having a car is not seen as necessary in the U.K.
London is not the U.K.
Either you live in a large, dense, metropolitan area or a car is a necessity.
For instance (from my experience) the periphery of Nottingham requires a car because even in parts served by the local authority's buses they don't run often. According to Wikipedia
Whilst the City of Nottingham has a historically tightly drawn boundary which accounts for its relatively small population of 288,700, the wider Nottingham Urban Area has a population of 667,000 and is the seventh-largest urban area in the United Kingdom, ranking between those of Liverpool and Sheffield.
