Greater London is generally quite homogeneous. Good areas and bad areas are often cheek by jowl. One end of a street can be quite nice, while the other end is much poorer. Obviously there are better & worse areas, but even there there's lots of variability.
So just like everywhere else, Croyden has lots of good, lots of bad, and lots and lots of in-between.
> The whole of London is an undesirable area in my opinion
Agreed. I think OP was more referring to crime. Ok maybe Chelsea vs Croydon is a bit different, but compared to any of the surrounding areas e.g. Wimbledon and Clapham, it isn't much different.
(I was in South Wimbledon - close to Mitcham and Tooting - for 2 years)
You might be surprised. In the year to date, Kensington & Chelsea have had about 12 crimes per 100 people according to the Met. Croydon have had about 6 crimes per 100 people. K&C does come out better if you look at certain subsets of serious crime, but Croydon is consistently in the "better half" of London Boroughs in terms of crime, often doing very well.
Most of the worst boroughs in London in terms of crime are the inner-city boroughs, regardless of wealth (Westminster in particular is a crime ridden hellhole if you look at the raw numbers by population, due largely to the amount of business and nightlife and low number of people living there; but Croydon city centre suffers from some of the same effect, dragging the overall crime rate for the borough up, even though the totals for the borough still remain better than average for London).
I'm right there with you having lived here for 3 years. It seems like you have to be single to enjoy living in London. I just find it crowded, expensive and rammed with traffic!
Amongst people who have never visited, yes. Which is presumably one of the reasons it is still so cheap.
The central business district also still suffers from ugly office blocks, as the town centre was bombed out during the war largely due to the proximity to the RAF base at Croydon Airport (which used to be London's main airport until Heathrow - it's been closed since the end of the 50's) and the factories at Purley Way, and most of the rebuilding resulting in massive amounts of large, ugly concrete office buildings mainly used by the home office initially.
As I mentioned, it's below the London average when it comes to crime, quite a bit above the London average in terms of salaries. A lot of good schools, including a handful of expensive high end private schools.
There are a few run down areas though the worst are "hidden away" far outside the main town centre, but also quite a few upscale areas, including Purley (in South Croydon), which is consistently one of the wealthiest post-codes in the UK due to a large number of very spacious estates (we're talking houses that can hardly be seen from the gate facing out to to private roads, forming adorable little seemingly old but entirely fake vestiges of old country villages) dotted around a leafy and generally nice little town centre.
Most of Croydon, though, is covered by mostly firmly middle class neighbourhoods and parks. Lots and lots of parks (120 of them), some of them very substantial. There's of course also the central shopping area, which is one of the largest in England, with two massive shopping centres (which look to be refurbished and combined into one centre as part of a join venture that includes the Westfield operators). Some of the best public transport in London (central choke-point on main lines from Victoria and London Bridge to the South Coast, as well as the tram system).
Part of the reputation problem is probably because most visitors at most see the central business district (which as mentioned still looks ugly), at most, including TV footage of Luna House (immigration processing for the Home Office), and don't even realise that most of the much nicer looking small towns and villages surrounding Croydon town centre are also part of the borough.
The last 5 years or so, we've also had a massive increase in building of upscale housing (highrises with 1m+ penthouses etc...) - they're in the process of putting up another high end 50 floor highrise in the city centre - and upgrades to the town centre, with more underway, so soon it'll even look nice.
A little bit of the riot happened within a small part of the shopping area of Croydon town centre, constrained to about half a square mile or so, apart from one or two stores in the Purley Way retail park. The Reeves corner store burning down was the "highlight" yes, and a couple of stores had some broken glass.
I walked through the town centre on the days of the riots, and frankly it was mostly quiet and uneventful - the media coverage was massively overblown.
There are still areas that area (as with any town), but on the whole I think it's increasingly seen as an option for young professionals working in London who don't want to live there.
