Original post by CopperknickersFirstly, tourist traps and Downton Abbey are not 'British culture', they are a loosely historically-themed fabrication dreamed up in a 1980s office block in Woking. And bravo to them, for convincing hopelessly naive foreigners to pay £20 for a baby-sized portion of ye Olde Englishe fish and chips in ye Olde English pub. The pub is probably about 20 years old and the food is most likely imported from America. Even the castles are mostly 19th Century military barrackses built on the site of demolished medieval castles: at least the crappy tourist trap ones which we advertise to foreigners are, locals know the real ones. And how is a black person identifying as an Englishman stopping you from enjoying castles and food anyway? They're probably cooking your fish and chips.
London isn't a British city any more, that much I freely admit (if it ever was, in fact). If you want to experience more traditional British culture then go to somewhere like Bristol or Newcastle. London ceased to be majority white British a while ago and has never really had much in common with the rest of the country, ever since it was founded as a Roman colony 2000 years ago and populated by everyone from Italians to Germans to Africans, then refounded by Viking invaders, and then refounded again by the Normans, and finally greatly expanded by varying waves of migrants from France, Flanders, Ireland, Eastern Europe, and many others.
London has a sideline in tourism but it's an Alpha++ city, second only to New York as a global capital in every area from finance to art to higher education. It was always cosmopolitan, being the capital of history's largest and most diverse empire, but now it's shed any pretence at Britishness.
So if you believed Britain to be some kind of homogeneous monoculture where everyone was a dapper Hugh Laughrie type sipping tea and playing croquet, I'm afraid that your ignorance is your own problem. Millions of people come to London each year to see the sights, indeed increasingly they go to the multicultural areas like Brixton and Tower Hamlets as well, so don't try to pretend that your personal prejudices are some kind of major blow to a city which recieves a larger number of tourists per year than most European countries' whole populations.
And for the record, I've never been to a city that didn't have beggars. Vancouver, San Fransisco, New York, Rome, Paris, Milan, all have huge homeless communities. In fact, the richer and more cosmopolitan the city, the more beggars there will be. It's the cities without beggars that are the desperate s***holes.