I think it requires a certain type of student to be at a London University, since it's a quite different social environment. Many more traditional universities have large campuses, which tend towards some degree of physical isolation from the surrounding neighbourhood (if not actually physically isolated anyway), whereas the London Universities seem to have more scattered accommodation, and can be spread out a bit more.
This is very true. Campus universities make extracurricular and social activities trivial compared to cities where accommodation, departmental and union facilities may be spread out. If you're serious about sport or drama or whatever, this is worth bearing in mind, though of course you can end up cut off from the outside world (understandable where the outside world is Coventry, of course).
At Bristol I was walking about 5 miles a day just to attend lectures. Going back down to the Union in the evening would double that (or involve equivalent amounts of waiting for buses), which is a significant time and energy overhead that isn't conducive to fitting the odd short meeting into a busy academic schedule. The best approach would be to hang around in a computer room or wherever for an hour or two after lectures and get some work done, do the union stuff then head home later. I barely managed to do any of the theatre stuff I signed up for, lost whole evenings to attending gigs, and only managed the rocket team because it was 90% engineering and physics students who were eager to do meetings over lunch or at the end of the day somewhere in the department.
My friends at London universities had this to an even greater degree. It seemed common for social stuff to not start until relatively late in the evening, so that those who were commuting had time to go back to their accommodation before coming back out again. If you lived really far out, this would leave you with several hours to kill with not very much going on.
