As someone who has lived here for 6 years or so -- it is pretty rare to work with people who are actually from here -- the tech scene here is mostly people from outside london, or from somewhere in europe, or somewhere else... There's a rather big financial draw (we have some of the highest day rates in the world)...

Whenever I meet/hire a real londoner, though, they do get the "So you DO exist!!!" treatment for a bit ;)

Many other cultures are just as much into tea as the Brits!

Maybe. That's why I'm just throwing a hypothesis - that if tea drinking is a strong tradition there, then the influx of new citizens who didn't grow up with that tradition over generations may be diluting tea drinking stats.

But yeah, lots of other cultures like tea. Hell, I'm Polish and I'm a total tea addict :).

How can you tell who's native by sight alone?

It's all about eye contact, real Londoners will go to incredible lengths to avoid any sort of interaction with strangers. When forced to, it'll be overly polite and with a certain mutual derision that's kind of hard to explain. As for correctly identifying someone who doesn't exhibit that behaviour -- all the scottish ones tend to reek of booze, the french people who are around all wield baguettes, the welsh are making weird sounds instead of talking and when you can understand what they're saying it's usually uncomfortably correct things about the other uk rugby teams... The few americans can be deduced by mass... At least, that's how I do it :P