In the 2016 film London Has Fallen, Gerard Butler stars as the hard-man hero who attempts to thwart terrorists blowing up some of the capital’s most recognisable landmarks. A decade on, “London has fallen” has taken on new meaning as a phrase that dominates social media feeds – linked to images, videos and posts that portray the city as lawless and crime-ridden yet are often no less fictional than the film.
These misleading online narratives have been picked up and amplified by prominent public figures and political leaders both at home and abroad, right up to the President of the United States.
Our new “Mistaken Britain” study shows just how this negativity about London has filtered through to the public.
The public’s average guess is that 30% of Londoners were the victim of a crime in the year to September 2025, when the actual figure is 12.2%. We are most likely to pick out London as having the highest rates of violent and sexual crimes of any region in England and Wales, when it has among the lowest of each. Six in 10 think crime overall has risen in London since 2019, when it has fallen slightly. Four in 10 think murders are up; they are down by around 15%.
The capital’s Muslim population is also a key source of error. Muslims make up 15% of all Londoners, but the public guess 35%, and Reform supporters assume they represent fully half of all those now living in the city. A third of people go as far as saying they believe there are “no-go” areas in London where Sharia law dominates and non-Muslims cannot enter – a view no doubt fuelled by comments last year from Donald Trump.
But a more fundamental reason many misjudge reality in this way is because our perceptions are more tied to emotional reactions and identity than a careful study of the statistics. We are partly sending signals about what’s worrying us.
And we tend to focus on what worries us because humans are hardwired to pay more attention to negative information, as it often signals a threat. The media, politicians and social media platforms know people engage more actively with that sort of information, so they feed them more of it. This interplay between how people think and what they’re told reinforces an overly negative view of reality.
As a result, we often miss the positives. For example, London regularly tops global “best cities” lists, but only 6% guess it ranks top of eight major cities tested. And while air quality in the capital has improved significantly since 2016, a majority think it has stayed the same or got worse.
But we should be careful not to paint an overly rosy picture. Some crimes have risen in London, particularly shoplifting and thefts from the person, which have both more than doubled since 2019. The public are more likely to correctly identify those changes – but from these very visible manifestations of disorder, which are often spread far and wide in online videos, people form a mistaken picture of a lawless dystopia in decline.
There’s no doubt the capital has challenges, as all major cities do. Yet people’s perceptions are often far darker than the reality. London hasn’t fallen, but we risk talking ourselves into believing it has.