Abandon All Fear

What nobody else seems to be saying…

[Travel Guides] Londonland Part 1

Posted by Lex Fear on June 18, 2007

This Post Is Rated: M for Mildly Offensive. Londoners may take particular offense at the revelations of this post (and they are welcome to it).

Inserted with Windows Live Writer… Impressive eh?

Last year I moved from Warwickshire, England to Ealing, Londonland and having been in this strange culture for several months now, I feel able to comment on it fully.

Londonland is ruled by Supreme Dictator Red Ken, whose rule has been unchallenged for 7 years and at this rate looks set to go on forever. Natives of Londonland refer to it simply as London, but it is quite obvious that the Supreme Dictator considers London to be a separate state from the country of England, where I come from. After all, in England, mayors of large cities tend to serve the inhabitants of their cities and are concerned with matters within their jurisdiction. It would be rare to see an English mayor flying all over the world to attract business and mass-migration, posturing on the world stage like a prime minister, president or royalty would.

The people of Londonland (Londoners) are very different from the English. For example, English people such as myself, enjoy fresh air and open spaces, so they buy and build property that allows them to experience these things. In Londonland, people have a fear of open spaces, so they cover anything green with flats and industrial parkland. Then they buy a large family houses and split each room into several living compartments for single or couples. The Mayor of London has erected a Congestion zone surrounding the City of London and the counties of Kensington and Chelsea. This is to create the maximum amount of congestion in the surrounding areas of Shepherds Bush, Hammersmith, Battersea, Vauxhall and Islington. This has the effect of reducing air quality as traffic takes longer to reach its destination.

The exchange rate between England and Londonland is 1:3. For every 1 pound you spend in England, you spend on average 3 pounds in Londonland. That’s why in England a hairdresser is usually a low paid job, but in Londonland hairdressers outrank fund managers and investment bankers.

Londoners have no basic sense of geography. Many Londoners would be able to tell you what time you need to catch the Victoria line to Kings Cross but have no idea how to get home if you offer them a lift in the car. When queried about a place existing outside of the M25, they simply do not know, it doesn’t exist.

There is no past-time that Londoners enjoy more than queing. Everywhere you go in Londonland you will find you have to queue. Infrastructure is designed to maximise queue potential by making buildings and streets as small as possible. If Londoners can’t queue then they settle for overcrowding, which is just as much fun. The objective of the game is to wait until the tube train pulls up and then try to cram as many people as possible into one space. If you’re not breathing the armpit of the person standing next to you, then you simply haven’t got enough people in yet. A good tactic of ‘overcrowding’ is to stand as near to the door as possible to maximise the sardine effect. The Mayor of Londonland knows how much Londoners enjoy ‘overcrowding’, which is why he doesn’t invest money into tube infrastructure to create more capacity.

Motorists of Londonland love nothing more than sitting in their car and going nowhere, especially in the hot sun. So as an alternative to the enjoyable activity of queuing to get into a car park, the Mayor of Londonland has done his best to recreate the a car park on Londonlands roads. This has been achieved by installing as many speed humps, traffic lights and one-way routes as possible. Of course this alone would not slow traffic down enough to simulate all the thrills of sitting in a car park, so the Mayor has also converted as many 2-lane roads as possible into single lanes. In order to do this he marked out long stretches of road with red tarmac. These lanes are specially reserved for the mythical London Bus. ‘Mythical’ because a bus is rarely seen on these strips of red tarmac, however, plenty can be spotted queuing amongst the cars on the black tarmac.

Londonland has very different traffic rules to England. For example, in Londonland, motorbikes and mopeds usually drive on the right side of the road, and only move onto the left side if the right side of the road is blocked by oncoming traffic. In England, where I am from, people generally use their car horns to express dissatisfaction with another driver, in a situation such as where the other driver has cut them up. In Londonland, the car horn is used to express apology or appreciation of your driving, ie. If someone cuts you up or crosses into your lane, it’s not unusual for them to beep you on their horn, the longer they beep the more apologetic they are.

Finally, when living in Londonland it’s important to emphasise how great living in Londonland is to visitors from England and other countries. A true Londoner will never mention the foibles detailed above because they don’t see them. It makes me think of the line that Morpheus speaks to Neo from The Matrix…


Londonland is a Matrix. Bleak, concrete, systematic and ruled by sinister government programs and agents. Green spaces and parks seem to be artificial compared to England. There’s nowhere you can go that other people aren’t and we are watched by a melee of cameras and robots. Welcome to Londonland.

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3 Responses to “[Travel Guides] Londonland Part 1”

  1. Stef said

    You are of course decribing New Londonland

    Speaking as one of the diminishing number of people who were born and grew up in Old Londonland who still reside within the forcefield that bounds the M25, I can assure you that there are still a few people trapped here who know how pants everything has become

    A personal peeve of mine is how short a time it now takes to live here before people start describing themselves as ‘Londoners’ and appropriating the identity of the people who have lived here for a while – they then go on to say the daftest things in our name

    Methinks if I moved to Newcastle, for example, and referred to myself as a Geordie after a weeks and started telling all the locals how they should think I would probably encounter a certain of personal misfortune.

  2. Andy said

    Very funny post. But this could apply to any big city I think. Certainly here. At least your motorcyclists drive on the right, except if there’s oncoming traffic. Here, they think they own the road and drive on the right, on the left, in the middle, on the pavement – basically anywhere they damn well like!

  3. Lex Fear said


    Good point, it’s true and unfortunate that foreigners like myself move to London and claim it as our own, whilst simultaneously ruining what once may have been a great city!


    I think it’s mainly true what you say but New Londonland seems to have the monopoly on dictators. I find Red Kens policies increasingly annoying, as well as the fact he treats the rest of England as a suburb of London.

    I’m not surprised there’s so many motorcycle accidents here though. Of course I was alluding to the fact that our motorcyclists are supposed to be driving on the left. The amount of times I’ve had to slow down for one heading in my direction is incredible.

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