Time Out says we’ve climbed a spot. I say ask me again after I’ve paid this month’s gas bill.
So Time Out has gone and named London the fourth best city on the planet, up one place from last year, based on votes from twenty-four thousand city dwellers and more than a hundred experts who presumably do not also pay North London rent. I read the news on my phone standing in a queue for a flat white that cost more than my first ever pint, and I laughed the specific laugh you laugh when something is both completely true and completely absurd at the same time.
And look, they are not wrong, exactly. The music scene genuinely is unparalleled. I went to a tiny gig above a pub in Camden last month that reminded me why I moved to this city in the first place, all sweat and feedback and a room full of strangers who somehow all knew the words. The green spaces are real too, Hampstead Heath in the golden hour still does something to my chest that no amount of cynicism has managed to switch off. London does have it all, in the way the article says. It has it all, and it charges you handsomely for the privilege of noticing.
What the rankings never quite capture is the specific mental arithmetic every Londoner runs constantly, almost without noticing anymore. Is this worth it. Is the fourth best city on earth worth the flat share where you can hear your housemate’s alarm through two walls. Is it worth the commute that costs more per month than some people’s entire rent in cities that ranked, presumably, considerably lower on this same list. We do the maths, and mostly, most days, we decide it is worth it, which is either a triumph of the city’s genuine magic or a symptom of something we should all be looking at more closely. Possibly both.
I think what actually earns London its place on a list like this isn’t any single glossy category, the restaurants, the clubs, the museums, though God knows we have those in genuine abundance. It is the way the city keeps handing you small, unrepeatable moments for free, right alongside the extortionate ones. Nobody charged me for the sunset over the Thames from Waterloo Bridge last Tuesday. Nobody charged me for the bloke on the 38 bus who spent twenty minutes explaining, unprompted and with real passion, why Arsenal’s midfield was fundamentally misunderstood by the pundits. Those moments do not show up in a Time Out ranking, but they are, genuinely, most of why I stay.
None of which changes the fact that I will be having a small, private, entirely justified moan the next time my energy bill lands, fourth best city in the world or not. London has never asked us to love it uncomplicated. It has only ever asked us to love it anyway, overdraft and all, and enough of us keep saying yes that the city keeps climbing these lists regardless of whether our bank balances agree with the verdict.
Congratulations, London, I suppose. Fourth place. We would have liked first, obviously, but then again, we would also like our landlords to not increase the rent again in October, and one of those two things feels marginally more achievable this year.
Still, I think what I keep coming back to, days after actually reading the full list, is how little the ranking itself matters compared to the specific, stubborn loyalty most of us feel toward this city regardless of where it lands on anyone’s table. I have lived in three other cities in my adult life, cheaper, calmer, by most conventional measures easier. I came back to London within eighteen months each time, for reasons I struggle to fully articulate even now, something about the particular density of possibility packed into every single day here, the sense that something genuinely unexpected is always just one Tube stop away.
That is not a defence of the cost of living, which remains, frankly, unhinged, and I will keep saying so in this column for as long as it stays that way. It is simply an honest account of why so many of us keep paying it anyway, why twenty-four thousand people bothered voting this city into fourth place rather than shrugging and moving on with their evening. London does not make loving it easy. It has just never needed to. It only ever needed to make loving it worthwhile, often enough, in ways too specific and too personal to ever fully show up on a ranked list, and for most of us, most weeks, it still somehow manages exactly that.
More from this author at Lowri Griffiths, prat.uk.