Over the weekend, in the wake of the horrific attack on London Bridge, this happened:
Which is odd, because I’ve lived inside the M25 pretty much my entire life, and waste much of my spare time on long, pointless walks across town, and I have never been aware of encountering a single no go area. Honestly: sink estates; industrial wastelands, Mayfair… They’re all basically fine, in my experience, and if I’m not scared I can’t for the life of me imagine why the police would be.
I’m not alone in this. Yesterday, my podcast co-host Stephanie – who is great, and who you should all follow on Twitter to make up for the fact I’m about to shamelessly recycle her tweets – tweeted this:
Love this. Only time Borough Market is a no-gone zone is Thursday evening after work, when you can’t move for the suits spilling out of pubs https://t.co/BuqHBfJScl
— Stephanie Boland (@stephanieboland) June 4, 2017
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Also, this:
Actual places Londoners are reluctant to enter: Covent Garden street performer hell Madam Tussauds Breakfast club queue Changing at Bank
— Stephanie Boland (@stephanieboland) June 4, 2017
A lot of people clearly felt strongly about a certain underwhelming restaurant chain.
For context: lived for years in a minority white neighbourhood. E1. No problems.* Utter racist nonsense to suggest there are “no go” zones
— Stephanie Boland (@stephanieboland) June 4, 2017
(A footnote: Stephanie, who is the funniest person in London, said it was fine for me to use her tweets providing I called her the funniest person in London*. So.)
Anyway. Yesterday I did that embarrassing thing where I read Steph’s tweets, forgot I’d read them, and then fifteen minutes later tweeted something similar as if they were my own idea because I’m basically a terrible person. Here was my effort.
Trying to think of no go areas of London. I don’t like Hammersmith much, but it’s not dangerous, I just don’t see the point of it
— Jonn Elledge (@JonnElledge) June 4, 2017
(Gratifyingly for Stephanie, you will note that I did not receive the numbers she did.)
My search continued:
Much of south London is “no go” in that it’s served by Southern Rail, and thus almost never sees a train. But dangerous? No.
— Jonn Elledge (@JonnElledge) June 4, 2017
Here, just for information, is a map of the no go areas of South London:
Click to expand, but don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Eventually, I found a couple:
Seriously, the queues at the bar are insane, and if you don’t manage to get a drink you’re basically just sitting in a multi storey car park. (Note for non-Londoners: this is literally true.)
There’s also this:
Which is a vexingly popular tourist attraction in Leicester Square, at which no actual Londoner would ever be seen dead.
Others had their own ideas. South London bitterness was a theme:
So was north London snobbery:
Also there is nowhere round there that doesn’t involve climbing a massive hill to get to a party. This is why Britain voted for Brexit.
— Jonn Elledge (@JonnElledge) June 4, 2017
For some reason, people really don’t think much of the remarkably anodyne north London suburb of Palmers Green:
Honestly, for a place that literally nobody as ever heard of, it attracted a surprising amount of ire.
A number of people mentioned the West End at Christmas:
The horror! The horror!
The very worst London area of all, though, a place you should absolutely never go to if you can possibly avoid it, turned out to be south of the river:
Clapham high street is pretty dreadful
— Alan White (@aljwhite) June 4, 2017
Probably because of one particular night spot.
Anyway. If you can think of other terrifying no go areas in London, do feel free to tweet me. And also, follow Stephanie – she is, you’ll recall, the funniest person in London.
*She also said I wasn’t allowed to say that she’d told me to do this.
Jonn Elledge is the editor of CityMetric. He is on Twitter as @jonnelledge and also has a Facebook page now for some reason.
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