Thank you for this insight, I really appreciate it! I'm currently leaning towards London because I feel like I need as big a city as I can get (and the more metropolitan/open-minded outlook that tends to come from people that live in them), but what you describe definitely sounds like hell and what I want to avoid. There are a lot of unis in London, but the challenge seems to be finding the right combination of good course content and the close-knit university vibe that you would typically get on campus unis like B'bham. I don't know how many of the London unis are actually campus unis, but I have heard they're few and far between.