The Metropolis

City Skills: The best places in London to break up with someone

Mike Pollitt | Wednesday 15 February, 2012 11:38

Breaking up sucks. It might be the hardest thing you ever do. Sometimes though, it’s for the best. If you don’t love somebody, you must set them free.

The question is, where?

Their house? But your unwanted apparition might taint their home forever. Your house? But they will have easy access to the kitchen knives. A pub? But strangers might gawp at you. It’s tough. Here are some ideas.

1. Hampstead Heath, a windswept winter morning

You wouldn’t break up with someone on the Heath on a bright summer’s afternoon. That would be wholly inappropriate. But in the wintertime, against a grey foreboding sky, to the howling soundtrack of the wind through the hollow dead oaks, it makes perfect sense. The breaker-upper would be fortified in their resolve by the landscape’s grand, implacable power. The breaker-uppee would be consoled in their grief by the landscape’s grand, implacable power. Win win.

2. A capsule of the London Eye

Risky, but potentially rewarding. If you get the break up out of the way first thing then you’ve got 25 minutes to work through all the psychological stages leading through to acceptance of the break up, and a shared conviction to remain friends. This timetable is challenging, but doable, and would save these issues being played out to no-one’s benefit over the ensuing weeks and months.

3. The Reading Room, British Library

So there won’t be any shouting.

4. Hampton Court Maze

A place which, thanks to Henry VIII, abounds with pertinent resonances: the passion and fragility of love, the possibility of romantic renewal, the inevitability of death. And the maze – what is the maze but a living symbol of a love withdrawn? The quixotic, duplicitous, enticing labyrinth of love, leading nowhere, signifying nothing. And you’ll be able to run away and hide easily if it all goes badly.

5. The place you got together

Not an obvious choice, I grant you. Indeed, some might think it rubs salt in the wound. But the principle of ring composition, whereby a piece of art finishes where it starts, is a well established aesthetic device. By breaking up with someone in the place you got together, you ensure that when they look back on the relationship it will be with a satisfying, almost novelistic sense of completeness. They may not appreciate that now, but in the long run this can only be enriching. In my case, it would certainly soften the blow if I knew the person breaking up with me had given thought to the memorial repercussions.

See also:
Annoying habits of Londoners # 2: Being upset when strangers gawp at you
The five best frozen pizzas on the London convenience store market
Five great London journeys into the sunset
Five filthy, dirty, obscenely sexual poems from the past

Photo – A Pillow of Winds on Flickr under Creative Commons

Follow Mike
Twitter: @MikPollitt
Email: michael.pollitt@snipelondon.com

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