Lindsay Lohan Credits London With Making Her Grow Up

-- Lindsay Lohan credits her move to London with helping her to finally grow up because of the freedom it has given her away from the paparazzi and her partying friends.

"I can go for a run here on my own," she told The Guardian newspaper this weekend. "I do every morning, early, and I think how my friends in New York would still be up partying at that time. I needed to grow up, and London is a better place for me to do that than anywhere else."

The moment she realized she was finally free came when she took a vacation to Greece last summer. "It was the first time I have ever just been on a vacation by myself," she said. "I just wandered about on my own! I turned off my phone. It was so extraordinarily freeing for me. Like another life."

The 28-year-old actress moved to London nine months ago to escape New York and her own notoriety, stoked by stints in rehab and jail, tabloid headlines and her OWN reality show. Soon after, she made her theater debut in David Mamet's "Speed-the-Plow," appearing on stage eight times a week for three months, not once missing a performance.

The routine of a play grounded her in a way her work had never done previously.

"In L.A. I didn’t know what to do apart from go out every night," she told the newspaper. "That’s when my friends were free. And I would go out and there would be all these cameras there and that’s when it became difficult."

Now, Lohan plans to make London her permanent home.

"I won’t live in L.A. again, hell no," she said in the interview. "My friends tell me s*** when they come over I don’t want to hear. I don’t even know who got married and who got pregnant. You turn on the news in L.A. and it is all gossip about people. All the stuff that is going on in the world right now and this gossip is the news?"

She laughed. "I love the BBC. I haven’t heard myself mentioned on TV since I have been here," she said. "That has been really weird for me, and great."