The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Love-it-or-hate-it LA is better than New York
No other city divides opinion quite like Los Angeles – you either love it for its endless sun-soaked days and laid-back So-Cal lifestyle, or loathe it for its unnavigable urban sprawl and bumper-to-bumper traffic jams. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve had to convince cynical Londoners and disparaging East Coasters of its many merits, spending hours extolling its virtues – the weather! The beaches!
The weather! The hikes! Did I mention the weather?
– and dismissing its various pitfalls. But now it seems that I’m not alone in my La La Land appreciation, with the recent news that it’s been named the seventh greatest city in the world, beating the likes of Paris and New York in the process.
While I’m as surprised as anyone to find Tinseltown up there amid such lofty company (though less shocked to see it pip New York to the post – who wants that hectic concrete jungle when you could go for beach walks while sipping a green juice instead?), it only confirms what I’ve always known: that LA really is one of the best places on earth, especially as somewhere to live.
Of course, it does have its downsides – you can pretty much forget about visiting if you don’t drive and most Angelenos will just laugh at you if you suggest walking anywhere or trying to navigate the limited public transport system (although its ever-expanding Metro and increasingly popular bike-sharing scheme did earn it bonus points).
Crime rates are still higher than they should be and the treatment of the many homeless men and women that roam the city’s streets leaves a lot to be desired. But such negatives pale in comparison with its many, many positives.
Let’s start with the most obvious one: the weather. As someone who grew up amid England’s grey and drizzly climes before swapping south London for Santa Monica, take it from me when I say that waking up to blue skies and blazing sunshine on an almost daily basis really does make everything better. LA averages 284 sunny days per year; to put that in perspective, the UK averages just over 100.
Then there’s the fact that, for such an urban city, there’s a mind-boggling number of ways to get back to nature, from exploring the many hiking trails in gargantuan Griffith Park to riding the waves in Malibu or watching the sunset from Venice Beach. LA used to be seen as something of a cultural wasteland, looked down on by New Yorkers who thought the best it had to offer was the over-hyped Hollywood Walk of
Fame. Now it’s known for its thriving art scene – particularly in the Downtown area, where cool new galleries open every other day – and worldrenowned museums, including the Getty Center, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the newly opened Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. The food is great, too, if you know where to look. Visitors often get sucked in by greasy burger bars and lacklustre strip-mall joints, only to ignore the neighbourhood gems on every corner.
It’s in LA that you’ll find some of the best tacos you’ve ever tasted, served from a non-descript food truck in Boyle Heights, as well as numerous fine dining options where top chefs do extremely clever things with the fresh produce California grows in abundance. You’d never guess it, but the city actually boasts the most Michelin-starred restaurants per capita.
The truth of the matter is that LA has earned its love-it-or-hate-it status because it’s so impenetrable to tourists – this isn’t a place you can get to know in a handful of days, as you can with many European cities. The trick is to make friends with locals who can show you how to get under the city’s skin, who can teach you how to harness that feeling of limitless possibility that pulses away in the background here and draws so many starry-eyed dreamers to its shores.
Once you’ve done that, you’ll be just as hopelessly hooked as I am.