Quality of life in the British Cities

For me living in a busy city centre has it's ups and downs and I'm sure it varies from city to city. I have been living in Liverpool City Centre for the past 6 months and I'm moving out to the suburbs in three days! You can tell already that city centre living has more downs than ups for me! Well I'll start on a positive note with the ups. The main positive point for me was a brilliant location. I have been five minutes walk from all the shops I could ever need, the cinema, a big choice of restaurats and some of my favourite bars and pubs. This means no need to catch an expensive taxi at the end of a night out! The only other true positive ...  Read the complete review

I have lived in Birmingham most of my life, and Cardiff since I came here to go to Cardiff University in September of this year. So I know about city life. I also worked on a summer camp this year in the remote Brecon Beacons for 5 long months, so I can see the advantages and disadvantages of cities and rural areas to live in. Now I have asthma, and the pollution in Birmingham doesn't exactly help. I live on a main road, and just waiting for the bus I am forced to breathe in exhaust fumes that make me wheeze. Wheras when I was on the summer camp there was lovely fresh, clean air (apart from the smell of burning foot and mouth infected cattle, but that's ...  Read the complete review

Up until the age of 10 I lived in the Essex countryside. My home was the fields and my friends were the trees and birds and animals. At 10 my parents upped sticks and moved to Northampton. Initially we lived in a downtrodden area whilst they experimented with the idea of owning a newsagents shop. I remember the day we walked into that shop and can still feel the shock and the horror of not seeing any fields behind our house. Just an ugly brewery and downtrodden railway and dirt, dirt, dirt everywhere. I was never one to bunk school but my “I’m just going round to so and so’s house” really meant “I’m off for a long walk up the main ...  Read the complete review

I was born in a city, albeit a small one – Lincoln, a beautiful and historic city, one that is far too laid-back to be compared with bigger places. When I was eleven, I moved to a small village seven miles away called Welton. This was an idyllic place for a child to grow up in the 1980s, but began to look rather more boring as I hit my mid-teens. 1988 came, it was time for me to move on. I went to Portsmouth to study Russian and Soviet Studies, a whole 210 miles away from home, a huge step! Portsmouth is a big city, a seaside and a naval area. Like most cities, it has its good and bad points, but was a rather daunting step from a quiet village. ...  Read the complete review

Having spent considerable periods of a mis-spent youth between Leeds and Manchester, and moved to London just seven years ago, I can't claim to be well-versed in the joys of urban living as opposed to country life, having never really known any other alternative, and like most ways of life, it has its good and bad. Cities are fun, but dirty, they have more to do and more people to meet, but they are 'less friendly', that is the perception anyhow. I hated London when I arrived at 21, I didn't know anyone and it seemed to big, but it was where the work was, and it is still where a lot of the work is. My job (I'm a social ...  Read the complete review