London Metblog
As many of you know, I am a contributor to the London Metblog. I'm not a very good contributor, if I'm honest. As much as I enjoy blogging on my personal blog, being interesting to more than just my small group of friends is not my biggest strength. But I contribute nonetheless, if not as regularly as I should.
Apparently there's a new London blog out there, and at least one blogger has taken notice.
Much to my surprise, I was actually mentioned in his brief post, when he drew attention to the fact that I am, indeed, American:
However, at least one of the contributors is an American, which seems to fly in the face of what they are attempting.
While it's always nifty to get a mention in someone else's blog, I'm not sure I agree with what's being said. In the spirit of 'Not all Americans live in America' (a source of recent frustration for me), you can obviously follow that up with 'Not all Londoners were born in the UK'. (Or even 'Not all Londoners were born in London', but we're not going to go there because I don't have the patience to look up the statistics.)
So, I've done a little research (in that anal way of mine), and poked around National Statistics Online. I found data about London from the 2001 census there, and after a bit of aggregation, came up with some figures.
| UK born | EU born | Non-EU born | |
|---|---|---|---|
| City of London | 5,217 | 560 | 1,408 |
| Inner London | 1,833,663 | 190,272 | 742,179 |
| Outer London | 3,395,524 | 186,776 | 823,677 |
| Total | 5,234,404 | 377,608 | 1,567,264 |
If you add all of this up, the total population of London represented by these statistics is 7,179,276. This means that 5% of the population of London is EU born and a whopping 22% is non-EU born.
Which further means that over ¼ of the population of London was born outside of the UK!
I guess I'm trying to say that I don't think having an American blogger on a London blog is so bad. At least, I don't think it should be a mark against the blog. In fact, it might even be misrepresenting London to not have a couple non-British bloggers.
Just a thought.
Edit 12 Nov 04: For the record, I was a bit pissed off when I wrote this and subsequently commented on it. It was a bad day. I mentioned that the London Metblog wasn't particularly well-run, but that didn't really come out right. In the past, I've felt that the hands-off approach of the management has been a bit too hands-off, but that's all been sorted and I haven't had a beef about anything since then. I shouldn't blog when I'm grumpy.
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Aha. I better understand the context, now, though I'm still intrigued by the remark. I agree with some of the points made - namely that the London Metblog historically wasn't particularly well-run. Are you simply admonishing the American-based management, though, or are you implying that American bloggers don't have a place in London blogging, as well?
Persoanlly? I'm doing neither right now. I'm just watching the content and listening to the reactions to the content. Personally I have no objections to a certain proprtion of non-London born posters, because you can't really reflect London's cosmopolitan nature without them. Others do seem to feel differently, though.
I posted to Adams site as well, but I absolutely agree with your post. In fact, we kind of try to have a few non-born-and-bred people in every city because they notice and talk about things that people who have lived there their entire life would never notice. Cities are full of people who are from there and people who moved there and I think a local group blog should reflect that as well.
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Beth Ballingall
food lover : world traveller : gamer : New Yorker : twenty-something : former Londoner : handbag lover : erstwhile soprano : geek
I failed to give the relevant context in the post, I see. There was a lengthy debate about the London metblog on my and other sites, some months back. The general feeling amongst many people was that a London site run from the US was never likely to get the right London feel. That was why I made the remark I did. You can see more at this post.