ABOUT eight years ago approximately half of my friends moved to London. It wasn’t quite en masse but one-by-one the upwardly mobile members of my social circle disappeared down south.

I’m told it’s where the best jobs are; that’s also why my sister and three of my cousins moved there.

Despite encouragement to join the exodus from friends and relatives I’ve always resisted the move.

London is a place which fills me with a volatile mix of contradictory feelings the moment I hop off the train at Euston.

It is without doubt one of the five most important cities in the world, to which I’d add Paris, New York, Tokyo and maybe Beijing.

But all of this comes at a huge price. London is horribly, horribly overpopulated. The roads are constantly choked with traffic and the pavements perpetually stampeded by almost impenetrable armies of workers. Even the pedestrian crossings are no longer wide enough.

And our capital is dirty. Central London is visibly grimy with walls tainted by a film of black dust which reappears the second it’s cleaned off. The Tube struggles to move around London’s swelling population which grew 12% between 2001 and 2011. And the capital’s sewers struggle to deal with movements of a different kind. It’s the only British city where you’re frequently assailed by the stench of effluent.

But what really gets me about London are the people. Broadly I’d divide them into haves and have-nots. The haves are self-indulgent, aloof and seemingly clueless about the lives of the have-nots, who are disconnected, forever angry and sometimes mentally ill. Anyone that’s walked the streets of a less salubrious borough will see the endless faces of miserable, alienated individuals who are surviving – but only just.

London is a place where it’s normal to work 60 or more hours a week. In Japan that’s called the ‘karoshi’ (meaning ‘death from overwork’) zone and a victim’s family can sue the dead relative’s employer.

But worst of all London has very little sense of community. Only 40% of Londoners were born there. Most of London is transitory. People stay a few years in overpriced rabbit hutches for flats before the city chews them up and spits them out elsewhere – or it swallows them and they disappear.

Along neglected suburban streets from Enfield to Croydon, Londoners ignore their door bells and buzzers while mail addressed to long-departed ex-tenants piles up in the narrow stairwells of dodgy house-to-flat conversions.

Someone is run over or murdered on a high street and the city barely blinks.

Can you imagine anywhere else in Britain where a person could lie dead and undiscovered for three years? That’s what happened to Joyce Vincent, whose skeleton was found in her north London bedsit, not far from my sister’s flat.

London is a place where humanity is at a low ebb, which is ironic for a place that’s supposed to be the heart of the civilised world.

While England’s largest cities had one evening of rioting in August 2011, London had three days of violence and looting. I remember watching the rioters live on TV and spitting incandescently at the screen. But now I’m beginning to understand why they did it. If you were constantly bombarded with images of stuff you could never afford, wouldn’t you feel isolated and enraged? The problem exists across the UK but like everything in London, it’s magnified several times over.

So London is a brutal, unfriendly and extreme place.

But it has stunning buildings and awe-inspiring public spaces. One can’t help but feel a sense of awe stood on either bank of the Thames or in one of the city’s many beautiful Georgian squares – and you can’t beat old London boozers for atmosphere.

London has everything you could materially desire, from high culture to the best food in the world. On Monday, I saw an American band that would have taken some persuasion to play anywhere else in Britain. The following day I sat in an authentic Mexican restaurant, near Euston, eating the best cake I’d ever bought. They are, among many others, reasons why I love to visit London – but I could never live there.