states and Russia. Are they tucked under "other european"? Same for tweets maps.
Well, Turkey is included in Europe even though most of it is in Asia, so Russia should be included under Europe too. Unless the number is so insignificant that it's just bundled with "Other Europe".
Well, Lithuania is listed directly, Estonia and Latvia are probably in "Other EU New Members", Ukraine, Russia and Belarus are probably in "Other Europe", Kazakhstan & co are probably in "Central Asia".
My guess is that they selected some of those groups to prove a point. I doubt that there are more Romanians (3000) than Russians (presumably part of the 55000-strong "Other Europe" group).
To be honest in those Excel files they provide I don't see more info. I mean there's no breakdown by country except for something like the top 10 countries. But I don't see Romania or Russia (for example) in them.
The Russian population probably is included in "Other Europe" but probably isn't as big as people think based on the spending power of a Russian minority in Belgravia...
It's so weird to think people live in London. That they get up in the morning and look around and think 'this is my home'... London (and New York) are almost as real as Hobbiton in my mind. You must wake up and see people, walk out the door and see people, walk and walk and walk and see people everywhere you go. Do they all just blend into the background? How do you live with so many lives intersecting with yours? Some days I go to <location> and it is busy with people. Having fun, dogs barking, kids shouting. So I think, "You know what, I'll come back later. When there's no one here."
Ha yes we all just avoid eye contact with each other! More seriously though, I actually find I interact with a less diverse range of people here than when I lived in more provincial towns, because you can always find very specific groups of people (ie developer events, climbers, guitarists who are into blues etc) rather than settling for more generic groups.
Try to get eye contact in London, and you see how human psychology is coping.
It is quite fascinating to get on trains out of London. With each stop out, the atmosphere loosens up, and the chance of someone talking to you (!) or giving eye contact increases.
I've always heard London to be unfriendly, but when I visited and asked multiple people for directions they were pretty damn accommodating. Maybe I just got lucky, but in the city I previously lived in (Copenhagen) you felt like you were intruding on somebody's day whenever you interrupted them in public.
I will always help with directions if I can, as I think most people in London would. When I used to lock my bicycle outside I'd get asked about twice a month — someone locking a bicycle is probably local.
What I don't want is irrelevant conversation. I've spent the day at work, the train home is a chance for a break and a rest.
You're right, they do blend into the background somewhat. I can't imagine what it was like before modern devices though. When I get on the bus, usually no matter how crowded it is I can just about manage to squeeze open my phone/kindle with one hand while hanging on to something with the other, allowing me reasonably good escapism from the horror of the situation.
In the 1930's London was more populated than it is now, and there were no devices. It was probably a lot smellier, louder and grimier too. I can't imagine coping in that city.
I lived in London for a year. It was the most lonely isolated place I've lived. Also it's not really part of the UK anymore. It's a "world" city - which makes the feeling of loneliness even worse.
Yeah well, that's pretty much all big cities when you arrive on your own, especially after student age. It's also very expensive to move around, and at this it's one of the worst places.
London is cheaper to move around by public transport than many other British cities.
A bus or tram journey is £1.45 regardless of distance, but in Manchester a tram journey is over £3, in Birmingham over £2, in Edinburgh £1.50.
London's tickets are also much better integrated -- only a couple of express train services to airports have special fares, and they all have non-express, cheaper alternatives.
There may be worse places in the UK, I honestly haven't compared that much with medium-sized cities like Manchester or Birmingham.
Among international big capitals (which is what you can really compare London to) it has to be the worst. The fact that going to other cities in the UK is prohibitive makes it even worse (it's cheaper to fly to many places in Europe than going to most other UK cities by any means of transportation). If you want to move medium distances within London in reasonable time, it's tube/Overground/DLR and it's prohibitive. Using the Oyster card it's better but still rubbish really.
The example is stupid and sensationalist, those stations are the two closest at 260 metres apart, or about two train lengths.
Like many European cities, paying by cash is being phased out. It's annoying for visitors, but London is ahead here: Oyster cards are refundable, let the user go overdrawn (into the deposit), and contactless credit/debit cards are accepted.
The actual Zone 1 fare is £2.20. A central zone Berlin ticket is €2.60. Copenhagen ~£2.60. Munich €2.60.
I live in one of the largest London boroughs, and I can often walk 10-15 minutes towards the train station - one of the busiest in London - and not see people, even though I leave the house around 8am.
London isn't all that dense, and the density is fairly unevenly distributed. There are forest areas within the boundaries of the city. There's a lake near my house - in the middle of suburbia, where people go fishing. I'm 10 minutes on a tram away from farms.
When I lived at Marble Arch and worked in Holborn (find "Oxford Street" on a London map - one of the busiest shopping streets in the world - and they're pretty much opposite ends) there was people everywhere most of the time, but even then finding quiet spots in the nearby parks, or by walking the back streets, was never hard.
I lived in Golders Green (Zone 3), and going to/from the tube station I always encountered few people. Since most of the sidelane was made up of single-family houses, it´s not so surprising.
Also, I had the ginormous Hampsted Heath park at a 10 minutes walk, parts of which are quite empty all day long.
Unlike many European cities, where the vast majority of buildings are medium/high rise apartments, many boroughs of London have parts more similar to American suburbs.
I've lived in London for 1 year, and Paris for 4 years (density: 55,000 people/mi², almost like Manhattan). You don't actually interact with others. You just cross their paths. And most of them are strangers you'll never encounter again. Or if you do, you won't notice it.
I guess I've become accustomed to the fact of being constantly surrounded, at almost any time of the day or night, although this feeling of permanent busyness is not exactly tangible.
As long as you remain aware of the fallacy of these interactions and don't expect anything from them, you're fine.
I never felt like that anywhere and I'm from a small town. My home was really my family and my closest friends. Once these scattered away there was no particular place I'd call home.
And about the last part of your message, actually most places in London are deserted rather soon in the afternoon. It's just a few selected places that are always busy. Honestly there's a lot to this place, but yeah it's a rather stereotypical big city.
Its no different than on the Internet, which is also another "International City". We're all just passive props in an objective play, of which there is only one viewer, in our case .. the reader.
In my experience there is very little sense of community in London.
For example, I once travelled on the tube in London and on the underground in Liverpool on the same day. In Liverpool people were chatting with fellow passengers.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. It's true. If you want community, don't live in a city. Live in a small town or village where everyone knows everyone else.
I think It's because someone thought I was dragging things off topic a bit. I probably was. Having lived there it has almost exclusively negative connotations for me. I didn't live in a great area though.
It happens in London as well, mostly outside of commute time.
But yeah, there's no real sense of community in London, or in any big city really. Neighbours don't even know each other more often than not. There's pros and cons to this "anonymity" but it's nothing new nor exclusive to London. A lot of people actually like it this way.
Yeah - but in my experience the 'warm friendliness' includes old women feeling entitled to touch my baby in her pram because in their mind we're all one big family.
Agreed. People seem to talk about more "friendly" cultures as being objectively better than less friendly ones. And by friendly they usually mean random strangers starting small talk with you more frequently. Personally, I normally find small talk tiresome and a waste of time with strangers, particularly if I get interrupted when I am daydreaming about something important to me.
Distribution by marital status is interesting. I always thought it was a bit of a stereotype, young-trendies near the city centre, happily-marrieds out in the 'burbs. All borne out by the data though.
I live and work in London. I was born and grew up here but lived away for a while too. It's a great city but for anyone wanting to do something entrepreneurial it's not possible to live too cheaply and so quitting a job to focus on a start up is difficult unless you already have funds or support.
As a recent transplant to London I was surprised at how 'cheap' it is. Obviously it's more expensive that other places but not prohibitively. I'm living in a decent flat share in Zone 2 and with rent, food, and travel to/from work each day it's costing about £1000 per month. Working from home working on a startup I could shave about £250 from that. And my living conditions are much, much better than some of the people I've read about on HN trying to get a startup off the ground in SF living off noodles and sharing a room with several people.
Depends on the lifestyle you're looking to lead. If a rented room in a shared house is adequate for your needs then the annual premium you're paying for that room to be in central London is probably less than the cost of an annual train ticket from outside London, or the lower salary you'd expect in a different city. If you're a young family, on the other hand then you could buy the freehold of a three bed house somewhere like Burnley for little more than the annual rental of a similarly unremarkable small house or flat in a not-especially-fashionable Zone 2 suburb. You'd just then have to cope with living in Burnley :-)
The ramen-eating room sharers in SF will probably also be better off than their London counterparts when they get funding (more likely) and can afford to pay themselves salaries linked to a much higher market rate for developers.
Compared to the maps of living-area-by-race in the US [1], it seems like there is much less segregation between black and white people in London. I wonder why this is the case? Also, I wonder why there is still heavy segregation in regards to the Asian populations in London.
I should add that the apparent mixing between blacks and whites could be because the grey and blue dots look too similar in the London map, but I still think there is more mixing than in the US.
Theres a much heavier contingent of Asian (specifically Indian) immigrants to the UK. People tend to cling to familiarity in foreign lands. As for the Black/White dynamic i have no idea.
The social housing policies in the UK deliberately tried to tackle social segregation. You would see council blocks 2 streets away in the poshest of the areas.
South Asian and Caribbean populations are overrepresented as users of social housing in London as the jobs they were brought in to do don't exist anymore.
Interesting. That is probably the reason why ex-councel houses are rented out for so much money after they are bought from the council. They are often in very desirable areas.
I wonder what the measurable/measured effects of this deliberate integrated housing system have been. I.e. there most have been some objects, and I wonder if they were met.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadMy guess is that they selected some of those groups to prove a point. I doubt that there are more Romanians (3000) than Russians (presumably part of the 55000-strong "Other Europe" group).
You can get the data directly from here.
http://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/population-nationality/res...
The Russian population probably is included in "Other Europe" but probably isn't as big as people think based on the spending power of a Russian minority in Belgravia...
I wonder to what extent human psychology is prepared to cope with such relationship overload after 10s of millenia in small communities.
It is quite fascinating to get on trains out of London. With each stop out, the atmosphere loosens up, and the chance of someone talking to you (!) or giving eye contact increases.
What I don't want is irrelevant conversation. I've spent the day at work, the train home is a chance for a break and a rest.
In the 1930's London was more populated than it is now, and there were no devices. It was probably a lot smellier, louder and grimier too. I can't imagine coping in that city.
A bus or tram journey is £1.45 regardless of distance, but in Manchester a tram journey is over £3, in Birmingham over £2, in Edinburgh £1.50.
London's tickets are also much better integrated -- only a couple of express train services to airports have special fares, and they all have non-express, cheaper alternatives.
A bus is a terribly ineffective way to move around London, especially for commuting to/from the center.
A single fare tube ride is 2.20 in Zone 1, escalating quickly with distance.
Among international big capitals (which is what you can really compare London to) it has to be the worst. The fact that going to other cities in the UK is prohibitive makes it even worse (it's cheaper to fly to many places in Europe than going to most other UK cities by any means of transportation). If you want to move medium distances within London in reasonable time, it's tube/Overground/DLR and it's prohibitive. Using the Oyster card it's better but still rubbish really.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/04/most_expensive_train...
Like many European cities, paying by cash is being phased out. It's annoying for visitors, but London is ahead here: Oyster cards are refundable, let the user go overdrawn (into the deposit), and contactless credit/debit cards are accepted.
The actual Zone 1 fare is £2.20. A central zone Berlin ticket is €2.60. Copenhagen ~£2.60. Munich €2.60.
London isn't all that dense, and the density is fairly unevenly distributed. There are forest areas within the boundaries of the city. There's a lake near my house - in the middle of suburbia, where people go fishing. I'm 10 minutes on a tram away from farms.
When I lived at Marble Arch and worked in Holborn (find "Oxford Street" on a London map - one of the busiest shopping streets in the world - and they're pretty much opposite ends) there was people everywhere most of the time, but even then finding quiet spots in the nearby parks, or by walking the back streets, was never hard.
Also, I had the ginormous Hampsted Heath park at a 10 minutes walk, parts of which are quite empty all day long.
Unlike many European cities, where the vast majority of buildings are medium/high rise apartments, many boroughs of London have parts more similar to American suburbs.
I certainly miss having a backyard.
I guess I've become accustomed to the fact of being constantly surrounded, at almost any time of the day or night, although this feeling of permanent busyness is not exactly tangible.
As long as you remain aware of the fallacy of these interactions and don't expect anything from them, you're fine.
And about the last part of your message, actually most places in London are deserted rather soon in the afternoon. It's just a few selected places that are always busy. Honestly there's a lot to this place, but yeah it's a rather stereotypical big city.
I spend most of my time in the office/lab, which are far less busy, and go a long way towards alleviating any feelings of suffocation.
For example, I once travelled on the tube in London and on the underground in Liverpool on the same day. In Liverpool people were chatting with fellow passengers.
In London there was silence.
But yeah, there's no real sense of community in London, or in any big city really. Neighbours don't even know each other more often than not. There's pros and cons to this "anonymity" but it's nothing new nor exclusive to London. A lot of people actually like it this way.
I always liked old ladies fussing over my kids when they were small. The kids liked it too.
The ramen-eating room sharers in SF will probably also be better off than their London counterparts when they get funding (more likely) and can afford to pay themselves salaries linked to a much higher market rate for developers.
I should add that the apparent mixing between blacks and whites could be because the grey and blue dots look too similar in the London map, but I still think there is more mixing than in the US.
[1] http://www.wired.com/2013/08/how-segregated-is-your-city-thi...
Source:My Butt
South Asian and Caribbean populations are overrepresented as users of social housing in London as the jobs they were brought in to do don't exist anymore.
I wonder what the measurable/measured effects of this deliberate integrated housing system have been. I.e. there most have been some objects, and I wonder if they were met.
Bring on SVG for this sort of stuff.