On London Extra: Loving it

The week in transport, housing and criminal justice policy developments and whether they might make more Londoners happier with their city

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London is sometimes portrayed as a place of loveless transience with no sense of community people are desperate to leave - or "flee" in the emotive language of national journalists who find out, as they do every few years, that lots of Londoners migrate to the Home Counties at certain points in their lives (they are less excited about the numbers that routinely move to London from the rest of the UK).

But despite the capital's high levels of population change and churn, Londoners on the whole feel a sense of attachment to their city that bears comparison with that expressed by Britons who live in any other region of England, according to a new poll from YouGov.

It found that 76 per cent of Londoners feel either strongly (38%) or fairly (38%) attached to the place, a figure topped only by the North East at 79 per cent, where there was also more strong attachment (48%), and matched only by the North as a whole, the North West and the South West, where in each case strong attachment was slightly lower. Who'd have thought it?

Londoners, however, were overall less likely than people in other regions to say theirs is a better place to live than other parts of the country, and also more divided about the extent to which they held that view.