Is London Safe? Nobody Answers the Question I Was Actually Asking.

I worked out that London was my favorite city on the planet while standing in a stranger's armpit on a packed train at Tower Hill.

Not a dignified moment. I was jammed in, holding a rail, close enough to a man's shoulder that we were effectively sharing a coat. And what went through my head was that I felt safer right there than I have felt almost anywhere in my life.

Some of that is the obvious stuff. But most of it was something I couldn't name at the time and can now: nobody was bothered by me being there. I barely existed. In the best possible way.

If you search whether London is safe, you get the same post about forty times. Watch your phone in Oxford Circus. Stay in zones 1 and 2. Beware the friendship bracelet scam. Mind the gap.

Fine. All true, all useful, and if you want the numbers they're reassuring: the Metropolitan Police recorded 97 homicides in 2025, down from 109 the year before, and the lowest figure since 2014. For a city of nine million people that is a genuinely low number, and the crime that actually touches visitors is overwhelmingly opportunistic rather than violent. Keep your phone in your front pocket and get on with your day.

But when most people ask if a place is safe, crime is only half of what they mean. The other half is whether you'll be all right there. Whether you'll be looked at. Whether you'll be helped or ignored or watched.

Nobody writes that post, so I'm going to.

We were getting off a train from London to Margate, which if you've done it with a four-year-old and a five-year-old and luggage is not an elegant operation. There's a gap. There's a step. There's a queue of people behind you who have places to be.

A middle-aged woman came past us, hooked her arms under my youngest, lifted her down onto the platform, and kept walking.

She did not break her conversation with her friend to do it. Not a pause, not a beat. She glanced at me, gave a small smile and a nod, and was gone. I never saw her again and I'd have no idea how to pick her out of a crowd.

In the States that interaction has a whole procedure attached. Someone asks. You say yes. There's a negotiation, a thank you, a bit of performance on both sides about how kind and how grateful everybody is being. Here, a woman saw a family struggling with a train door and solved it on her way past like it was a piece of litter she'd picked up.

We landed at St Pancras and got the same thing repeatedly. Hands appearing. Bags lifted. Nobody making a thing of it.

That's not coldness. That's a city where helping strangers is so routine it doesn't require a ceremony.

We ate Persian food in Brentford one evening. The owner was Middle Eastern and he and his staff doted on our girls like we were family they'd been expecting.

While we were eating, a couple of his regulars came in, an older British couple, and they'd brought him a gift.

They'd come to say they were devastated by what was happening in Iran at the time, and that they hoped his family was safe.

He couldn't hold it together. And they just held onto him. Two people in their sixties, in a restaurant, consoling a man over something happening four thousand miles away because he was theirs and they were his.

I've never seen anything like it. I'm not sure I've ever seen the American version of it.

That's what I mean about London. It isn't a metropolitan area with a financial center attached. Nine million people from everywhere on earth have been living on top of each other long enough that they've built something out of it. You can call it multiculturalism if you want a word for it, but on the ground it just looks like an old British couple bringing a present to their Iranian friend on a bad week.

Here's the part that's harder to write.

Most places I go, I don't get to just be a guy. I'm a representative. I'm an ambassador. I'm the Black friend. I'm the American in Spain. I'm whatever category the room decides I am before I've said anything, and I adjust accordingly, and I've been adjusting my entire life.

If you don't look like me, that probably reads as something you could simply choose not to do. Just be yourself. I understand why it sounds that way. It isn't how it works, and I'm not going to argue the point here, I'm just telling you it's the case.

In London, it stopped.

Not because anyone made a show of accepting me. The opposite. Nobody had a reaction to have. There are so many people from so many places that whatever I am is not information anybody is processing. And even if somebody did care, they're busy, and the tourists around them are looking at Westminster Abbey and the London Eye and Big Ben (or Grande Benjamin, as I have apparently started calling it).

I got to let my hair down. My kids got to be as strange and loud and themselves as they wanted, and nobody's face did anything.

I'd searched a long time for somewhere that felt like that. Getting off the plane and finding it was one of the better things that's happened to me.

I want to be careful here, because I was a visitor. I've been told there's real classism in London and I didn't experience it, or wasn't in a position to notice. It's a huge city and it has problems, and I'd rather you hear that from me than decide I was selling you something. What I can tell you is what happened to us.

The reputation is that London is unfriendly and southerners are cold. I think that's a misreading of what's actually going on.

Londoners live in a city that thirty million people a year treat as a theme park. They're not performing hospitality on their commute. They're getting to work through a crowd that's stopped dead at the top of the escalator.

Stop and actually engage with one and you get the same warmth you'd get anywhere else in Britain. We had people go out of their way to tell us their favorite corners of the city. We had shopkeepers spend twenty minutes with us on evenings we didn't spend a penny, just because we'd come in and looked at what they'd made.

Busy is not cold. Americans confuse the two because we've built a service culture where strangers are contractually required to seem delighted to see us.

Fair question, and I get it a lot.

Spain was always the plan. We'd started that visa process before we ever set foot in Britain. Then we spent months traveling through the UK and fell hard for it, London most of all, which was not on the schedule.

UK visas are genuinely difficult to get. That's the whole answer. There's no clever route I've been sitting on. We're in Valencia because that's the door that opened, and I'm glad it did, and I'd still take a London address tomorrow if one were on offer.

Don't be.

Go with your wits about you, the same as any big city. Watch your phone. If you go looking for trouble you'll find some.

But go expecting to be looked after, because you probably will be. Don't take the news media's word for what that city is. There are more versions of London than you can see in a lifetime and you'll find whichever one you go looking for.

I went looking for somewhere I could stop performing.

I found it standing in a stranger's armpit at Tower Hill, and I've thought about it nearly every day since.

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