This piece of mine appears in this week's So London magazine:

I’ve lived in Zone 1 for all my adult life. Indeed, for much of that time I’ve been in the middle of the city, in W1.

I’ve not just enjoyed living there myself. I’ve also, I have to admit, looked at down at those unfortunates who, rather than being able to walk to any number of wonderful restaurants or the wonderful array of cultural lures, have had to get the…I can barely bring myself to write it…the…ugh…the…Tube.

So it is with a large dollop of humility that I write what follows: I have been happily ensconced out of Zone 1 for the past year, and I am about to move even further out, when I get hitched. And do you know what? Not only am I relishing the prospect of leaving; I can’t understand how I could have been so blinkered in my Zone 1 ways and so, well, plain wrong.

I’ve always believed that the point of living in a city is to live in a city – to take full advantage of the summation of human achievement which cities represent. Not for me the countryside or green land. Land is for building on, for turning into the adventure playgrounds of advanced humankind which urban life is about. Cities have everything the human soul needs, from the physical sustenance of the food available in the eye-blinking array of specialist shops or restaurants, to the mental and emotional sustenance of culture, the like of which is, in London, unrivalled on the planet.

Few things are more annoying than Londoners who don’t take advantage of our theatres, our cinemas or our concert halls. If you want to spend your evenings doing nothing, go and live where there’s nothing to do. Try Norfolk.

Where I’ve been quite wrong, however, is in dismissing Londoners who live outside Zone 1 - or, let’s be generous, even Zone 2.

I had things entirely back to front in thinking that to enjoy London properly one needed to live in proximity to its heart. In fact, I now see from my own experience, the only way one can properly enjoy London is to treat the centre – the area within Zone 1 – as a facility to be utilized as often as possible but from which one can retreat – or, perhaps more accurately, escape – when the need arises.

Because the plain fact is that, today, living in central London is not a pleasure but a penance. After 7 years in Fitzrovia, it suddenly dawned on me that I didn’t have to be woken up at least once a night by a fight in the street outside. I didn’t have to walk home at night through a urine-drenched Soho. I didn’t have to fear being attacked by drunken louts if I set off home after chucking out time. And I didn’t have to walk in streets with dirt as a sort of perpetual motion that forced the street cleaners to start again before they’d even finished.

There was a solution: leave.

Now I have the best of all worlds. I go into the centre for what only the amenities of the centre can provide. But instead of fighting a daily losing battle against my surrounding environment, I have discovered that London living can be a pleasant experience. I know the names of the shopkeepers in the parade near me. I have made friends with other coffee-hounds in the local café. Passers-by smile at me and I do not immediately think that it’s a distraction before they mug me.

I’ve recently been scouting out all sorts of areas for when my fiancée and I get married. And my zonal prejudices have melted away. Because it turns out that even in the wilds of Zones 3 and 4 one can live the full, enriched London experience. Call it gentrification, call it yuppification, call it what you will. The phenomenon is nothing new. But it’s been given a new impetus by the ever-growing unpleasantness of living in the middle. Areas which were once the death-knell of vibrant living are now beacons of life and prosperity, each with their own micro-economy of cafes, shops and services, all proof that it is indeed possible to have full access to London life but to live without the aggravation.

When I think how much time I spent in the middle, pretending to myself that I liked the dirt, and that the hassle was all part of the urban lifestyle, I have only one reaction: what an idiot. I should have moved out years ago.