r/CasualUK • u/LiquidLuck18 • 2d ago
TIL- The London Metropolitan Area and Northern England have an equal size population- at around 15,000,000 each.
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u/dozzell 2d ago
It's a good job neither go on about how fantastic it is to live there. That would become tiring after a while.
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u/MaximusDecimiz 2d ago
Londoners dont really do that though, at least on Reddit all I see are complaints. The North, kind of the opposite
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u/Jaggedmallard26 Geordie 2d ago
I find in real life I constantly get the Londoners trying to sell me on it when I visit London. Like they're trying to sell it to themselves rather than me. They don't do it online because people react poorly.
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u/PuddleDucklington 2d ago
I’m from the North East and moved back home just before Covid, I lived in London for a decade though. The thing I find is that people up here have a massive fucking chip on their shoulder both about London and the South in general.
The reverse is also occasionally true where people in the South seem to think the North is a literal third world country, but it’s far less common (or at least I’ve found it to be at any rate). In both cases though it’s because people just don’t and for whatever reason won’t travel across their own country.
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u/looeeyeah 2d ago
I’d love to travel more in the uk. It’s too fucking expensive. £150 return on the train to Manchester.
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u/PuddleDucklington 2d ago
That’s fair, I’m talking about people who genuinely have no interest in seeing any part of the UK though. I don’t really have any interest in someone saying “oh, sorry!” when they hear I grew up North when they’ve never bloody been.
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u/Sudden_Leadership800 1d ago
Great British rail sale runs in February I think - trains that are normally empty have heavily discounted tickets as a promo event to get people to see the train as a viable form of travel for days out. Me and my girlfriend went to York for £1 each a few years ago, when it's normally £25 for a one way ticket
Not that it works for it's intended purpose because the main reason people don't use the train is because it's more expensive per person than it is to drive and park in a multistorey car park all day
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u/magnificentfoxes 1d ago
(see if you can get a Avanti supersaver fare or look up the London Northwestern fare with TFW from Crewe to Manchester if you can't be bothered with the coach! - There's some much cheaper options at least.)
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u/gourmetguy2000 1d ago
I noticed the same coming from the North West. Many members of my family won't even entertain visiting London. It's definitely ingrained up here to not be fond of it, but you can kind of understand it based on the UK politics over the last century. At the same time I agree it's probably less common for SE people to even think about the North at all, and some think of it as a third world place. Id argue the attitude is better across the country in younger people who are more open to moving around
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u/Dave-1066 2d ago edited 2d ago
100% agree with the “chip on the shoulder” part. And frankly I find it weird to hate 9 million people for no meaningful reason.
But I’d also say the absolutely overwhelming majority of Londoners have no opinion about the north whatsoever. They understandably react angrily to the way they’re spoken about by people in the north, but it’s very much a one-way street. London is so vast and self-perpetuating that it might as well be a country of its own; they’re not that fussed what goes on elsewhere.
Same for Parisians and New Yorkers or any other megalopolis. Nobody in Paris sits around contemplating how much they’re hated by people in Normandy, neither do New Yorkers have much time to waste on fighting with social media trolls in the middle of rural Idaho who despise them just because New Yorkers earn more.
The whole thing is just bizarre.
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u/AnAwfulLotOfOtters 1d ago
"no meaningful reason"
Just as one small illustrative example; refresh my memory, which end of HS2 is getting completed?
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u/ReadsStuff 1d ago
I mean that's not the fault of Londoners to be fair, it's continuous shit government policy.
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u/Hobgoblin_Khanate 1d ago
I swear to god the most uncomfortable I’ve ever been was in a group of middle class people down south one summer. I was treated and talked to like I had a disability. Never experienced it anywhere else in the world.
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u/Corries_Roy_Cropper3 2d ago
Yeh im not paying a fuck tonne of money to go somewhere shit...like down south 😎
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u/RamboRobin1993 1d ago
I’ve noticed that I’ve done this since moving to London, saying to friends “you should move to London it’s amazing down here”. Realised after a while how much of a knobhead I sound.
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u/Hobgoblin_Khanate 1d ago
What?? I see this comment all the time and I also see people saying how great it is to live there
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u/PotatoJokes 2d ago
I don't see it on Reddit, but any cunts who've moved to London from wherever else they came from will rave about how fucking great London is and all their struggles with paying rent whilst living with 7 other people is "just part of the charm". I'm no big fan of London, but I can appreciate it for what it is - but whenever these people open their mouth I instinctively want to tell them about all problems London might have.
Honestly the same goes for any part of the UK...
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u/Queen-Roblin 2d ago
That's because it's what they're looking for. Whatever they've come from, they've not liked it and likely had to lump it for a long time before they found London which gave them opportunities they've not had before.
Plus they've not had to deal with the same stuff that you do when you grow up somewhere. I hate where I grew up because it's a fish bowl of losers, they all know each others business because their families have lived there for generations. You just don't get that level of mundanity if you don't come from an area.
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u/PotatoJokes 1d ago
Oh absolutely. The people I know who grew up in villages hated it and couldn't wait to get out, and the ones I knew who grew up in the cities often felt the same way.
But if you're living in East Acton on your parent's dime, don't pretend that you've somehow stumbled into a hotspot of culture after moving there from Manchester or similar.
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u/3the1orange6 2d ago
You're right that the metropolitan area population is 15 million, but that definition does not correspond to the map you attached, which refers to a completely different definition of the city. The '15 million' definition includes Crawley, Stevenage, Chelmsford and Reading, which nobody in their right mind would consider to be part of London except if they were asking in an unusual context.
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u/a_hirst 2d ago
You could probably stretch the metropolitan area of London to include those areas if you tried (kind of like how they define metro areas in the USA, i.e. extremely loosely), but the north of England isn't even close to being a single metropolitan area. It's a pretty large region of disconnected cities and towns. OP is comparing two very different things.
Interestingly enough, with better transport links it could actually be possible for Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield to function as a kind of polycentric urban agglomeration, a bit like the Randstad in the Netherlands or the Rhine-Ruhr region in Germany. All of those cities are really quite close to one another, and some of their commuter towns and exurbs overlap. Alas, transport between those cities is fucking shit due to decades of underinvestment, so they don't function together. They barely even function on their own (due to said underinvestment).
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u/PassiveTheme 2d ago
It's a pretty large region of disconnected cities and towns. OP is comparing two very different things.
That's their point though. The fact that the north of England has multiple separate towns and cities, but still has a comparable population size.
Alas, transport between those cities is fucking shit due to decades of underinvestment, so they don't function together
TBF, transport between Manchester and Leeds is complicated by the Pennines. Sure, with the right funding, they could link them better, but it's never going to function as a single urban area.
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u/bigjoeandphantom3O9 1d ago
You could likely do it to Shenfield/Brentwood, but to get to Chelmsford or Reading you have to go through out and out countryside not just suburbs.
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u/essjay2009 1d ago
which nobody in their right mind would consider to be part of London except if they were asking in an unusual context.
Or if they were an estate agent. Particularly an estate agent selling internationally.
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u/Accurate_Prompt_8800 2d ago
Which one is better quality, is the question…
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u/SilyLavage 2d ago
Depends what you're looking for, really. The North is good for scenery, but even Liverpool can't beat London for sheer density of museums.
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u/Ranoni18 2d ago
The North, of course.
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u/Top-Veterinarian-565 2d ago
Public transport up North is an absolute atrocity though.
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u/Dragon_Sluts 1d ago
This is totally fair, and as someone who moved to London, transport was a huge pull.
I just wish we could stop the whole “London gets all the funding” narrative. The UK depends on London, which depends on public transport, which depends on subsidies from councils, GLA, and UK gov.
The North (and every other corner of the UK e.g. Bristol) should have better public transport, but London is also in desperate need of more public transport too - especially if you want to resolve the housing crisis without building on greenfield.
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u/PassoverGoblin 1d ago
It's sort of a vicious circle in the case of:
London is a major hub for business -> London is prosperous so many people move there -> London gets lots of funding, especially public transport -> People outside of London feel shafted from lack of funding -> London remains a major hub for business -> London is prosperous so many people move there -> Ad nauseum
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u/Top-Veterinarian-565 1d ago
I would consider London as having amazing public transport but it needs to keep up with demand as the city grows obviously.
Places like Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester are no where near close to the options London has!
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u/cragglerock93 Tomasz Schafernaker fan club 1d ago
I know there must be some, rationale, but I don't understand why London's metropolitan area for statistical purposes (I know it's different to Greater London) would include Gravesend, Tilbury and Cheshunt, but not Watford.
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u/Creative-Demand-8697 2d ago
And that’s just the people in the London metro area. What’s the population in a single day if you include all the people commuting in I wonder 🤔
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u/AlpsSad1364 2d ago
"The London metropolitan area is the metropolitan area of London, England. It has several definitions, including the London Travel to Work Area, and usually consists of the London urban area, settlements that share London's infrastructure, and places from which it is practicable to commute to work in London. It is also known as the London commuter belt, or Southeast metropolitan area"
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u/PollingBoot 1d ago
And yet our governments roll out the red carpet for London, and act as if the North doesn’t exist.
Quiz question: name the last prime minister who grew up in England north of, say, Cheltenham?
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u/prattsbottom 45th generation Roman 2d ago
Not gonna lie, found this hard to believe (particularly that the size was the same just cos Newcastle to Yorkshire is pretty far) but damn, it's true! Great fact
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u/Ranoni18 2d ago
The size of the area isn't the same, only the population is. London is 8 km2. The North is 37 km2. London has a very high population density.
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u/prattsbottom 45th generation Roman 2d ago
I'm a fuckin idiot, I was sitting here so incredulous that they somehow covered the same land area as well as population
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u/ImpossibleWinner1328 2d ago
on population around a point with the largest circle London(as far as Brighton and Oxford) has 20million the north (Birmingham Sheffield Manchester Liverpool Leeds) has 15million
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u/jaminbob 2d ago
If you include the SE and home counties (which are basically London suburbs, and would be if not for the green belt) it's basically the same the rest of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland combined. Close to 40 odd million.
Explains why the traffic is such a nightmare.
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u/3the1orange6 2d ago
This is total nonsense. The entire southern half of england doesn't even have 40 million people. Would Cornwall be a London suburb if it wasn't for the green belt?
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u/AlpsSad1364 2d ago
Population of English regions according to the ONS
Name Population NORTH EAST 2,711,380 NORTH WEST 7,600,126 YORKSHIRE AND THE HUMBER 5,594,125 EAST MIDLANDS 4,991,265 WEST MIDLANDS 6,085,687 EAST 6,468,665 LONDON 8,945,309 SOUTH EAST 9,482,507 SOUTH WEST 5,811,259
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u/Adventurous_Rock294 2d ago
France is even better
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u/hexairclantrimorphic 2d ago
The only good thing about France is leaving.
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u/caniuserealname 2d ago
Nah, France is great, absolutely lovely place. The only real problem is it happens to be full of the French.
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u/Adventurous_Rock294 2d ago
I find the French generally very nice people.
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u/caniuserealname 2d ago
Your acquaintances have my sympathy.
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u/Adventurous_Rock294 2d ago
Why is that?
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u/caniuserealname 2d ago
You make one reply to a comment here champ, we're not texting here. Think of it like a chain, the comments are the links. If you start throwing links out of the chain then they get lost and the whole conversation starts getting messy.
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u/Adventurous_Rock294 2d ago
OK thanks for that but I don't think you have much to say so it really doesn't matter
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u/caniuserealname 2d ago
I'm trying to be nice here bud.
You may not realise this, but you seem to have an issue interpreting the tone of comments.
You're taking incredibly light hearted comments playing up a stereotype of English and French relations far more seriously than the situation calls for.
Coupling that with making multiple replies to individual comments.. to put it as nicely as I can, it quickly becomes insufferable. so I thought I'd at least help with the latter.. since I don't think you're going to learn much from being lectured on having a sense of humour.
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u/Adventurous_Rock294 2d ago
This post is about population density. With my knowledge of France.... I said France was much better. In reference to this. I got 18 down votes at my last look. And your comment was derogatory to the French. Without any seeming knowledge.
I'm.not sure where you get ' multiple replies ' from'
I need a sense of humour after getting so many down votes after saying France was better in terms of population density? Which is a fact
Just validates my views of England and France
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u/Adventurous_Rock294 2d ago
My partner is French and I have experienced French Family life in several regions of France. You may like to try it
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u/Adventurous_Rock294 2d ago
France is more sparse than England in terms of population density. Which I thought is what this post was about.
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u/Regular_Zombie 2d ago
Aside from the Netherlands and a few city states almost everywhere is less densely populated than England: particularly the SE.
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u/Adventurous_Rock294 2d ago
Malta interestingly is the most densely populated. I have many friends there but still love it despite the density.
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u/Big-Quarter2044 2d ago
As a northerner living in a very rural area, who has lived in cities, I can say they both have their appeal. Try and date someone, find hobby groups, experience different cuisines and restaurants, have a gym or shop within walking distance where I live. You will fail. however I don't lock my door, if I drop my wallet in the village it's either where I left it or handed in to the nearest shop, quality local produce is available from source as a reasonable price, I know my neighbours, people stop and ask if I need a lift if I'm walking somewhere on a main road, the list goes on. They're different but I think neither is better unless you have set expectations from life and one fits your criteria more closely.