OPINION - Why millions of Brits are dead wrong about what’s really happening on London’s streets

An American friend of mine recently asked why I’m okay with my two late-teen daughters going out on their own in London. The reality is you always have some background concern as a father, but the fact he spontaneously asked, and linked his question specifically to London, took me aback.

With that context, we also shouldn’t be surprised that the public within the UK are generally way too negative about the realities of London, as our new study shows.

The public’s average guess is that 30% of Londoners were the victim of a crime in the year to September 2025, when the actual figure is 12.2%. We are most likely to pick out London as having the highest rates of violent and sexual crimes of any region in England and Wales, when it has among the lowest of each. Six in ten think crime overall has risen in London since 2019, when it has fallen slightly. Four in ten think murders are up; they are down by around 15%.

It’s not just crime we’re very wrong on: the average guess is that 35% of Londoners are Muslim, against a reality of 15%. Reform UK supporters guess fully half of Londoners are Muslim. A third of the public believe there are “no-go” areas in London where Sharia law dominates and non-Muslims cannot enter: two-thirds of Reform supporters believe that’s the case.

We also miss the positives. London regularly tops global “best cities” lists, but only 6% guess it ranks top of eight major cities tested. London’s air quality has improved significantly, but the majority think it’s got worse or stayed the same. Only 30% know London pays a huge amount more in tax than it receives back in spending, with a net contribution of £43bn to public finances.

There are many reasons why we’re so wrong, not least that London does have some serious, well-evidenced problems with crime and disorder. Shoplifting and personal theft have more than doubled since 2019; we will generalise from the personal experience and online videos of these incidents to a much broader belief that we have lost control.

These examples land because humans are just wired to pay more attention to negative and threatening information: we’re at the end of a long evolutionary process where those who ignored threats were edited out of the gene pool. The media, politicians and social media platforms know that, so we’re fed more of it – “if it bleeds, it leads” is a cliché for a reason.

We’re also particularly likely to believe these negatives about London, as they fit with a long history of dislike or resentment for the capital: back in 1822, the radical pamphleteer William Cobbett called London “the great wen”, a sebaceous cyst, swelling on the face of the country and draining the wealth of rural England.

The concern about consequences goes way beyond guilt-inducing questions from overseas friends. The Lady Mayor of the City of London, Dame Susan Langley, is worried about the growing wave of negative disinformation because it “seeps into boardrooms and influences perceptions and shapes investment decisions.”

It also has more personal impacts. Londoners themselves are only marginally more positive about the trends in their home city, and this will affect their own quality of life: there is clear evidence that an overblown fear of crime can have unnecessary negative effects on wellbeing.

But it is what it signals about the UK’s increasingly febrile and polarised politics that may matter most. London has become a political focal point, not just for different attitudes but different realities.

For example, 60% of Reform supporters (wrongly) think murders have increased in London, compared with 24% of Labour supporters. But 83% of Reform supporters (correctly) believe that violent offences have increased, while only 41% of Green supporters think that’s the case.

We are seeing the London that fits the story we already believe, reflecting both our own biases and the messages we’ll see from an increasingly fragmented and polarised media, social media and politics.

Defending and promoting a shared view of the reality of London is crucial to allow healthy debate about our capital: we’re all entitled to our own opinions on that, but we’re not entitled to our own facts.

:: Professor Bobby Duffy is director of the Policy Institute at King’s College London