Welcome to RAGE city!

It's a sunny day on Tottenham Court Road. A pregnant woman stands in front of a NatWest cashpoint machine, rummaging through her handbag for her card. The queue is lengthening behind her, people are sighing irritably. Suddenly, number two in the queue - a man, mid-thirties, well dressed, carrying a briefcase - explodes in fury. 'For God's sake,' he shouts, 'What the f*** are you doing?' and pushes her violently out of the way. She remonstrates, the rest of queue stays silent. He, not at all embarrassed, inserts his card, takes his money and strides off muttering under his breath.

Welcome to London, where tempers are fraying like never before. We're all at it. The famous have even shorter fuses than the rest of us, it seems, or perhaps we just hear about them more. So far this summer: Dane Bowers brawling outside the Kabaret Club, Mick Jagger and Liam Gallagher punching paps and Jay Kay throwing an incandescent wobbly because Hear'say sold a single. Nothing new there, then. But hold on - there's also Ruby Wax going apeshit in a traffic jam, hurling cones out of her way and mouthing off at workmen, Jeremy Irons shielding himself from a fight outside Chinawhite and Madonna, once the Maharani of Cool, 'storming out of her luxury hotel' in the middle of the night because the air conditioning slipped a notch below the level required to preserve her genius. Yes, it's summer in what is fast becoming Tantrum City.

The whole country is bubbling under - witness Bradford and Oldham, the petrol protesters, the thousands of British anti-capitalists in Genoa - but this rage springs from legitimate cause. In London, the triggers are often the minor irritations of daily life. One in two Londoners apparently experiences pavement rage on a daily basis, whereby they want to kill the pillocks who won't get out of their way fast enough. We have become connoisseurs of rage: road rage, supermarket rage (and its subset, trolley rage), office rage, techno rage, funeral rage (he's already dead, we rationalise, so get out of my way), Tube rage (ergo Ken bloody Livingstone rage), even nail-technician rage (she blotted your finger wrong - so kill her). Children as young as three are offered anger-management classes and most adults behave like children: one in ten of us throws a tantrum at least once a day, according to an ICM poll carried out for the BBC.

Add to that the heat - any temperature over 70 will do - and the deranging effect of London's crazy road and public transport system, and you get what Martin Amis calls 'the riot heat of August': an annual epidemic of simmering intolerance, mayhem and madness. Worse, when that heat is replaced by rain and clouds - as it inevitably is - there's the ensuing rage and despondency that our six-day summer has ended and we've got another year of depressing weather to endure.

It's surprising not more of us are going postal, gunning down the few colleagues who aren't larging it in Ibiza: currently, one in three Londoners agree with the statement 'I often feel I can't cope because I feel under too much pressure'. We are always under pressure: we invite it in, then get nastily passive-aggressive about the strain. Londoners are, inevitably, emotionally aroused: it goes with the territory. 'And the more emotionally aroused you are at any time,' says Joe Griffin, a psychologist who trains NHS staff in anger management, 'the nearer your brain is to an anger hijacking.' Rage bypasses your higher cortex - that lovely cooling fountain of rationality - thus turning you into a functional idiot who thinks in black and white, is convinced you are always right and is damn well going to tell everyone so.

And when two stressed-out Londoners - or 'functional idiots' - cross paths, you get combustion. An example: Andrew, a lawyer, takes a cab, which means he has to spend 20 minutes listening to the vitriol of an aggressive cab driver. He pays the fare, then blurts out, 'You are the rudest f****** cab driver I've ever had.' Blam! The cabbie goes nuclear, jumps out, takes a swipe at Andrew, then races after him into King's Cross Tube station. Andrew only avoids hospitalisation by hiding behind a well-placed pillar on the Northern Line platform.

This is now normal. London is the backdrop to our lives but it's also become the aggressor, the stressor, a third presence triggering us into dispute. We fight about the things we fight about because we live in London and have to put up with a lot. The city's distinctive passions - money, status, a Notting Hill pad, a Saturday-night table at The Ivy - mean there's the pressure to make it here, and making it in London is quite different from making it in Cardiff. We're dictated to by the city's belief system: our lives colonised by career, we live with a sense of urgency and emergency, desperately overscheduling and outdoing each other. People eat out five nights a week, always schmoozing, always putting on The Front, as psychotherapist Jo Ellen Grzyb of The Impact Factory calls Londoners' fibrillating need to keep up with the latest restaurant/book/label/handbag/ florist/whatever.

'The city attracts brighter and more ambitious, competitive people,' says Joe Griffin. 'And the more ambitious you are, the more stressed you tend to be, because you place more demands on yourself.' Type-A personalities almost exclusively, we need instant gratification - like Verruca Salt in Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, our catchphrase is 'I want it, and I want it NOW.' Life should go my way - or else.

All this glamour, but the city is also time-consuming, dirty, and pre-eminently frustrating. We are forced into accelerated cohabitation with partners or even acquaintances due to astronomical rents and mortgages. (At £450 a week for a two-bedroom apartment, London rents are officially pricier than New York's.) Every day we crunch our way to work over a high-street graveyard of Kentucky Fried Chicken bones, and lie awake seething at the free emotional expression of our noisy neighbours by night.

'I've noticed a general low level of pissed-offness in London,' says Millie, an advertising executive who has just returned from a six-year stint in New York. 'Expectations have been raised and people have a more international outlook, but they're all working really long hours, everything is expensive, and they still look sweaty and hot and fat in their summerwear. The noise is also more intrusive here,' she continues. 'New York is bounded by rivers and you can see trees, and that has a calming effect, especially in summer. There is not the sense of endless concrete and brick that you get in London. Here, you sit in your garden listening to your neighbours cough on either side of the fence and want to get up and machine-gun them.'

Charlotte lives in Camden Town, where every summer Saturday night is at alcohol- and drug-induced top volume. 'I get so enraged at being kept awake. I dream of revenge. My neighbour is this guy who plays fantastically crap loud music every night - Duran Duran, for God's sake. If I wasn't so knackered, I'd go round at 6am and sit on his doorbell, wake him up so he suffers like I do...'

Strangely, people in Greater London are less likely than others to resort to physical violence when they lose their tempers, according to ICM. To avoid lashing out every 40 seconds, we contain our violent impulses, if not our angry ones. Manuela Viana is co-founder of the newly created British Association of Anger Management (BAAM). 'Londoners are imploders,' Viana says. 'With the imploder personality type, anger comes out as passive-aggressive, so it's not in your face, as it would be in Rome, Paris or New York. This is a very angry city, but it's not expressed outwardly. Violent aggressive outbursts aren't the order of the day.'

Instead, we express our anger by proxy, as the big corporations well know. Just look at the 'See Red' ads for Virgin mobiles, or Ms Sexy throwing plates while selling Renault Clios, or even Fred 'It's only a bloody shirt' Perry. Even more satisfying, we engage in road rage or rage against the machine - PCs, mobile phones, waiting on hold - because technology doesn't bite back. But, warns Viana, 'You can only implode for so long. Anger is manifesting outward in London more than ever before.'

The most common focus for imploders, says Viana, is their partners. London couples apparently bicker about everything, and agree on nothing. Our innate sense of entitlement and its corollary, instant gratification, means we often can't even decide which cuisine to take away at night. Which in turn gives rise to that peculiarly London habit: 'You want Indian, I'm bloody well having Chinese.'

Nor, in this dual-income, dual-career, financially pressurised city, is there any chance your partner will be around to smooth your troubled brow. They're too near screaming point themselves. Couples are hugely emotionally competitive: at 7pm, the capital reverberates to irritable conversations about who had the more awful day: whose commute was worse, who has more deadlines, who needs - but probably won't get - the TLC tonight.

Individualism is everything, which means every compromise is a recipe for conflict. When Claudia, a stylist, moved into her photographer boyfriend's apartment near the Design Museum, the eternal London theme of Whose Life Is Actually More Important? got in the way. A design obsessive, James's pride and joy was a statement old school gym horse. He went ballistic when he noticed a handprint on its suede back - Claudia had invited some friends round and they'd leapfrogged over it. Trivial? But no. A monumental argument ensued, encompassing the role of friendship, boundary setting (his, that is) and the inviolability of his lofty interior. 'He was basically saying, "My gym horse is more important than your friends, than your life",' says Claudia. 'I was devastated.' Actually, he was conforming to the Type-A Londoner's mantra: compromise is fine so long as it's the other person doing it.

Many Londoners accelerate cohabitation to relieve financial pressure. Ergo, disillusionment followed by shattering rows. 'The speed of modern technology has created a new value system in young people,' says Joe Griffin. 'And they expect personal things to happen quickly, too. But it takes years for a couple to coordinate their behaviour and get on together. If you rush the early stages of a relationship, you will have more intense arguments later.'

Location, meanwhile, is everything. Louise, an orthodontist, and Robert, a programmer, were never truculent and impatient with each other until they moved from leafy suburban Battersea to gritty inner-city Shepherd's Bush. Because they were turfed out of their flat so quickly, they had to move into a scrubby little one-bedroomer, a scenario which played neatly into their fear of loss of status. 'It was like Look Back In Anger, all dreadful Fifties d?cor and depression,' says Louise. 'It felt like we'd had the good life, the big job in the city, and now we'd come down.' They didn't have a washing machine, so spent hours in the laundrette. Their neighbour played non-stop garage, and every night they'd fight about who was going to tell her to shut up. 'We were bickering endlessly. It felt like we were living in an ashtray. We were affected by our environment in the most stressful way.' For her, the biggest eye-opener was that you don't pull together when you fall on bad times. 'You end up taking it out on each other instead.'

'Living in London is like living on the edge,' says Manuela Viana of BAAM, herself a resident for ten years. 'You have to be self-sufficient, wide awake and disciplined. You have to be a strategist. God forbid if you're not. You just get eaten. It's survival of the fittest, 100 per cent.' And the fittest, it seems, fight back.

With all this projection and competition going on, is there any hope of living a happy, non-neurotic inner-city life, free of anger and rage and in delightful harmony with your colleagues, lovers and friends? Well, actually, yes. London is like Domestos: so tough and unrelenting that it weeds out the weak. Despite our universal escape fantasies and even Prozac, only the emotionally evolved are destined to survive its daily chaos. You find your inner calm or you leave, to fulfil the tattered remains of your dreams in some less demanding environment. Like the suburbs.