History Main / BritainIsOnlyLondon

It also does not help that London as a whole really does tend to see the rest of the British Isles as an appendage of it, regarding everything outside the M25 (or beyond, at a push, the Watford Gap) as {{Mordor}}. Furthermore, Londoners, who are by and large comparatively sophisticated, liberal and cosmopolitan, think very differently from those in the North or in the small towns and countryside of England and Wales, something shown very clearly by the EU Referendum in 2016 -- where almost all of England and Wales outside of the big cities voted to Leave, London voted by a two thirds majority to Remain. This has left a lot of Londoners very resentful towards their rural compatriots (who are usually stereotyped as [[LowerClassLout ignorant, inbred bigots]]) and half-joking petitions for London to either declare Independence or join similarly pro-Remain Scotland (abbreviated as "Londependence" and "[=ScotLond=]" respectively) quickly gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures, cementing the ideas that a) London is a place unto itself, b) London and the rest of Britain enjoy a seething mutual hatred.[[note]]The resentment is mutual: the further away you get from London, the more there is a belief that the English regions in particular have been hung out to dry so that London can benefit at their expense, and that Londoners are smug bastards. Neither is entirely inaccurate. One point of view is that the Brexit vote was a deliberate two-fingered gesture at a cultural, social and political elite who consider that England - or at least, the bits worth talking about, Scotland and Wales rarely get a mention of any kind at all -- ends at the M25, who govern purely for the benefit of London and the surrounding UsefulNotes/HomeCounties. See OopNorth and other pages. [[/note]]

[[folder:Film -- Live-Action]]

** Manchester had been promised significant government investment in expanding the successful (and economically significant) Metrolink urban tram system to cover more areas of the conurbation with new lines. Local people were angry when it was announced they were diverting the funding to the Crossrail project in London, on the explicitly stated grounds that this was far more important and Manchester was just going to have to wait. Even local MP's normally supine and sycophantic to Blair were moved to protest. Manchester is only now (2017) finishing the upgrades that might have been in place fifteen years ago.

* Creator/PeterFHamilton
** Averted in the Greg Mandel trilogy where most of the action takes place around Peterborough. This is because GlobalWarming and the subsequent evacuations due to flooding led to a concentration of refugees in the city, and Britain's extreme left-wing government was forced to allow foreign investment to bring in jobs and alleviate the costs. Now the New Conservatives are back in power, the area has become the center of Britain's industrial restoration.
** In ''Literature/TheNightsDawnTrilogy'', Louise Kavanagh goes to London because she's unfamiliar with Earth, but as her planet is based on [=19th=] Century England the name at least is familiar. However as the land outside the arcologies has been devastated by the armada storms and other ecological damage, it's likely that for all practical purposes the arcology of London really ''is'' all of Britain.

* It becomes clearer, as the Literature/{{Discworld}} develops more depth and detail, that the great smelly city of Ankh-Morpork is a FantasyCounterpartCulture of London. the City Mappe features a suspiciously familiar wiggly river with lots of Thames-like twists and turns. It even has an "Isle of Gods" in roughly the plae where the Isle of Dogs appears on London's map, and district names like Dimwell and Dolly Sisters echo locations in London, as do many street names [[note]]In the overall conception, nearby areas like Lancre (Lancashire), The Chalk (Wiltshire, Somerset and The Downs) and The Shires (a Borsetshire-like rural England) fill the spaces for England as a whole. The capital city, however, is a steampunk fantasy London. [[/note]]

* {{Lampshaded}} on ''The Kevin Bishop Show''. One of the characters is a camp American who opens a sketch by confirming where an English woman's from. She explicitly states she's not from London, and of course, he starts ranting about how he loves London. A likely inspiration is TruthInTelevision -- see bottom of the page.

* Averted on ''Series/RupaulsDragRace [[ForeignRemake UK]]''. In the first season, only three contestants were from London, while the others were from all over England, except Blu Hydrangea who hailed from Belfast, Northern Ireland. Blu talks about how things are culturally different over there, with Northern Ireland being more conservative and homophobic (during filming it had not yet legalized same-sex marriage, the last country in the UK to hold out), and how she sometimes felt like an outsider compared to the other contestants, all mainland Brits. In theory, Scottish and Welsh drag queens are also eligible to compete.

* Averted on ''Series/TedLasso''. The show ''is'' set in London, but it's in Richmond upon Thames, one of London's westernmost boroughs about 15 kilometers (9 miles) from Central London. Additionally, the characters are frequently shown traveling to the UK's other cities such as Liverpool for matches.

Despite the real-life London being 607 sq miles in area, the characters will never leave Central London (around 24 square miles), if they even make it more than half a mile from the river. London is just one city in ''England'', which is itself just one of ''three'' countries (England, Scotland, Wales) that makes up Great Britain, the largest island in the United Kingdom, which includes Northern Ireland, and lots of other islands (see UsefulNotes/BritainVersusTheUK if you've just gone all cross-eyed). Hollywood England is a tiny place. It's an island, for trope's sake! While there may be a bit more to it than just London, it's not a whole lot more. If UsefulNotes/{{Scotland}}, UsefulNotes/{{Wales}} and UsefulNotes/NorthernIreland cross their fingers and hope ''really hard'', they might just make an appearance in the form of {{Scotireland}}. The Isle of Man and Channel Islands are just plain out of luck. Unless they come into play, the only other place in Britain is basically just a giant field outside London that is home to some sheep, a few cows, some [[CampbellCountry supernatural monsters]], [[{{Barsetshire}} a village]], a couple of [[Series/DowntonAbbey English]] [[Series/ToTheManorBorn manors]], a [[Literature/BlandingsCastle castle]] [[Series/BridesheadRevisited or two]] and [[SmallReferencePools Stonehenge]].

* In [[http://transmission.thecomicseries.com/comics/52/ one strip]] in ''Webcomic/{{Transmission}}'' the character is from UsefulNotes/TheWestMidlands [[note]]The character was previously described here as being from OopNorth, but Stoke-on-Trent is very definitively West Midlands. See OopNorth for further discussion as to where UsefulNotes/TheMidlands ends and the North begins: this is by no means fixed and is subject to some debate[[/note]] visit the Britannia casino in Las Vegas and are a bit offended at the employees' fake accents. [[http://transmission.thecomicseries.com/comics/54/ "There is more to England than London you know."]]

* In [[http://transmission.thecomicseries.com/comics/52/ one strip]] in ''Webcomic/{{Transmission}}'' the characters from OopNorth [[note]]well, kinda; the exact dividing line between the north end of UsefulNotes/TheMidlands and the actual North is subject to some debate[[/note]] visit the Britannia casino in Las Vegas and are a bit offended at the employees' fake accents. [[http://transmission.thecomicseries.com/comics/54/ "There is more to England than London you know."]]

* And in 2021, a TV show seeking to identify ''Britain's Best loved Television Advert'' gave the accolade to a series of ads for Heathrow Airport, featuring a family of anthropomorphised cute bears getting together for Christmas, that had never, ever, been screened outside London and the South-East. ''Britain'''s favourite TV advert? And even within the Creator/{{ITV}} regions, there were issues. Granada [=TV=] covered the whole of the North-Western region from the Scottish borders to Chester and notionally included the Isle of Man. But a frequent complaint was that 95% of its local news and current affairs footage dealt with Manchester and Liverpool, the two biggest and most significant cities. Granada Is Only Manchester or Granada Is Only Liverpool was heard a lot.