I’ve lived in London for thirty years¹. Somehow.

I’m not entirely sure how it happened. It was never the plan. Not that I had a plan. If you’d asked me where I wanted to live, I probably wouldn’t have picked London.

I applied to a handful of jobs at the tail-end of my stint at university². The one job offer I received³ was in London. That’s how it started.

To give you an idea of how arbitrary it all was: my first employer had offices in central London and in Surrey. I looked at the train lines and found that Wimbledon was about half way between the two. That’s where I ended up.

I didn’t have a plan much beyond that. If anyone had asked, I might have suggested staying for a year or two before heading back north.

Instead, I stayed.

A colleague recently asked why, and I’m not sure that I had a great answer. Sure, there’s an element of inertia and the complexity of uprooting the entire family. And undoubtedly there’s a degree of romanticism, the idea of London rather than the reality⁴.

But there really is something of everything here. It’s one of the few, genuinely “world” cities. There are people, languages, culture and food from everywhere⁵. Before remote work became feasible, it was the best place in the UK, probably all of Europe, to find the kind of work I’m qualified to do.

It’s expensive and busy and polluted, so there’s undoubtedly a cost. I know I’m fortunate and I’m not pretending it’s for everyone, but, consciously or not, it’s a trade-off that I’m still happy with.