Ed Sheeran has branded the entirety of London is “sketchy” and “dangerous”.
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The artist lives on a huge £3.75m country estate in Suffolk but reportedly owns 22 properties in London, including two in Battersea, three in Whitechapel, and two in Covent Garden. Most of these he rents out.
Despite this, he recommended avoiding “every area” if you want to avoid being robbed.
The topic came up in an interview with US podcaster Theo Von, who asked him where the most dangerous place to be in the UK is.
“Here? I’d say every area of London. Literally, every area is sketchy,” Sheeran answered.
“I think that you cannot be anywhere. It’s not like a segregated city. No, I mean the nice areas are sketchy, the bad areas are sketchy, but you just have to not do stupid shit.
“If you wander around with, I dunno, like a Louis Vuitton duffel bag and a 200 grand watch, you are going to get robbed. But just don’t do that.”
Ed Sheeran. Credit: Dana Jacobs/Getty
In the same conversation, Ed Sheeran hit out at the Conservative government for making cuts to the arts.
He said: “I’ve been doing probably for the last seven years stuff with music in high schools because in my area, so basically in 2017/ 2018, my old music teacher came to me and he was like, ‘look, the government that is currently in charge, do not value art at all.. arts, drama, music.’ And they cut all the funding for comprehensive high schools.
“So my music teacher came to me and was going, I think they had to share between art, music and drama, like £700 per year for all three subjects. So I started funding that at my local high school. And then you see a massive uptick in kids doing production, kids doing songwriting, kids doing this.”
Sheeran added: “I built a recording studio there. There’s loads of proper instruments that aren’t broken and you just see the school getting better at music. So then I started doing that in the county that I’m from. And we’ve just now changed it to do it nationwide. And I’m now visiting more high schools and places that really need music funding.
“And you see what a difference it makes too. Because I’m not an academic person and in the real world I would be viewed as stupid, but I excelled at music and therefore people think that I’m good at something.”
Meanwhile, it was recently confirmed that the singer-songwriter was the most played artist of 2023, beating out close competition from Taylor Swift.
Last week, he also teamed up with Hozier at Pinkpop to perform ‘Work Song’.
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