Faith in London restored after ranking fifth best student city on earth

Studying in London has always felt like being an old battered cliff edge, slowly crumbling under its own creaking weight. But every once in a while, something happens to reaffirm our faith in the big smoke.

London’s most recent apologist is the QS Best Student City rankings, a list in which cities with populations over 250,000 are ranked according to five criteria. Rankings, Student Mix, Desirability, Employer Activity and Affordability. London, beaten only by a supergroup composed of Sydney, Tokyo, Melbourne and Paris, came 5th in the entire world on this esteemed list.

Edinburgh was the next placed UK city at 33rd

While coming first in Rankings and 3rd in Employer Activity, London floundered miserably with the other three categories, coming seventh on Student Mix, 17th on Desirability and a laughably awful 75th on affordability.

So what does this tell us about London? According to QS, London is a “nerve-center of global academia”, containing as it does several esteemed universities. Furthermore it’s “one of the planet’s great centres of culture and creativity”. Its creepily high “employer activity” rating is owed largely to London’s position as an “important financial hub”.

Worth every £80 complimentary lime segment

It’s debatable as to whether a city which is supposedly the least affordable on Earth can realistically be the fifth best student city in the world, but it’s reassuring to hear something good about the capital for once. Between the Vice-led stress about the city’s culture being milked for cash by a dead-eyed army of gentrifiers, probably all called Martin, and the Mail-led stress about Big Ben being turned into a giant M&M World for Syrian peadophiles, it’s about time someone said something nice about London for once.

So thank you, QS. Thank you for remembering that London, warts and all, has still got a little bit of fire in her belly just yet. Thank you for remembering it’s more than simply the least affordable student city in the world, it’s also a city of young love, of lights glittering in the stunningly bleak Christmas air, of staggering home from a party in Kentish Town after alienating an entire arts society, of being bored with your mum in the National Gallery, of fantasising about beating up the 12-year-old would-be muggers who you ran away from in Camden, and of reliably getting stabbed in a Dalston takeaway.

You see after the facts and statistics and all the rubbish, London is still, very much, a city of humanity.