As a young Australian, I never thought I’d feel unsafe in Britain. Yet each time I step outside I’m overcome with a sense of fear as a crime so vanishingly rare back home seems to be normal here…

It’s 6pm and I’ve just finished work for the day.

My office is in Soho – a bustling, touristy part of Central London known for its shopping, nightlife and West End shows.

I take a moment to check the time. I’ve got no plans tonight – just a quiet evening at home after the rush-hour slog back to Zone 2. I think about what to watch on Netflix as I squeeze onto the Tube, and resist the temptation of a takeaway on the way.

But with every step on these busy streets, I look both ways – not just to cross safely, but to check my phone and make sure it isn’t swiped.

After seven years in Australia’s biggest city, Sydney, I never thought twice about slipping my phone in my back pocket or using it in the CBD (that’s our term for the city centre). But over here? It’s a whole different story.

Met Police figures released this week show 70,137 mobile phones were stolen in the UK last year – an average of 192 a day. In London alone, one is stolen every seven and a half minutes.

Phone theft is reportedly a £50million (AU$103million) underworld industry in the UK, with most stolen devices sold to businesses in China, where they are either disassembled for parts or unlocked for resale.

I’m one of the few Aussie expats I know to have not fallen victim to phone theft (so far). Whether it’s luck or my hypervigilance, I don’t know.

Lucy McIntosh, a young Australian living in London, was shocked by the prevalence of phone theft in the British capital. The problem is far worse than back home, where it’s common to see people walking around with their phones in their back pockets

But what I do know is that these thieves are getting more brazen by the minute, often using mopeds or e-bikes to make their quick escape.

Not to be hyperbolic, but it feels like every second person I know has either had their phone stolen or knows someone who has.

I’ve heard countless stories – from people having them snatched right on their doorstep to others having them taken out of their bags at gigs, on buses or even while grabbing a drink at the pub.

Some have had theirs stolen while waiting for a train and others simply while trying to capture an Instagram-worthy photo of a famous London street.

So what happens when your phone gets nicked? Well, that’s the thing – not much.

With phone-snatching rates nearly tripling in three years, police budgets shrinking and the Met having bigger fish to fry, phones being plucked from hands aren’t high on their priority list unfortunately.

I’m aware that living in fear of my phone being stolen is inherently a first-world problem – and that it’s a privilege to live and work in one of the world’s most expensive cities in the first place.

But when you pair that niggling feeling with a long list of other harsh realities of living in London, it’s easy to feel disappointed that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

Met Police figures released this week show 70,137 mobile phones were stolen in the UK last year – an average of 192 a day. In London alone, one is stolen every seven and a half minutes

It’s now been eight months since I quit my job in Sydney, sold my car, and packed my life into a 30kg suitcase. I knew the first few months of living here would be hard, especially when I had no close friends or family nearby, but I thought by now I’d be able to say I was loving it. The truth is, I’m not – and I feel pretty complicated about it.

I left the Harbour City because the shine of living there had worn off. Trading Australia’s warm, sunny shores for the UK’s colder, greyer ones might not seem like the obvious way to find that shine again, but I was craving a change of scenery.

Besides, it was one of the only countries I could realistically move to. I’m not bilingual, I don’t hold dual citizenship anywhere else, and the Youth Mobility Scheme Visa looked to be one of the easiest to be approved for as a young Aussie.

When you move to London from Australia as a young person, you expect it to be even better than the version you’ve dreamt up in your head. Someone said to me it feels like being in the ‘centre of the universe’ because you have everything at your disposal: You’ll zip off to different countries on weekends, say ‘yes’ to everything because YOLO (you’re only in London once), collect new friends like Pokémon, and do all the things you don’t get to do in Australia – like experience good nightlife, buy same-day tickets to a West End show and maybe spot Harry Styles in the street.

I admit the last one is a bit of a stretch. Still, I genuinely thought this version of London would happen for me because that’s how I’d seen it play out for others – naïve, I know, especially when what I’ve experienced has been far less glamorous.

Aside from gripping my phone with both hands at all times, there are plenty of other grim aspects of living here that, in my opinion, feel even more challenging when coming from a country like Australia.

I don’t want to sound like a whiny twenty-something with a laundry list of gripes, so I’ll stick to a few that, in my experience, don’t get as much attention.

Everyone knows the weather on this side of the world is mediocre at the best of times, but I wasn’t prepared for how brutal winter would be. No one warned me that from November to January, it’s basically dark by 3pm.

Lucy swapped sunny Sydney seeking adventure in London, which is known for its dreary weather. But what she found most confronting wasn’t the rain but how dark it gets by 3pm

This is a typical sight that would greet Lucy after clocking off her office job in the city. By contrast, commuters in Sydney often have several hours of daylight after rush hour

I understand it’s even worse in more northern regions, but coming from a place with at least eleven hours of daylight, it was a shock to say the least.

The lack of vitamin D didn’t just take a toll on my mental health – it hit my immune system, too. Over the winter, I tested positive for both Covid-19 and Influenza A. Luckily, I’m young and relatively healthy, but the flu left me the sickest I’ve ever been.

Another insult to injury is the cost of living. Sure, it’s getting more expensive to live anywhere, but here it’s particularly brutal.

Every young expat I know is more or less living paycheck to paycheck. It’s considered ‘cheap’ to pay AU$2,000 (£970) per month for a room. Add to that London’s transport prices now being the highest in the world, you can go broke simply by existing.

Australians always say the best part about living in England is being on the doorstep of Europe, which means cheap weekends away in Paris and Berlin. The reality is different. Once you add luggage, travelling around Europe with ‘budget’ airlines like EasyJet and Ryanair can quadruple in cost.

As for food and drink, you’re also paying double for simple luxuries like a barista-made coffee or a glass of wine at a pub. The only thing on a par to Australian prices is probably groceries.

I’ve been thinking a lot about whether articulating my experience this way says something about my character or, more broadly, my privilege. If I’m being honest, it probably says something about both – but it also says something about being human. And being human sometimes means feeling disappointed that your reality doesn’t match your expectations.

I’m still coming to terms with the fact I can live somewhere and not enjoy it as much as I thought I would. As someone who often lives and feels in extremes, London is teaching me how to exist in the in-between. Neither loving it nor hating it means that I can put myself in neutral, take the backseat and care less about what happens.

And it’s boosting my reserves of the one thing you can’t get through life without – resilience.

I’m still figuring out when to close my London chapter. Maybe living here will grow on me; maybe it won’t. I’m open to whatever happens but equally, for the first time in my life, I feel divorced from any dreamt-up version of my future.

And that’s liberating in a way.

But part of me still yearns for a time when I could keep my phone in my back pocket without worrying about it being swiped.

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