I was born in London, but moved to Devon when I was 10 days old. Thence later to Essex during most of my childhood. I visited London a lot, as my grandmother lived there, and used to go with friends sometimes.
I never liked it, and still don't. Once we moved to Herefordshire, I realised that I am a country girl at heart - I felt at home and at peace in a rural setting in a way that I had never done before. So my dislike of London extends to most cities really.
I hate the noise, the fact that you cannot walk down a road and hold a conversation with your companion because of the rumbling traffic. I hate the fumes. I hate the dirt - whenever I have to go to London I always jump in a shower when I get back and scrape the black from under my fingernails. I hate the inhuman ignoring of homeless people in doorways. I hate the dominance of the car and the grim concrete flyovers. I hate the brash consumerism and garish shop fronts. I hate walking down a street and people brush past you at speed, lost in their own preoccupations. I am entirely immune to the buzz that others feel in a city.
I go to Cardiff for concerts - a clean human-scale city - and sometimes to Brum, where I spent 8 years at uni and working till moving here.
I feel at home here in the middle of nowhere in spite of the inconveniences of distance. I love waking to the endless vistas from my bedroom, the birds singing, the cattle and sheep in the fields, the buzzards wheeling and mewing in the summer, the tiny close-knit and caring community, the intergenerational mixing, the crazy social activities like films in the village hall with soup in the interval, the panto (pricelessly and incomparably badly acted but utterly hilarious!), the ancient church and churchyard with their extraordinary history of the Knights Templar, the fact that everyone talks to you as you walk to the village and you catch up on the gossip, the tiny village school which functions like a family and welcomes all the community, the extraordinary variety and quality of local societies (choirs, book clubs, poetry group, heritage group and much much more) - I could go on. It is where I feel at home, as I never would in a city.
My children were brought up here in a safe environment with people to look out for them and a human scale city where they could roam safely.
You can keep London!
Each to his own I guess.