Under Big Ben’s Gaze, Boorishness Rules

When I arrived at Heathrow recently on a visit to London after 18 months in Los Angeles, the grayness was almost welcome. The overcast skies meant no squinty eyes, no battle to escape the permanence of the California sun. Even the $80 cab ride couldn’t dampen my excitement.

But by the time we reached the city’s center, this was starting to give way to feelings of mild gloom and anxiety. The streets, strewn with litter and uncollected bin bags, were filthy in comparison to the mostly pristine ones of L.A. Thinking that maybe I had just become too soft, I studied the crowds on the uniformly packed pavements; they were made up of hundreds of unsmiling, sullen faces. The atmosphere was brittle, as though people were expecting something terrible to happen. By the time we reached Covent Garden, a full hour-and-a-half later, after negotiating traffic that suggested a state of siege was in progress, a full foreboding had set in.

When I left London and moved to L.A., some of my friends saw it as a cause for concern. In choosing L.A., I was abandoning the wellspring of cool creativity, the center of the fashionable universe, for a place that represented the epitome of crass--a cultural desert in the middle of a literal one. I was forsaking civilization for a place besieged by violence, dominated by intolerable stupidity and aggressiveness, and hurtling decadently toward an inevitable apocalypse. “You’re going into a war zone,” a supportive friend assured me.

I was well used to sweeping condemnations of American culture from those whose dislike of it was matched only by their obsession with it. The image of Los Angeles in particular was, I suppose, in part understandable, given the press the city has received over the last decade due to recession, rioting and earthquake. I would be back in London within six months, I was told, my British subtlety and sense of irony having seen me through the onslaught. But 18 months later, I am still entrenched, unmugged, yet to be caught in cross-fire and, most importantly, my brain hasn’t turned to jelly. Angeleno friends, encouraged by heavily promoted images of Cool Britannia, are eager to visit London, and I’m finding now that the warnings given me last year about their city will in fact be far more helpful to them, should they make the trip.

Los Angeles, it seems to me, is no longer the provincial town it once was and is achieving a sense of its own importance, over and above its domination by the entertainment industry. But there’s no doubt that the well-chronicled machinations of Hollywood have given it its reputation as the world capital of fakery and insincerity. While you will certainly find some of the most cynical, subhuman examples of the species working in that industry, it’s far from being the whole picture. I have found L.A.’s cultural life to be vivid, new and aspirational: The L.A. Opera, now headed by Placido Domingo, is world-class, Frank Gehry’s spectacular new concert hall is rising, and the art scene downtown is reminiscent of New York’s SoHo in the early ‘80s.

In L.A., you can be passionate about what you do. Made constantly aware of its supposed cultural poverty, it allows an optimism and an almost naive sincerity about new ventures--artistic, architectural or otherwise--which is nothing short of liberating for one coming from London, where a complacent smugness is overwhelming. During my visit back home, it was clear that the stranglehold that irony has had on London life for some time has finally forced any remaining lifeblood out of it; the only safe way to live there now seems to be within quote marks. The possibility of actually expressing a strongly held view, or admitting to being genuinely moved, is more or less unthinkable.

L.A. is undoubtedly a dangerous city; even though the crime rate, including homicides, has dropped in line with that of other U.S. cities, there’s no question that you can far easier get a bullet in the head in certain areas than in the whole of London. But what is totally absent here is the atmosphere of civic hostility that permeates my home city, and which struck me during my trip back as having intensified and hardened. Whether walking in the West End, or on a suburban high street, I felt a palpable sense of resentment and incipient violence between perfect strangers.

At night in central London, the air was filled with the sound of loud drunken spats, and the constant police presence suggested an unending New Year’s Eve. Within one week I witnessed two nasty fights, on the Strand and in Shaftsbury Avenue, both complete with that vivid bloodletting that still manages to shock. These incidents seemed to be directly related to drink; in fact, the city seemed most nights to be in the grip of some collective reel. Drinking has always been central to London’s social life, and I may well have been infected with L.A.’s puritanism on this point, but what struck me this time was the industrial, joyless, oblivion-seeking air about it. The mostly young crowds, huddled outside pubs in Covent Garden and around Oxford Street, spilling onto the road and sitting in the gutters, chanted barely understandable football slogans, and dared you to meet their fuzzy gaze. Everywhere, one sensed a barely contained, bubbling anger.

In my time in L.A., I have seen nothing that approximates this. When I chose to live in Hollywood, again I was warned by those same supportive friends that I was about to descend into a vortex of sleaze and danger. The tackiness and tawdriness of the area certainly remain, despite the well-publicized improvements and redevelopments on the boulevard, and a walk through Hollywood’s main streets can be profoundly depressing; however, fending off the threat of physical harm or having to negotiate boorish behavior en masse are things I have never had to deal with.

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The aggressiveness that now characterizes London is not just about physical threat. I found it right there in the startling lack of simple courtesy or acknowledgment of the feelings or even existence of others. The British often think of urban Americans as unhelpful and lacking refinement. Visitors from the U.S. take this view of themselves to heart only to get a nasty surprise when they come expecting understated British politeness. American friends of mine living in London are now resigned to casual rudeness, especially about their nationality.

After only a few days in London, one aches for even the most perfunctory niceness. The American ethos of the customer-is-king undoubtedly leads to unctuousness, but this is preferable any day to the obligatory surliness and resentment that are features of most transactions in London. Where there is an attempt at friendly service, it comes off as a slightly bullying “mate-ness,” which defies you not to respond in kind.

Next to this, I have found L.A. to be positively courtly. The general politeness, even the passing nodding acknowledgments from strangers, can catch the brutalized Londoner off guard. When I first arrived here, I remember waiting in line at a coffee shop on Santa Monica Boulevard. “Good to see you again, sir,” said the guy serving the man next to me. “Good to be here again!” replied the man. Confronted by such civility between people who were presumably more or less strangers, I found myself tentatively looking from side to side to see where the candid camera might be hidden. To the Londoner only too used to mocking tones, such an exchange could only be a setup.

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Those who adopt a new city can always be accused of Pollyanna-ism in their enthusiasm. But if you are to judge a place not just on crime statistics, but by how people treat each other on a daily basis, then it is London that is the violent, aggressive city. Gangs notwithstanding, in its everyday life, L.A. is gracious by comparison. Drivers in what is a car-dominated city are comparatively courteous (believe me, they are), and generally it’s not immediately assumed that the people you come into contact with are going to be objectionable, beat up on you or behave in some other antisocial way.

London life, far from being typified by the bowler-hatted gent of old, is now characterized by the dominance of what is known as the “yob”--a slang term for a thuggish, loutish, usually soccer-loving man who is boastfully downwardly aspirational. L.A., thankfully, has little concept of what a “yob” is, and in trying to explain the culture that now seems to set the self-consciously coarse, crude, dumbed-down tone of life in London is difficult in a city that still largely carries a picture of Londoners as polite and educated.

One thing is certain: Compared with L.A., London is fast. But it seems fast for no reason. L.A. has a huge dynamic under it in the shape of the entertainment industry. London’s rush struck me as simply hallucinogenic. The much-celebrated new “energy” seemed more like frenzy. L.A. is narcissistic, but it feels positively sophisticated when compared with the cut-price hedonism that seems to have gripped London. For all its faults, L.A. has a sense of what it is about; my hometown seems to have lost any idea, and, with it, any sense of control, or even future.

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Peter Whittle is a television documentary maker and has hosted TV shows in England.