And then I went to university in Leeds. It’s a stereotype that Northerners are more friendly than Londoners. But it’s a stereotype that is, largely true. People smile at you in the street. Cab drivers talk to you. When I first got to Leeds, this freaked me out. Which sounds ridiculous, but when a cab driver started talking to me, I really didn’t know how to respond. When people on the street gave me a smile, my instinct was to look away. My first few trips back to London felt…safe. No one I didn’t know was going to try and interact with me and that was what I was used to.
And then there’s the pace of Leeds. A friend of mine once commented that, “Leeds has the economy of a city, but the pace of life of a town”. For a Londoner, I’m a pretty slow walker. In Leeds, I’m practically The Flash. Which is something I’m conscious of when just walking through the street, but there it doesn’t matter. But in a queue, it does. I’m honestly not sure what I find more annoying; the slow moving of the queue, or the fact that the people around me don’t seem to mind. I’ve stood in many a shop queue wanting to yell, “Does no one here have other places that they need to be?!”.
For a long time, partly because I came home very often during my early university career, I very much felt like a Londoner in Leeds. But more recently, I’ve noticed a shift in me. The slow pace of Leeds is still annoying to me…but London can seem…too fast. Getting into Kings Cross station, I was thinking “why are there so many people, why are we all moving so quickly, I can’t deal with this!”. And I’ve realised I’ve started smiling at people in the street. I didn’t even realise I was doing it when in Leeds…but in London I realised because people who I smiled at looked at me like I was crazy.
No where is quite like London, and I do love this endlessly fascinating city. But coming home, for the first time…I didn’t want to. Leeds feels so…homely to me now. And there’s something you can get from cities like Leeds that you can’t really get from London. The feeling of…potential. Something growing. There are always new and exciting things happening in London, but it’s not the same. London has, in so many ways, hit saturation point. It can do different things. But it can’t do better things than what it’s already doing. It’s so amazing there’s very little room for it to become any more amazing. But with cities like Leeds, there still growing. And that’s really exciting to watch.
I’m still a Londoner. Pushing my way through a very crowded Waterloo station the other day showed I can still get into the “head down, keep walking” London mentality. But I’m a slightly more…Northern-tinted Londoner. A “more willing to smile at people in the street” Londoner.
