I worked in London for years before I actually packed my life into boxes and moved here. During those commuting years I had an established group of nine-to-five city friends, and we shared the rhythm of the office, the quick lunches and the post-work pints where we could vent about our days, so I felt completely connected to the pulse of the city. When I finally became a resident, though, the reality of the capital shifted beneath my feet.
When five o'clock came round on a Friday, my city friends boarded their trains and disappeared back to the shires, taking my social life with them. I had moved in with my best friend, which felt like the ultimate safety net against the sheer scale of London, but he already had a deeply rooted social life and weekend routines of his own. We shared interests and a home, yet his evenings were full, and so when the weekend arrived I found myself, in a city humming with millions of people, spending an uncomfortable amount of time completely alone.
It wasn't just me
For a long time I assumed this was a personal failing, or something peculiar to London. It turns out to be part of a much wider pattern that researchers have been documenting for years.
A 2022 study of loneliness in young people (opens in a new tab) found that 16 to 24-year-olds are now more likely to report feeling lonely than people over the age of 70, and that their loneliness was no lower in cities than in rural areas. Being surrounded by people, in other words, is no guarantee of feeling connected to any of them. Older Londoners face their own version of the problem, and the Campaign to End Loneliness points to research suggesting (opens in a new tab) that when urban spaces are shaped around the needs of affluent younger consumers, older residents can be left more isolated as the places they relied on disappear.
Why cities make it harder
The Campaign to End Loneliness report Tackling loneliness through the built environment (opens in a new tab) explains much of what I felt at the time. It describes the importance of "bumping spaces", such as a post office queue or a well-placed bench, where we repeatedly cross paths with neighbours and acquaintances and gradually build what researchers call "weak ties". These small, low-key encounters matter more than we might think, and one study (opens in a new tab) found that people who had more of them on a given day felt a greater sense of belonging.
The report also notes that people who move between rented homes, those facing financial barriers and those who feel that certain places simply aren't "for them" can find it especially hard to put down roots. For anyone who has arrived in London and rented a succession of rooms in unfamiliar neighbourhoods, that will sound very familiar.
Alongside all of this sits our attachment to our phones. We can spend an hour in a crowded coffee shop scrolling through feeds, surrounded by potential conversations while locked into our screens, and the simple pleasure of sitting across from someone over a coffee, with nothing digital shaping the conversation, has started to feel like a lost art.
The solo miles
My default response to those empty weekends was to lace up and head out. I'm a runner who works in waves, the kind who aims for the stars, falls a little short, hits reset and goes again, so those solo miles were familiar territory.
Spend enough time running in any big city and you notice just how many of us are out there, grinding out the miles in the early-morning dark or weaving between commuters in the evening. Plenty of people genuinely cherish that solitude and treat it as their daily therapy, and I understand why. For others, though, running alone isn't really a choice so much as the default, because they haven't yet found a way to meet people who share their interest.
You don't need to run at the same pace
There is a lingering belief that to run with someone you need to match their pace and their schedule, and I quickly learned that it isn't true. It's rare to find someone whose training mirrors your own, but a shared run doesn't depend on synchronised splits, and some of my best memories from that lonely period are track sessions with a friend who was training for something entirely different.
We never ran a single lap at the same speed. We would meet in the cold, jog the warm-up together, and then split off to do our own workouts, each lost in our own private suffering for the best part of an hour. When the intervals were done we cooled down side by side, picking over our heart rates, comparing splits and talking through what we had learned, and having someone there for the warm-up and the debrief transformed those evenings in a way the pace never could.
The research supports this experience. Weak ties are valuable, but turning them into the strong ties of real friendship takes more, and a review of community interventions (opens in a new tab) cited in the report found that the activities which best helped people form lasting connections were those that gave them a focal point, a shared reason to keep coming together.
Why runner talk works
Running provides exactly that kind of focal point, and it comes with a language of its own. If we're honest, talking about running to non-runners is a quick way to lose an audience, because few colleagues want to hear why your watch's sleep score is dictating your mood, why you need three pairs of shoes to get through a week, or the finer points of your fuelling strategy.
Find another runner, however, and the conversation rarely runs dry. Debating energy gels or comparing notes on pre-race nerves cuts straight through the awkwardness of making friends as an adult, because the shared interest does the work that small talk usually struggles to do.
There is another reason running groups can help, and it is one the report makes quietly. Loneliness still carries a stigma, and lonely people tend to be more willing to join activities that are open to everyone than ones explicitly aimed at "lonely people". Nobody turns up to a group run to admit they are lonely. They turn up to run, and the connection happens along the way.
The places we run matter too. The report highlights evidence that access to green space is linked to lower loneliness (opens in a new tab), and research with young adults in some of London's most deprived boroughs found they felt most socially connected in parks and in places where they could pursue their interests with others. London's parks, towpaths and riverside paths are, in that sense, some of the most valuable social spaces the city has, and running gives us a reason to share them.
Starting from scratch
Every day, new people arrive in this city and unpack their bags with no local network, trying to build a life in a place that rarely slows down to introduce itself. We won't ease that kind of loneliness by sharing crowded spaces or liking each other's posts, but we can start to ease it by putting our phones away, finding what we have in common and doing something difficult together.
Those lonely weekends are a large part of why I started Run Love Sprint. Whether you are chasing a sub-three marathon, running separate track intervals alongside a friend or trying to get round your first 5K without walking, the road feels very different when the person beside you knows exactly what it took to get out of the door.
Sources
- Campaign to End Loneliness (2022), Tackling loneliness through the built environment (opens in a new tab)
- Marquez, J. et al. (2022), Loneliness in young people: a multilevel exploration of social ecological influences and geographic variation (opens in a new tab), Journal of Public Health
- Sandstrom, G. M. and Dunn, E. W. (2014), Social interactions and well-being: the surprising power of weak ties (opens in a new tab), Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
- Bagnall, A. et al. (2018), Places, spaces, people and wellbeing (opens in a new tab), What Works Centre for Wellbeing
- Astell-Burt, T. et al. (2022), More green, less lonely? A longitudinal cohort study (opens in a new tab), International Journal of Epidemiology
- Scharf, T. and de Jong Gierveld, J. (2008), Loneliness in urban neighbourhoods: an Anglo-Dutch comparison (opens in a new tab), European Journal of Ageing
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