It wasn't that I had particularly bad time. After attending two consecutive events I simply felt it wasn't a good use of time for me.

On both of those occasions the tone of the evening was pretty much "we have these recruiters over here, and those recruiters over there, go say hi and please give your email address".

The entire London meetup scene (at least the one I try to frequent) feels like it's densely populated by recruitment agency staff, to the point where techies and hackers are driven away ... unless the meetup is consistently exceptionally good.

FWIW, Thats totally the opposite of how I felt about HN London when I regularly attended a few years back. Beers, pizzas, talks and a mingle. And I’m sure most people feel the same way I do as that hall was always packed