(Illustration by Natalie Hunt)

London is full of places, and it’s full of people who lie about how good those places are. But they couldn’t fool Andrew Mickel. No way.

A lot of rhetoric about what makes the London such a diverse and interesting place is based on the idea that the city is a rich variety of communities and peoples, from the Australians of Acton to the Bangladeshis of Bethnal Green. But there are many other less-great parts of our city with equally alliterative residents (if I say Clapham is on the list below you can probably guess what I’m thinking).

Why have some areas becoming highly sought after by young people who should, frankly, know better? The yuppie holy grail of wine bars, upwardly spiralling property prices* and a suspiciously high number of people working in financial services suck a lot of people in: do everything you can to stop the same happening to you.

CLAPHAM

In theory, the oft-coveted Clapham is the thriving gateway to south London, and the capital of going out below the river. Credit where credit’s due, Clapham is both of these things. But in a terrible, terrible way.

It’s a thriving gateway so much as it has a lot of train stations. Not only is it a bit shoddy when this is the best fact you can flag about an area, but whichever station you get to you still seemingly always need to walk for ages from any of them to get where you are going.

As for being the capital of going out in south London, it is in much the same way that Leicester Square is the capital of going out north of the river: everyone has tried having a night out there which will have dissolved in recriminations as you fail to find anywhere to go that looks even slightly passable. For fans of rude-boy wine bars, complete with sticky sofas and deals on shooters, only. Remember, this is a place that has two Revolution Vodka Bars.

Redeeming feature: The surprisingly classy pubs of Clapham old town.

WEST HAMPSTEAD

There’s a strange atmosphere in West Hampstead that can be difficult to articulate at first. There are more aspirational wine bars than you can shake a packet of wasabi peanuts at, a fair number of gym-buffed thirty-somethings strutting about, and enough immaculately furnished flats to start a new series of property porn on Channel 4.

But the more time you spend there, the more you realise there is something rather amiss. How come the many bars are largely empty long before closing time, leaving tables of glasses of rioja and Hoegaarden half-drunk? Why is this neighbour to activity-laden Hampstead so culturally impoverished, with not one theatre or gallery to its name? Why, in short, is no-one having any fun?

Simple answer: West Hampstead is on the Jubilee Line, so there is a fair portion of Canary Wharf’s City boys and gals stuck here. Everyone’s had to go home early to be able to get the first train into to work in the horribly early morning. And after a fair few years stuck into number-crunching, money-grabbing and greasy pole-climbing, very few of them seem to comprehend how to have fun unless it’s been featured in the FT’s How To Spend It.

Redeeming feature: The early-til-late joy that is Roni’s Bagel Bakery, and the well-chosen West End Lane Books.

PUTNEY

Jack Wills shirt? Check. Improbably architectural hair? Check. Braying voices at every turn? Check. Buff, poshboy physique? Check. (Okay, it’s not all bad in Putney…)

Both Clapham and West Hampstead are moneyed, but there’s a different air to the affluence round these parts, as no-one seems to be doing that much work to get the cash. That works in other parts of the city – Kensington is unerringly fun – so why is there so little to do in Putney?

Put it this way: Putney, along with fellow offender Clapham, was listed among the five most anonymous town centres in London by thinktank the New Economics Foundation in 2005. How that exists in the same place as the moneyed classes is baffling, but it’s not recommended that you spend much time there trying to work it out.

Redeeming feature: There’s quite a nice Waitrose there, I suppose.

*Okay, that may not be so true any more, but it made certain people move there in the first place. The point stands.