The downside of cryptic crosswords

In general, I much prefer the British Commonwealth form of crosswords, "cryptics", to American ones.  The primary difference is that cryptic clues are all puns and wordplay, mostly of a few specific forms.  The trick is to figure out what part of the clue is a pun, what's a definition, and so forth.  You end up doing a lot of anagrams, for instance.  There are a few other significant differences (American crosswords make it so every single letter is part of both an Across and Down, which means that you can often solve a puzzle without actually solving every clue, and Cryptics never cross more than half the letters, so you've got a lot more blank space, for imstance), but that's the main one.

As such, American  crossword clues tend to include more obscure-ish knowledge, while cryptics usually only require common knowledge.

The downside, though, is that "what everybody knows" is cultural.  So I just got a clue, "A very busy place is High Burnet!", and I had B?E?I?E solved.  Which, since you only get half the letters was the best I could do.  I eventually typed it into a crossword solver, and got "BEEHIVE" which is obviously a very busy place, but had no idea how High Barnet fit into it.  Or, in fact, what a High Barnet is in the first place.

I looked it up.  It's an area of London, and their football club is the London Bees, and their stadium is called The Hive.  If I lived in London, wherr the puzzle was from, that would be totally fair.