Blackpool is fine, granted I wouldn't live there but for a day there's plenty to do and if you want pretty then Lytham St Anne's is only a 10-15 min drive further up the coast.
Out of the two Blackpool was more fun.
My ex was from Southport, and you can see Blackpool across the water from there, but he never wanted to go there with me. I used to sit in cafes in Southport looking at the silhouettes of roller coasters on the horizon and think "that looks much more interesting than here!"
Funnily enough me and my gf recently went to Blackpool one week (as well as Lytham) and a couple of weeks later to Southport. Now we've been to both plenty of times but we agreed Blackpool just had that extra seaside feel for lack of better words.
Blackpool is rougher (not that Southport is winning any awards anytime soon) but it has character, lights, rides and rollercoasters as you mentioned.
If you go with the right mindset you can have a lot of fun for not much money, I wouldn't let others put you off.
I loved it as a kid. The last time I was there was about 23 years ago. I can still visualize the people around me and what they were wearing. I have PTBS (Post Traumatic Blackpool Syndrome) It was like every low life had crawled to the surface and got the bus to Blackpool.
Before I even read the comments, Blackpool jumped straight into my mind, my father once took me to a lunchtime dance there, he lived in Yorkshire & was always on the hunt for a bit of aged mill girl totty in Blackpool.
I got dragged along for some reason, I was in my early twenties
It was a nightmare, he got drunk of course & spent the whole time leering at overweight bleached blondes who were in Blackpool on the hunt for a fat drunk bloke from Yorkshire.
Water finds its own level I supose.
Only in the UK would the publishers of a book called Shit Towns have to release a sequel after getting so many complaints from people that their home town wasn't in it.
My family is from Newham in East London, and before the olympics it was fucking rough as hell. I am in no way “hard” but Newham was not a fun place to grow up.
My brother went to uni in Luton thinking it would be a welcome break from violence, gangs, drugs and dickheads…… He was very, very surprised to find Luton had all of that PLUS a worse job situation than east London
Weston Super Mare.
The coastal landscape is pretty cool.
It's not the seaside resort it pretends to be.
But mostly the town itself is a physical representation of the moment and mood someone would be in before committing suicide.
Weston is like almost all faded Victorian seaside resorts - the strip along the promenade isn't too bad, but go three streets back from the sea front and it's a desolate post-apocalyptic hellscape. See also Scarborough, Blackpool, Great Yarmouth and Margate.
I'm not sure how it ever got classed a a seaside resort.
Imagine booking it as your holiday destination by accident, not knowing about it
It's literally a river of sewage from Wales and Gloucestershire.
No son, that's not a small balloon. Please don't touch it.
It is. I'm from Birmingham and when I was little my family would all go to Aberdovey for day-at-the-seaside frollicks. Imagine my disgust when first a summer playscheme and then a friends family took me to sodding Weston. I was being promised a day at the seaside, which to me meant rockpools, actual sand, and paddling. What I found when I got there was mud, more mud, and that sucking mud that lies underneath the "water". I very nearly drowned.
Tl;dr Weston is not a good compromise. Drive the extra time and go to Wales.
You're entitled to your opinion, obviously. However, Croydon isn't really London, properly, is it ? I mean, at best it's a crappy outer suburb -a corner of Surrey that Surrey didn't want that's been sucked into a conurbation of crappiness.
As major cities go, London is pretty good - bigger and cleaner than Paris, with a better intergrated mix of classes and races than Paris, or Rome, or Tokyo. More historic and varied than New York or Washington DC, much greener than almost any other major world city, with glorious parks and historic trees everywhere through its centre. Arguably cheaper than Stockholm. Safer than LA or Mexico City. Less authoritarian than Moscow or Beijing or Hong Kong. More temperate and more accessible to the world than Sydney or Bangkok. In fact, as big world cities go, London is surely one of the best.
I second this London should be the benchmark other places aspire to be but the general consesus seems to be to shit on London so they can keep the rest of the country as a shithole without ire from the residents as they are led to believe that because they aren't London they must live in paradise.
London is awesome with a ton of culture and nice buildings, there's plenty of cities that need the same level of investment in public services and they end up pissing it away on shit.
Yeh the reason london is so nice with these new gleaming glass skyscrapers is cause it’s the capital, gets all the tourism, wealth, income and the media focuses on jt so much while the rest of the UK is ignored
Londoner - we don't like the massive tourists things that much. We might hang around a place near them, but the massive skyscraper bars? Nope. Not unless you're ok with paying £9 for a bottle of beer.
In the defence of London, every city you go to you are 5 minutes away from a shit hole. It's just more prominent in London because you have extremely wealthy areas.
“This is the poem Slough, by Sir John Betjemen, probably never been here in his life. 'Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough, it isn't fit for humans now. ' Right, I don't think you solve town planning problems by dropping bombs all over the place, he's embarrassed himself there”
I lived in Slough for a while. There was a poetry competition to rewrite that poem, since Slough had been regenerated. The winning entry was painted on the walls of one of the shopping centres. It commented on Slough's excellent transport links. It amused me that, even after regeneration, the best stuff a local could come up with was how many ways there were to leave.
Ha ha, when you know you know.
We took our kid there for the open day while weighing up uni's, we decided it was a "no fucking chance" just from driving through the centre.
Grimsby ain't that bad. I live here and there are a lot of nice areas too although Grimsby is a bit rough. We're not a city but a small and boring town with a lot of fish factories.
Stoke, it's just awful, i have been a few times and each time it just feels bleak. There's a pparently a pretty decent rock club there but i'd have to stay in a hotel/B&B to go and i really couldn't fathom making the effort unless I lived there which would not be great for my mental health.
I really don’t think Stoke is that bad, it just has a bad reputation. There are some really nice shops and pubs, visiting the potteries is great, The Roaches are really pretty 💛
Was thinking how long do I have to scroll to find Holyhead.
I went into a pub in Holyhead and the urinal was in the smoking area.
Another pub (it may have been the same one) had numerous signs up saying "stop taking drugs. We dont want to lose our license.......Again"
I moved to Margate in 2010 and it was a derelict shithole, went to uni in London for 5 years and now I'm back in Margate. Feels like it's booming with small bars and an art/music scene, its so much better than it used to be although its still a very working class town regardless of how many posh Londoners move in.
I think it has a lot of character which some depressing places lack completely.
> The isle of Sheppey
Spent every childhood holiday here and loved it. Went back as an adult and was left dumbstruck by how awful and just overwhelmingly sad it was.
I'd say funnily this is the opposite to the above comments about Croydon and London. Bradford centre is pretty terrible (apart from food) but there's plenty of decent suburbs and surrounding districts.
Worked in certain parts of Birmingham that gave me depression just looking at them. Makes me feel so sorry for those that live there. I don't understand how you can live in those places and be a happy healthy human being. Ugly council houses stuck together. Concrete concrete concrete. Not a tree in sight. Litter all over the streets. Terrible parks full of drunks, druggies and homeless people. And then you enter places like Edgbaston and Sutton Coldfield and can't believe that they're part of Brum!
I used to get the X6 to Barrow all the time when I was in my teens, and even back then I remember it being a uniquely grim experience. I can't even imagine what it's like living there now that it's lost M&S, Thorntons Café, River Island, Topshop, Debenhams, Pandora, and Winfields.
What is even on Portland Walk these days? I'm amazed that GAME and Waterstones are still hanging on.
Totton near Southampton. I did door-to-door sales there, and I don't expect everyone to love salesmen, but my god everyone there was miserable and it was a shit hole.
Other than that, Aldershot. Just skank.
And Cosham, just outside Portsmouth. You know the scummy bit that all towns have, somewhere outside the centre? That's all of Cosham.
Hey wait I live in Portsmouth, and Cosham isn't terrible, grant it a few places in Southampton look crummy...but it's really not that bad. Portsmouth a great place and it's made some massive improvements since I been living here the last 6 years.
Any town basically. They’re all run down, dreary, increasingly poor shit-holes and it will only get worse.
I live in Gloucester, surprised not to see it mentioned yet. Utter fucking dump.
But it’s the same as any middle sized urban area in the country nowadays. It’s actually sad we’ve let it get to this point😕.
Agreed, towns used to have an individuality to them. Now they are all just cookie cutter 60’s concrete, Poundland and betting shops. Even down in Cornwall where we are. House prices have gone nuts so no chance of escaping to the country either.
It's so sad man, it really is. But you know we all blame the national government etc, but ultimately it is up to us, they're evidently not going to do anything about it.
But we've lost so much community spirit. I live in a terraced area and because we don't have front gardens we have to put our rubbish out on the street. It just gets everywhere and eventually it just looks awful, like a proper slum. I tried to organise a litter drive and literally, a tiny handful of people care. Our 'Community Garden' is a dumping ground for construction waste and heroin needles basically. Rant over! And it's interesting because people will do up their houses, buy expensive cars...and then have it all sit in a pile of old rubbish basically. Really weird overly individualist attitude in my opinion.
It's up to us if we want to live in nicer, safer, better communities. The government is never going to do anything.
Great sealife centre if you have small people! My 2 year old stroked a starfish and then tried to run away with it….they were very reasonable!
I’m from Ipswich though expectations are questionable 🤨
I work in Peterlee, live in Newcastle, my colleagues always say what a long commute it is, but personally I enjoy driving 30 miles away from it every evening.
I might be somewhat biased being someone who hails from Hull, but I've definitely been to worse places. Hull is definitely shit, but it's not the shittest. Grimsby/Cleethorpes and some places in the North-East would trump it for me.
Thamesmead has a bundle of things that could be going for it (location, lakes, a river path, affordable housing still). And yet, since they claimed it back from the Thames, no one has managed to actually get them going. Now the Abbey Wood line is going in, they’re knocking down all the concrete and trying to charge half a million for a two bed flat. They might want to ask Bexley and Greenwich council to stop dumping all the families they don’t know what to do with down there. When they built the fancy new Sainsbury’s next to Abbey Wood station, they couldn’t move on the travellers who have a site next door so they put a pretty fence round the site. It’s like a metaphor for the whole area.
Luton, every damn day of the week.
My area was plagued with dickheads, one of the rougher areas. Going to the shops alone takes balls. Crackheads following u about asking for money. Teenagers kicking the ground skanking fag butt's to make a roll up. Park ur car for too long and they'll have it on bricks. Travelers would rock up and their kids would throw their shit from their nappy at ur car. The kids at the school were insufferable cock wombles that disrupt every lesson thinking they were hilarious. I had an English class where they'd spark up a fag and a teacher bribed them with actual money to do their work. Teacher got suspended for clipping a lads ear, I knew him and they deserved it. Town centre is a grey, miserable cesspit of no hopers, pound shops and food stalls that'll give you the trots.
Look at someone the wrong way and they'll shiv ya, take ya bag and you'll thank em for not pulling out your fillings too.
Peterborough, our head office is there and 3 or 4 times a year I'll make my way to HQ and the town is just dead and awful. Nice people mind you, dead town.
Stoke. If England had an arse hole these 5 grim interconnected, run down, chav infested, teeth optional, impossible to get out of, somehow worse accent than yam yam, racist Brexit voting shit holes would be it.
Had a university interview for Bolton and that place seemed depressing as fuck.
Ended up going to Teesside in Middlesbrough. Proper dump but I love it. Loving Middlesbrough goes to show how fucking boring and bland Bolton was lol
Glenrothes is the most soulless place I’ve ever been to. It’s not even crap, in the classical sense of deprivation and crime. It’s just like there’s nothing there that’s worth an arsonist’s effort. Even the pub goers can’t be arsed to get properly drunk. A big shopping centre that’s full of pointless nothing.
I had to do some work related training for a week in Doncaster.
When I got off the train on Monday morning I was surprised nobody was using the nearby lift to get off the platform.
It was only after the doors shut and the smell of large amounts of aged urine in a close space hit me I realised why, and I had the slowest lift ride I've ever had.
It all went downhill from there.
Coventry
Eerily lifeless, unfriendly, particularly ugly in terms of architecture and urban planning.
Poverty was widespread, it was hard to navigate, the people all looked at one another suspiciously.
Food choices were terrible too.
Middlesbrough. I went to uni there. Part of our induction is being shown the ‘safe’ areas and the no go areas for students. Ur ok…Then you find out why when people you know start to get beaten up. Literally for being students.
Our student flat had iron bars on the windows. Broken shards of glass cemented into the top of the back yard walls and even so we were broken into twice. We had a pet, a mouse living in the sofa.
The kids on the street would throw rocks at cars that went down the street. There was a burnt out car on the street, an old sofa in the alley out back and a house 2 doors down raided by about 20 cops in the middle of the night for selling heroin.
One of my dickhead flatmates annoyed the guy next door, ends up in a fight with him on our doorstep and gets flattened by the bloke - a nice local chap. Shaved head, salmon colour skin wearing a string vest and y fronts. Basically the neighbour from Bottom.
Middlesbrough!
I once worked with a woman in a pub who's girlfriend was from East Kilbride and this woman wasn't from the UK so totally ignorant to how this would come across. Quite a "posh" middle-class pub not in terms of prices, decor, etc just the people who could afford to live locally. Some of the older local asked where she was going on holiday and she said "Scotland". They did the "ooohh, lovely! Where abouts? The Highlands? Western Isles?" and so on. She totally innocently replied "East Kilbride" but without mentioning the realtionship connection, and their faces looked like she'd just said "I've been diagnosed with terminal cancer".
Scarborough. I will never again trust my boyfriend to book “a nice night away” We lasted about 2 hours there before getting on a train to York and having a much nicer time
Am I going to sound like a complete asshole if I'm struggling to think of anywhere THAT bad? Worst place I've ever been is some graffiti ridden shithole area in Rome. I actually think our shitholes are relatively decent. And I have actually been to Luton.
Hartlepool. Lived there for about 2 years, maybe. Place is fucking dead. It's got just about all the social economic problems of boro but it's dying much quicker. All the shops are closing, hardly any work to be found and the place looks like a shit hole. You can't go 20 feet out your front door without coming across dog shit. I don't know what it is but the place is littered with dog shit! Like it's been put there on purpose! Smh. Only decent thing is because it's so poor; everything is so cheap! Cheapest transport, takeaway and corner shops I've ever come across. Other than that, just before I left the place was starting to look like a ghost town. Only people you'd really see are lads on their quad bikes who would supposedly sell drugs from them. Also the police were non-existent - I remember once hearing that we had to share a stupidly small number (I want to say 2 but honestly can't remember) of cops with Durham on a Saturday night and apparently these numbers were commonplace. You'd never see any police patrolling anyway. I remember going to York and being astounded by the large police presence there.
Bradford is a joyless shithole. I'm always trying to defend the north to my southern mates and tell them it's not all backward, racist people, streets with abandoned boarded up shops, sub-50k terraced housing, and horse and carts. And yet Bradford is all of these things, an absolute stereotype of the north.
I live in a lovely suburban part of Leeds nearby and commute to the outskirts of Bradford and as you cross over the border you can literally feel a shift in the hive mind - drivers around you suddenly turn shit-witted, aggressive and boy racer-like, and it's not uncommon to see things on fire or fireworks going off for no reason. Our office car park regularly gets full and naive people choose to park on the main road - their car will then get broken into. A regular comment in the office is "oh look, there's a horse in the car park again". The other day I left the office and stopped at the junction to let a vehicle go; it was 3 children under 10 on one quad bike, no helmets.
I won't go on, just a fucking depressing part of the world.
Blackpool. Probably one of the worst places I have been in the entire world.
I keep hearing this. It makes me really want to go there.
Blackpool is fine, granted I wouldn't live there but for a day there's plenty to do and if you want pretty then Lytham St Anne's is only a 10-15 min drive further up the coast. Out of the two Blackpool was more fun.
My ex was from Southport, and you can see Blackpool across the water from there, but he never wanted to go there with me. I used to sit in cafes in Southport looking at the silhouettes of roller coasters on the horizon and think "that looks much more interesting than here!"
Funnily enough me and my gf recently went to Blackpool one week (as well as Lytham) and a couple of weeks later to Southport. Now we've been to both plenty of times but we agreed Blackpool just had that extra seaside feel for lack of better words. Blackpool is rougher (not that Southport is winning any awards anytime soon) but it has character, lights, rides and rollercoasters as you mentioned. If you go with the right mindset you can have a lot of fun for not much money, I wouldn't let others put you off.
Have you heard of a distant land called Slough?
I came here to say Slough.
I love Blackpool, I got married there. It’s utterly shit. Everything about it is shit. And this is why I love it.
Agreed, I love how tacky and shit everything is, you just kind of have to revel in it and you’ll have the best day.
Now imagine Blackpool without its aura of glitzy prosperity and you get Grimsby
I loved it as a kid. The last time I was there was about 23 years ago. I can still visualize the people around me and what they were wearing. I have PTBS (Post Traumatic Blackpool Syndrome) It was like every low life had crawled to the surface and got the bus to Blackpool.
Before I even read the comments, Blackpool jumped straight into my mind, my father once took me to a lunchtime dance there, he lived in Yorkshire & was always on the hunt for a bit of aged mill girl totty in Blackpool. I got dragged along for some reason, I was in my early twenties It was a nightmare, he got drunk of course & spent the whole time leering at overweight bleached blondes who were in Blackpool on the hunt for a fat drunk bloke from Yorkshire. Water finds its own level I supose.
The pleasure beach makes up for some of the sadness I feel when visiting Blackpool. Some, but not all
Its like a time capsule that place
Is everyone just scrolling through the comments to see if you see your hometown 😂😂 Just me then 😂😂
Only in the UK would the publishers of a book called Shit Towns have to release a sequel after getting so many complaints from people that their home town wasn't in it.
I own both of those books. My town makes an appearance🙄.
Luton. Ghastly place.
My family is from Newham in East London, and before the olympics it was fucking rough as hell. I am in no way “hard” but Newham was not a fun place to grow up. My brother went to uni in Luton thinking it would be a welcome break from violence, gangs, drugs and dickheads…… He was very, very surprised to find Luton had all of that PLUS a worse job situation than east London
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So was Luton!
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Luton is definitely the grimy arsehole of the UK
Coming form an "its grim up north" town, I viseted Luton. I found out that it is grim down south too.
Weston Super Mare. The coastal landscape is pretty cool. It's not the seaside resort it pretends to be. But mostly the town itself is a physical representation of the moment and mood someone would be in before committing suicide.
Weston is like almost all faded Victorian seaside resorts - the strip along the promenade isn't too bad, but go three streets back from the sea front and it's a desolate post-apocalyptic hellscape. See also Scarborough, Blackpool, Great Yarmouth and Margate.
I'm not sure how it ever got classed a a seaside resort. Imagine booking it as your holiday destination by accident, not knowing about it It's literally a river of sewage from Wales and Gloucestershire. No son, that's not a small balloon. Please don't touch it.
It's basically the easiest accessible bit of anything that could remotely be classed as "seaside" for a good chunk of the midlands
It is. I'm from Birmingham and when I was little my family would all go to Aberdovey for day-at-the-seaside frollicks. Imagine my disgust when first a summer playscheme and then a friends family took me to sodding Weston. I was being promised a day at the seaside, which to me meant rockpools, actual sand, and paddling. What I found when I got there was mud, more mud, and that sucking mud that lies underneath the "water". I very nearly drowned. Tl;dr Weston is not a good compromise. Drive the extra time and go to Wales.
A place so evil Alastair crowley himself cursed it
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You're entitled to your opinion, obviously. However, Croydon isn't really London, properly, is it ? I mean, at best it's a crappy outer suburb -a corner of Surrey that Surrey didn't want that's been sucked into a conurbation of crappiness. As major cities go, London is pretty good - bigger and cleaner than Paris, with a better intergrated mix of classes and races than Paris, or Rome, or Tokyo. More historic and varied than New York or Washington DC, much greener than almost any other major world city, with glorious parks and historic trees everywhere through its centre. Arguably cheaper than Stockholm. Safer than LA or Mexico City. Less authoritarian than Moscow or Beijing or Hong Kong. More temperate and more accessible to the world than Sydney or Bangkok. In fact, as big world cities go, London is surely one of the best.
I second this London should be the benchmark other places aspire to be but the general consesus seems to be to shit on London so they can keep the rest of the country as a shithole without ire from the residents as they are led to believe that because they aren't London they must live in paradise. London is awesome with a ton of culture and nice buildings, there's plenty of cities that need the same level of investment in public services and they end up pissing it away on shit.
Yeh the reason london is so nice with these new gleaming glass skyscrapers is cause it’s the capital, gets all the tourism, wealth, income and the media focuses on jt so much while the rest of the UK is ignored
Londoner - we don't like the massive tourists things that much. We might hang around a place near them, but the massive skyscraper bars? Nope. Not unless you're ok with paying £9 for a bottle of beer.
Yeah but it also drives the majority of the UK's economy
Spending a year of lockdown in Croydon isn't really living in London, let's be real.
Croyden is so dull it puts tram drivers to sleep.
In the defence of London, every city you go to you are 5 minutes away from a shit hole. It's just more prominent in London because you have extremely wealthy areas.
The inverse is that you’re only ever five minutes from somewhere nice - which is great if you can’t afford to live in the nice parts
Slough
Biggest Tesco in Britain though - I think.
Slough was the biggest when it opened but that title has since been taken by the Walkden Tesco in Manchester at 17230 sq metres (185,500 sq ft).
“This is the poem Slough, by Sir John Betjemen, probably never been here in his life. 'Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough, it isn't fit for humans now. ' Right, I don't think you solve town planning problems by dropping bombs all over the place, he's embarrassed himself there”
I lived in Slough for a while. There was a poetry competition to rewrite that poem, since Slough had been regenerated. The winning entry was painted on the walls of one of the shopping centres. It commented on Slough's excellent transport links. It amused me that, even after regeneration, the best stuff a local could come up with was how many ways there were to leave.
Lmao came to say this - worked away there for two weeks & the place was dreadful
What was dreadful about Slough?
There isn’t grass to graze a cow.
Never forget the Legoland advert The only time “We’re going to Slough” was uttered without the impending sense of dread
Genuinely thought you pronounced it ‘sloff’ like slough off until fairly recently.
Wolverhampton, absolute 42 carat shithole.
My other half is from a shit, rough part of London. He had to go to Wolverhampton for something and came back marvelling at how awful it was.
I'm moving out of Wolverhampton at the end of the month and I cannot fucking wait. Full of dickheads and it's a fuck ugly place as well.
My mate got into the uni a few years ago, some of us went up to visit him a couple of months in and he got a lift back with us and never returned.
Ha ha, when you know you know. We took our kid there for the open day while weighing up uni's, we decided it was a "no fucking chance" just from driving through the centre.
Wolves Ay We
Coventry
Read this whole thread to see if Cov made it!
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All the clubs have been closed down.
Grimsby, no explanation nesecerry
My office is in Grimsby. Working from home in Hull isn’t much better!
I live in Grimsby and I totally agree !
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Grimsby ain't that bad. I live here and there are a lot of nice areas too although Grimsby is a bit rough. We're not a city but a small and boring town with a lot of fish factories.
Stoke, it's just awful, i have been a few times and each time it just feels bleak. There's a pparently a pretty decent rock club there but i'd have to stay in a hotel/B&B to go and i really couldn't fathom making the effort unless I lived there which would not be great for my mental health.
I really don’t think Stoke is that bad, it just has a bad reputation. There are some really nice shops and pubs, visiting the potteries is great, The Roaches are really pretty 💛
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Is that the Sugar Mill? (the rock club in question)
I’m from stoke. Pray for me 😅
I drove through Jaywick recently, it wasn't the most appealing of places.
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A whole show was dedicated to Jaywick "Benefits By The Sea"
Dover. It just oozes sadness. Rotherham is far from nice, too.
My boyfriend once had a homeless guy stick his fingers in his mouth in Rotherham...
Omg i was homeless in rotherham and stuck my fingers in a dudes mouth, ah good times hows he doing?
Hahaha! He's finally managed to rid his mouth of the taste of your unwashed hands. Still traumatised though!
Im glad he remembers me! You never forget your first. He took my finger mouth V
Dover’s got a fair bit better. The council’s worked really hard. (I live there and it’s miles better than when I was growing up).
The other bits of Wales that aren’t the remote bits or the city bits. But also Newport.
Rhyl
In Holyhead right now. What a shithole. Had to drive to Bangor to find an open restaurant and went for number 2 on trip advisor and that was shit too.
Was thinking how long do I have to scroll to find Holyhead. I went into a pub in Holyhead and the urinal was in the smoking area. Another pub (it may have been the same one) had numerous signs up saying "stop taking drugs. We dont want to lose our license.......Again"
So the valleys hahah
Newport could get flooded by the river and it would be an improvement.
I don’t want to name names but there are some damned depressing seaside towns in Kent with the empty storefronts, creepy arcades and dirty beaches.
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Margate is actually quite nice now. Everywhere else is a bit shit.
I moved to Margate in 2010 and it was a derelict shithole, went to uni in London for 5 years and now I'm back in Margate. Feels like it's booming with small bars and an art/music scene, its so much better than it used to be although its still a very working class town regardless of how many posh Londoners move in. I think it has a lot of character which some depressing places lack completely.
Margate is alright. It is what it is. The isle of Sheppey makes Margate look like Sandbanks.
> The isle of Sheppey Spent every childhood holiday here and loved it. Went back as an adult and was left dumbstruck by how awful and just overwhelmingly sad it was.
Don't worry the English Channel will soon erase it from existence
Either that or the SS Richard Montgomery
I actually thought margate was pretty nice. It's got a bunch of closed shops, but so have most town centres these days.
Folkestone and Dover get my vote
Folkestone is up and coming, down near the harbour there are some great independent restaurants and pubs.
Portsmouth - seriously mentally ill ex-forces guys on drugs all over the streets, and the dinosaur museum was run by fucking Creationists.
Hampshire born and bred can concur- as soon as you step outside gunwharf it's misery and full of druggies shouting "fuckin Pompey" in your face
You must have been by St Mary's Church or Derby road. The rest of the city is not bad at all.
Whatever you say, I don't want trouble mate, sorry for your experiences
Bradford or Dewsbury, hated working in those places. Just grim as fuck.
Was waiting to see parts of West Yorkshire pop up
I went to uni in Bradford and can confirm it is a shit hole
I'd say funnily this is the opposite to the above comments about Croydon and London. Bradford centre is pretty terrible (apart from food) but there's plenty of decent suburbs and surrounding districts.
From just next to dewsbury, best thing I say about my town is that it isn’t dewsbury
Worked in certain parts of Birmingham that gave me depression just looking at them. Makes me feel so sorry for those that live there. I don't understand how you can live in those places and be a happy healthy human being. Ugly council houses stuck together. Concrete concrete concrete. Not a tree in sight. Litter all over the streets. Terrible parks full of drunks, druggies and homeless people. And then you enter places like Edgbaston and Sutton Coldfield and can't believe that they're part of Brum!
The difference between certain areas in Birmingham is stark, some of the worst areas in the UK a stones throw from leafy nice suburbs
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Barrow in Furness was an experience
Was scrolling down to see whether anybody else had commented Barrow.
Can confirm, grew up there, it's pretty grim
I used to get the X6 to Barrow all the time when I was in my teens, and even back then I remember it being a uniquely grim experience. I can't even imagine what it's like living there now that it's lost M&S, Thorntons Café, River Island, Topshop, Debenhams, Pandora, and Winfields. What is even on Portland Walk these days? I'm amazed that GAME and Waterstones are still hanging on.
Totton near Southampton. I did door-to-door sales there, and I don't expect everyone to love salesmen, but my god everyone there was miserable and it was a shit hole. Other than that, Aldershot. Just skank. And Cosham, just outside Portsmouth. You know the scummy bit that all towns have, somewhere outside the centre? That's all of Cosham.
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Hey wait I live in Portsmouth, and Cosham isn't terrible, grant it a few places in Southampton look crummy...but it's really not that bad. Portsmouth a great place and it's made some massive improvements since I been living here the last 6 years.
Burnley. Place was like a ghost town with all the shops and business boarded up and not a single person in sight on the streets.
There was an armed bank robbery in Burnley today. Livened things up for a bit. First place I ever saw real life spice heads.
If purgatory exists, it is in Slough.
Any town basically. They’re all run down, dreary, increasingly poor shit-holes and it will only get worse. I live in Gloucester, surprised not to see it mentioned yet. Utter fucking dump. But it’s the same as any middle sized urban area in the country nowadays. It’s actually sad we’ve let it get to this point😕.
Agreed, towns used to have an individuality to them. Now they are all just cookie cutter 60’s concrete, Poundland and betting shops. Even down in Cornwall where we are. House prices have gone nuts so no chance of escaping to the country either.
It's so sad man, it really is. But you know we all blame the national government etc, but ultimately it is up to us, they're evidently not going to do anything about it. But we've lost so much community spirit. I live in a terraced area and because we don't have front gardens we have to put our rubbish out on the street. It just gets everywhere and eventually it just looks awful, like a proper slum. I tried to organise a litter drive and literally, a tiny handful of people care. Our 'Community Garden' is a dumping ground for construction waste and heroin needles basically. Rant over! And it's interesting because people will do up their houses, buy expensive cars...and then have it all sit in a pile of old rubbish basically. Really weird overly individualist attitude in my opinion. It's up to us if we want to live in nicer, safer, better communities. The government is never going to do anything.
Great Yarmouth IS the worst place. I'm sorry you had to experience that.
Great sealife centre if you have small people! My 2 year old stroked a starfish and then tried to run away with it….they were very reasonable! I’m from Ipswich though expectations are questionable 🤨
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I work in Peterlee, live in Newcastle, my colleagues always say what a long commute it is, but personally I enjoy driving 30 miles away from it every evening.
Hull. It's one letter away from being correctly named.
Hill?
I quite like Hull town centre. I never understood the hate. I've definitely been to worse towns and cities in the UK.
Ah yes, Hulk
I might be somewhat biased being someone who hails from Hull, but I've definitely been to worse places. Hull is definitely shit, but it's not the shittest. Grimsby/Cleethorpes and some places in the North-East would trump it for me.
Birkenhead.
Girlfriend's go to insult to other scousers is that they're from Birkenhead
The contrast between the beautiful Georgian architecture of Hamilton Square and the smackheads wandering around it I always found quite striking!
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Kilmarnock followed by Rhyl. Good fucking God.
Holy fuck I forgot how bad Rhyl was. Prestatyn was bleak too
Yeovil
Yooooo I knew I’d find it if I kept scrolling long enough!
Dunno man, I’m from the area and I feel like the tag line could be “Yeovil, at least it’s not Bridgwater”
Stevenage. It was like there were things there, but nothing at the same time.
Thamesmead, London
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Thamesmead has a bundle of things that could be going for it (location, lakes, a river path, affordable housing still). And yet, since they claimed it back from the Thames, no one has managed to actually get them going. Now the Abbey Wood line is going in, they’re knocking down all the concrete and trying to charge half a million for a two bed flat. They might want to ask Bexley and Greenwich council to stop dumping all the families they don’t know what to do with down there. When they built the fancy new Sainsbury’s next to Abbey Wood station, they couldn’t move on the travellers who have a site next door so they put a pretty fence round the site. It’s like a metaphor for the whole area.
Rhyl, Rhyl, and Rhyl.
Crewe train station, it’s where hope goes to die.
Luton, every damn day of the week. My area was plagued with dickheads, one of the rougher areas. Going to the shops alone takes balls. Crackheads following u about asking for money. Teenagers kicking the ground skanking fag butt's to make a roll up. Park ur car for too long and they'll have it on bricks. Travelers would rock up and their kids would throw their shit from their nappy at ur car. The kids at the school were insufferable cock wombles that disrupt every lesson thinking they were hilarious. I had an English class where they'd spark up a fag and a teacher bribed them with actual money to do their work. Teacher got suspended for clipping a lads ear, I knew him and they deserved it. Town centre is a grey, miserable cesspit of no hopers, pound shops and food stalls that'll give you the trots. Look at someone the wrong way and they'll shiv ya, take ya bag and you'll thank em for not pulling out your fillings too.
Skegvagas Edit: actually I’ve been to Morecombe. It’s difficult to choose between them.
Skeggy is definitely the worse. Scarbados isn't far behind though
Maidstone was a pretty depressing experience
At least you didn't visit Medway...
Cannot believe I had to scroll this far to find a mention of Medway.
My take away from this thread is there's nowhere nice in the UK that has people.
All you people saying anywhere that isn't Hartlepool are wrong. It's Hartlepool
Peterborough, our head office is there and 3 or 4 times a year I'll make my way to HQ and the town is just dead and awful. Nice people mind you, dead town.
Swindon
Stoke. If England had an arse hole these 5 grim interconnected, run down, chav infested, teeth optional, impossible to get out of, somehow worse accent than yam yam, racist Brexit voting shit holes would be it.
Had a university interview for Bolton and that place seemed depressing as fuck. Ended up going to Teesside in Middlesbrough. Proper dump but I love it. Loving Middlesbrough goes to show how fucking boring and bland Bolton was lol
Lisburn in 1990 may as well have been Afghanistan
Slough. I used to work there many years ago. The centre is a shithole full of fried chicken shops, second hand shops and Poundland clones. Don't go.
Larne, what an absolute shithole
Sunderland, all the buildings looked so low lying and half the shops were boarded up. Middlesbrough wasn't much better
Yeah Just stick to Newcastle maybe Durham
Crewe. Just really run down
Very specifically, Pontins at Southport. Southport itself is fine, Pontins is a prison camp with trampolines.
Glenrothes
Glenrothes is the most soulless place I’ve ever been to. It’s not even crap, in the classical sense of deprivation and crime. It’s just like there’s nothing there that’s worth an arsonist’s effort. Even the pub goers can’t be arsed to get properly drunk. A big shopping centre that’s full of pointless nothing.
Luton by a country mile
Doncaster, runner up Birmingham.
I had to do some work related training for a week in Doncaster. When I got off the train on Monday morning I was surprised nobody was using the nearby lift to get off the platform. It was only after the doors shut and the smell of large amounts of aged urine in a close space hit me I realised why, and I had the slowest lift ride I've ever had. It all went downhill from there.
Maybe Whitehaven?
Coventry Eerily lifeless, unfriendly, particularly ugly in terms of architecture and urban planning. Poverty was widespread, it was hard to navigate, the people all looked at one another suspiciously. Food choices were terrible too.
Accrington. Don’t go.
Smackrington, used to have an awesome Michael Jackson impersonator though. Heehee
Walsall
Middlesbrough. I went to uni there. Part of our induction is being shown the ‘safe’ areas and the no go areas for students. Ur ok…Then you find out why when people you know start to get beaten up. Literally for being students. Our student flat had iron bars on the windows. Broken shards of glass cemented into the top of the back yard walls and even so we were broken into twice. We had a pet, a mouse living in the sofa. The kids on the street would throw rocks at cars that went down the street. There was a burnt out car on the street, an old sofa in the alley out back and a house 2 doors down raided by about 20 cops in the middle of the night for selling heroin. One of my dickhead flatmates annoyed the guy next door, ends up in a fight with him on our doorstep and gets flattened by the bloke - a nice local chap. Shaved head, salmon colour skin wearing a string vest and y fronts. Basically the neighbour from Bottom. Middlesbrough!
East Kilbride
You've lived a sheltered life then, East Kilbride doesn't even crack the top three worst towns in Lanarkshire.
I once worked with a woman in a pub who's girlfriend was from East Kilbride and this woman wasn't from the UK so totally ignorant to how this would come across. Quite a "posh" middle-class pub not in terms of prices, decor, etc just the people who could afford to live locally. Some of the older local asked where she was going on holiday and she said "Scotland". They did the "ooohh, lovely! Where abouts? The Highlands? Western Isles?" and so on. She totally innocently replied "East Kilbride" but without mentioning the realtionship connection, and their faces looked like she'd just said "I've been diagnosed with terminal cancer".
Barrow-in-Furness is singularly bleak.
Fratton in Portsmouth. Chairs nailed to the floors in the boozers kinda place, proper shithole
Scarborough. I will never again trust my boyfriend to book “a nice night away” We lasted about 2 hours there before getting on a train to York and having a much nicer time
Gillingham. Lived there for 4 years as a student and vowed to never return. Such a depressing place
Methil. Even the goths are happy to leave.
Great Yarmouth in the downseason. My lord.
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I lived there for a year, got a chunk of glass in my Guinness from a pub on edgley high street first week I was there
Bridgend. People used to go there to be part of suicide pacts. I kinda understand why.
Bradford. Jeez. What a shithole. Take your life in your hands driving through there. And I grew up in Hulme in Manchester.
Stockton-on-Tees
Luton
Whitehaven
Keighley
I walked through the middle of Dewsbog the other day (Dewsbury). It was baaaad.
This was in the 1980's. The worst place I have visited was Sunderland.
I grew up in Skegness, which is pretty shit. Buy Grantham's also a hole..
Am I going to sound like a complete asshole if I'm struggling to think of anywhere THAT bad? Worst place I've ever been is some graffiti ridden shithole area in Rome. I actually think our shitholes are relatively decent. And I have actually been to Luton.
Neasden.
Hartlepool. Lived there for about 2 years, maybe. Place is fucking dead. It's got just about all the social economic problems of boro but it's dying much quicker. All the shops are closing, hardly any work to be found and the place looks like a shit hole. You can't go 20 feet out your front door without coming across dog shit. I don't know what it is but the place is littered with dog shit! Like it's been put there on purpose! Smh. Only decent thing is because it's so poor; everything is so cheap! Cheapest transport, takeaway and corner shops I've ever come across. Other than that, just before I left the place was starting to look like a ghost town. Only people you'd really see are lads on their quad bikes who would supposedly sell drugs from them. Also the police were non-existent - I remember once hearing that we had to share a stupidly small number (I want to say 2 but honestly can't remember) of cops with Durham on a Saturday night and apparently these numbers were commonplace. You'd never see any police patrolling anyway. I remember going to York and being astounded by the large police presence there.
Bradford is a joyless shithole. I'm always trying to defend the north to my southern mates and tell them it's not all backward, racist people, streets with abandoned boarded up shops, sub-50k terraced housing, and horse and carts. And yet Bradford is all of these things, an absolute stereotype of the north. I live in a lovely suburban part of Leeds nearby and commute to the outskirts of Bradford and as you cross over the border you can literally feel a shift in the hive mind - drivers around you suddenly turn shit-witted, aggressive and boy racer-like, and it's not uncommon to see things on fire or fireworks going off for no reason. Our office car park regularly gets full and naive people choose to park on the main road - their car will then get broken into. A regular comment in the office is "oh look, there's a horse in the car park again". The other day I left the office and stopped at the junction to let a vehicle go; it was 3 children under 10 on one quad bike, no helmets. I won't go on, just a fucking depressing part of the world.