I spent a whole morning in Crouch End several years ago and, at the end of it, understood exactly why people sometimes go a little doolally and hunker down on their high street in combat fatigues with an AK-47.

I left the place seething with an irrational anger, mixed with pity. It was so utterly bloody pleased with itself — and on such slender grounds.

I’ve lived in a good few locations in Britain, from Cardiff in the west to Middlesbrough in the northeast, and I’ve always been able to celebrate the good in both the locale and its inhabitants. But I cannot for the life of me see the point of north London, an awful area populated by quite the most awful, posey people.

Those long arterial roads — the Holloway, the Caledonian, Green Lanes — are unspeakably grim, the hinterlands too crowded with the incessantly jabbering metropolitan elite: the Hampstead Set, Islington Man, and so on. There is a vast swathe of north London, from Acton in the west to Hackney in the east, which I sometimes wish would be afflicted by a profound and instantaneous subsidence, the whole area to be swallowed up suddenly in a fiery maw and the grateful earth to then close above it. I realise that this is an unpleasant thing to think.

My affection for southeast London, then, is based upon an objective assessment of the evidence, as well as the fact that I was born and raised there. And also on economic expediency — the average house price in Southwark, Lambeth, Greenwich and Lewisham is at least £100,000 cheaper than in Islington, £200,000 cheaper than in Camden and £400,000 cheaper than the patently absurd Kensington and Chelsea. Blackheath is clearly prettier and leafier than its north London counterpart, Hampstead, and a home there will set you back half the price.

It is true that, for the most part, we do not have the Tube. For years we were told that this was because the chalk aquifers made the ground too wet, but that lie was exposed when the Jubilee line was extended through the newly gentrified south Docklands (and the pretence began that Surrey Docks was Surrey Quays. Even north Bermondsey has been renamed Bermondsey Spa. Look, you mugs: it ain’t bleedin’ Bath or Baden-Baden. It’s still Bermondsey, okay?).

The real reason the southeast has been underfunded and underdeveloped is that the people who run the country tend to live north of the river and they couldn’t give a monkey’s what goes on beyond the other shore, so long as they can get to Tate Modern all right.

Nor do we have a daily newspaper — the Evening Standard is implacably rooted in the north, and news stories from south London are only ever allowed if they have the words “multiple stabbing” in the first paragraph. Restaurant reviewers — a strange occupation, often conferred upon the limited talents of the offspring of the famous — usually refuse to venture south. And when, once in a blue moon, they are forced to do so by their editors, they whine liked whipped puppies. Yet we have terrific restaurants down here: Franklins, only 500 yards from my house, beats the famous St John’s for fairly hardcore, modern-British cuisine. And it’s not full of braying City bores, either. But have you ever seen it reviewed? Have you heard of it? Ordinary people are beginning to take note, though. Southeast London boroughs are now seeing property prices rise rather more quickly than most of those north of the river, admittedly from a comparatively low base. And only rarely, these days, do taxi drivers pull up the window, lock their doors and speed away when you politely mention that you would quite like to go to Camberwell or Dulwich or Peckham. We’re moving up. Perhaps one day we will be as pleased with ourselves as the residents of Crouch End and Highgate.

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