London Smile

One of the criteria for his 'ideal girl' required by a certain young man on a certain online dating site (don't get too excited, because I'm not about to reveal my online dating experience) was "wouldn’t have a London smile which seems to look like this :(". Yet another time during a skype conversation with a Sri Lankan who had visited London, it was brought up "how the British were less friendly than the Americans". Then there's Jack Whitehall cracking jokes about the customer service in Britain being absolutely appalling, whereas in the US you walk into an Apple store and all the staff want to be your friend (if you haven't seen Jack W. in action please do youtube him. He's such a fantastic comedian). So this got me thinking, are people in London really that cold?

Theoretically my opinion regarding this can be easily discarded because
1. I don't live in London. The longest I've been in London is 3 months during the Summer of 2011, and other than that I only commute to London on my way to the airport or the handful of times I meet up with friends.
2. I've never travelled to another country (other than Sri Lanka where I was born and bred) so I haven't got much to compare with.

Anyhow during the few times I have been in London I found people friendly and helpful. Every time I struggled to carry my massive luggage (which during the summer has everything that belongs to me except for a kitchen sink) up or down a flight of steps during the rush hour in a busy underground station (which itself is a notorious act known to annoy the life out of busy commuters) random lovely gentlemen have always stopped to help. Yet again highlighting London's friendliness is this one time, when I was running towards a train in the central line, with the doors shutting before me and my hopes slowly crumbling through the gap (see what I did there?) a knight in shining shoes, pink shirt and a lovely tie pushed the doors open from inside the train and held them apart while the alarm went off just so I could jump in. Obviously since "no eye contact, no talking and no smiling", was the unspoken code of the London Underground, I quickly looked at him and gave a much appreciated nod, to which he replied with a similar shrug and we continued the journey in silence before going our own ways. Bottom line is to me Londoners always appeared as friendly as any other community of people I'd have encountered on a day to day basis.

London with over 8 million residence remains the largest and the most dense city in the United Kingdom. Interestingly according to the 'the Migration Observatory' based at the Center on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) at the University of Oxford, 1/3 of this population are non-British (according to their nationality). Furthermore according to a very recent BBC article only 45% of London's residents were white British, clearly making them a minority. So I think the question is if a tourist after doing the London political tour comes to the conclusion that "British people are really unfriendly", who is he talking about? Can his observation on a population sample based in a highly diverse, specific region of the UK, be used to draw conclusions about an entire nation?

Moving further from London, I have plenty of examples to pin point how hospitable the British country folks are. From the friendly bouncer at the club I work in who offered me "pocket money" the first time I travelled back home for Christmas, to house mates and their families who take me into their homes whenever I become homeless (which is every summer), people have been nothing but kind and generous. So I often found myself wondering, who are these rude, unfriendly, cold Brits everyone was referring to? It is then I stumbled on the following journal article by Tahseen Shams. Based on a study focused on Bangladeshi Muslim men living in Mississippi, United States of America, she points out how the experiences of these men differ according to their identities. In a nutshell, Shams observed how Bangladeshi men with racial, religious and ethnic identities completely invisible, highly adapted or overlapping with those of their white, Christian peers had more positive experiences within the community and were more accepted or/and tolerated. So fortunately or unfortunately, I, like those Bangladeshi men, am a very flexible individual. My views, the way I dress, what I eat never really clashed with what was main stream British. So when I say "over the last 4 years almost every British person I've met have been incredibly friendly to me", is it because they see me as a quirky foreigner who they take pity on? Is it because they see me as one of them? Or is it because they are inherently kind? I however like to think it's the latter.

So, next time you're travelling in a crowded underground train with your face in some dudes armpit, whilst trying desperately to read the Metro, stop for a second and smile at the first person who catches your eye. Who knows, something magical might happen. What do you think?