Crap Towns

[Shonx]

True, although I once bought a similar looking thing called "Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit" as a christmas present for a housemate (who was doing a left-leaning critical theory masters) which turned out to have a few rants about TV and fruit and then a fairly coherent (if not exactly revolutionary) critique of Blair's Britain (tm)...

I liked that book and most of the targets in it were ones I agreed with, and mostly an awful lot of them couldn't be avoided so there was no choice in having to experience them at some point. In situations where you just have to tolerate these things, it's good to be able to vent about how infuriating they are.

I remember a few years back having troubles at work, and some helpful dickwad said that I just had to "play the game", keep my head down and get on with it, irregardless of whether it was a shit game, with shit players and ultimately denied my expression of utter contempt for it.

It's very difficult at times to find something positive or constructive to say in these situations and in terms of towns where the "well if it's so shit, why don't you move" attitude, doesn't take into account that you have friends and family there that you would actually like to stay around but the town in itself has zero to offer.

 

[Pestario]

I remember talking to a friend of mine (who was studying urban planning) about Milton Keynes once. He was telling me how incredible it was, a great place to live.

I was a bit surprised about this and said "have you been there?" in a piss-taking way.

His response was "oh no, but I've seen the plans!"

Milton Keynes is an elegantly planned place to drive your car. As is the fault with a lot of modernist planning, its oriented towards abstract ideas of efficiency and organisation which fail to take into account how people actually live their lives.

Like bad modernist architecture, it may be nice look at on paper and think about conceptually but on the ground it is a disaster.

 

[hucks]

Milton Keynes is an elegantly planned place to drive your car. As is the fault with a lot of modernist planning, its oriented towards abstract ideas of efficiency and organisation which fail to take into account how people actually live their lives.

I drove to see my team play the MK Dons a couple of seasons ago (don't hate me Mos Dan!) and the directions were "Go straight ahead for the first 8 roundabouts, then last exit on the 9th". By number six I had totally lost count.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Bedford

Bedford does have a good happy hardcore shop tho' - pretty central with a very friendly owner.

Middlesborough isn't great - the people seemed sour: Geordie extroversion spoilt by Essex aggression.

Kettering has leafy bits and Reading is chaos central, so both have something to recommend them.

Swindon is pretty weak, but has a half-appealing old town that I managed to find on my last visit.

Likewise, tedious Stevenage has a picturesque old town about half a mile from the modern sprawl near the station.

Hope appeared to have abandoned Gillingham last time I went - the railway station was in a lamentable state of disrepair and even the money-grubbing chain pubs hadn't dared set up outposts.

 

[jenks]

Grays was a crap place to live. And no matter of great back story history (Tilbury down the road, Sinclair A13 mysticism) to the place stopped it being crap - living in a town that had lost its centre to Lakeside; that thought success was knowing Tony Tucker (guy shot dead in Range Rover) or going to school with Leah Betts (early ecstacy victim); that was slowly withering with a combination of neglect and waste.

Yes those crap towns books are shit but that does not deny the fact that some places are pretty dire to live in - Grays is now only being kept any where near vibrant by the immigration into the area. It appears to me to be a town that has given up, thrown up its hands and acts as dorm for commuters and those who seem to be permantently injured - i have never seen so many people wearing slings and needing crutches.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I've got this book, and it wasn't a gift, I bought it for myself. I think it's quite funny, the entries are for the most part wittily written and I don't think it assumes that geographical crapness springs from nowhere either; many of the entries talk about the recent history of these places vis-a-vis traditional industries shutting down, unemployment, influxes of students or 'new money' types, unemployment, the vicissitudes of chain pubs and shopping centres, clueless town planning...

 

[U-Basstard]

Middlesborough isn't great - the people seemed sour: Geordie extroversion spoilt by Essex aggression.

wow, totally on the money, i've never heard it described that way before but it's incredibly succinct, despite the fact i've never been to Essex, but i can quite easily imagine what you're getting at. I just find m'bro interesting because almost like Milton Keynes, it's only had a very short lifespan, developing from the mid 19th C industrial boom, with something like 30 people into a centre of industry with a population exceeding 100,000. And it's this population made up of non-indiginous (or non-N.E) which has come to find it's own very defined identity, to which it sticks to very very strongly. I only found out recently that the collective noun for people from Teesside - "Smoggies" comes from the fact that the townsfolk were chuffed when there was a big cloud of smoke across the town produced by ICI/British steel etc, because it meant they were all working and earning. And they still refer to themselves the same way today, IMO it's the quintessential working class town.

I can't really comment much on all the other southern towns mentioned upthread because i've not been there, maybe i should do a great British roadtrip of all the beleaguered mid sized towns? That would be fun...

 

[IdleRich]

"I've got this book, and it wasn't a gift, I bought it for myself"

Perhaps you hate yourself.

"Swindon is pretty weak, but has a half-appealing old town that I managed to find on my last visit."

Ah yes, my birthplace. The old town aint that nice though is it? Didcot was near where I grew up, I heard a lot of people moaning about it but I never really went there except to play them at football.

I was about to suggest that there's a distinction between (primarily northen, I think) crap towns that were shat on by Thatcherism and the collapse of heavy industry but which retain some sort of identity if only in relation to being shat on, and the crap towns that seem almost like what Thatcherism was aiming for - places where "there's no such thing as community" is written above the door of the council house. I guess it's the latter that I had in mind when I started the thread, and it'd be interesting if people who've lived in these places have got a more nuanced view than "total shithole..."

I think that this is the main point though. It's the new towns that seemingly have no soul and that are merely places for people to exist that I find depressing. Especially because a lot of people live there through choice. Some of the suburbs of London are like this kind of crap town I think, I went to Ikea once (never again) and the area around that was so dead that there was an almost palpable feeling of nothingness. I can see why some people are fascinated by suburbia, I love getting the bus between Oxford and London and when you come in past Hillingdon you see all these houses with little gardens that face straight on to the main road and the whole place seems like a cultural void but is somehow still interesting to drive over - you imagine all these frustrated teens plotting their escape. I could be totally wrong about it being a void of course and at least if you live on the outskirts of London you can walk or get a bus to somewhere better I suppose - but I have the feeling that a lot of people choose to live in these places to get away from London, that is they work somewhere more central but escape to the burbs because they don't like the big city. Strikes me as the worst of both worlds but there you go.
No-one has talked about the role of geography in this thread (I think). There are a lot of towns and villages in Cornwall or Devon that have very little in the way of work and, as a consequence, anything else, but the picturesque area and the much nicer weather means that they don't have the sheer grimness of some of the places being mentioned. At least that's the impression I get.

 

[...]

That's possibly true, to an extent. But then, a couple of months ago, I happened to spend a day in Milford Haven, an incredibly depressing, quintessential crap town, perched on a beautiful, fresh Atlantic inlet. You'd think Havenites would spend most of their time eating fresh fish and windsurfing, but the town was desolate, devoid of living souls, every grim terrace and bungalow plastered with satellite dishes and English football club stickers. In an area rich with mythology and folklore, the one concession to culture was the Torch Theatre. It used to have a tremendous fish market at the Docks, but this closed when a large Sainsbury's was built five minutes away.

Places like Fishguard and Pembroke are not much better, despite their stunning coastal locations. And then there are the dead coal and steel towns: places like Merthyr Tydfil and Ebbw Vale that scarred the surrounding countryside and almost obliterated local wildlife during the Industrial Revolution. But, with pollutive industry subsequently dismantled, they're even grimmer, because, apparently, now there's nothing to do except take heroin and/or work in a Pot Noodle factory ("Pot Noodle factory" = South Wales shorthand for post-Industrial malaise). But, as everyone with eyes can see, Merthyr and Ebbw are surrounded by lush rolling hills and green valleys, full or red kites and hang gliding opportunities.

 

[STN]

I was born in Aldershot. It's balls.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Perhaps you hate yourself.

Well yeah, but that's entirely by-the-by.

I think that this is the main point though. It's the new towns that seemingly have no soul and that are merely places for people to exist that I find depressing. Especially because a lot of people live there through choice. Some of the suburbs of London are like this kind of crap town I think, I went to Ikea once (never again) and the area around that was so dead that there was an almost palpable feeling of nothingness. I can see why some people are fascinated by suburbia, I love getting the bus between Oxford and London and when you come in past Hillingdon you see all these houses with little gardens that face straight on to the main road and the whole place seems like a cultural void but is somehow still interesting to drive over - you imagine all these frustrated teens plotting their escape. I could be totally wrong about it being a void of course and at least if you live on the outskirts of London you can walk or get a bus to somewhere better I suppose - but I have the feeling that a lot of people choose to live in these places to get away from London, that is they work somewhere more central but escape to the burbs because they don't like the big city. Strikes me as the worst of both worlds but there you go.

Perhaps the idea that "There can't just be NOTHING going on!" in places like that is why suburbia is such rich grounds for fiction; specifically, as a breeding ground for middle-aged swingers' parties, gun-toting drug barons, mad cults, murders over disputed Leylandii...

No-one has talked about the role of geography in this thread (I think). There are a lot of towns and villages in Cornwall or Devon that have very little in the way of work and, as a consequence, anything else, but the picturesque area and the much nicer weather means that they don't have the sheer grimness of some of the places being mentioned. At least that's the impression I get.

Yeah, I grew up on the Isle of Wight and it's a bit like this.

 

[...]

"Left at 18, bags packed at 16."

I grew up in Swansea, and spent some time in Coventry, family in both cities. Both cities a tragedy: Blitz victims that had plenty to lose, and lost most of it.

Swansea, however, redeemed by: it's indestructably beautiful coastline; the gorgeous residential parks and roads (e.g. the Uplands, Cwmdonkin Park) largely untouched by the Luftwaffe; a fantastic central market that sells fish straight from the docks and fresh meat and veg from Gower farmland; the residual glitz and wealth of the mid-to-late 80s yuppie/"swafia" crossover that centred on the new Marina, then-still-running Dallas and Dynasty TV shows, the Bonnie Tyler Clan, and largely unregulated dockland; Joe's Ice Cream Parlour and the generally attractive effect of Italian settlement; the prettiest, most filthy-minded girls in Wales; the undulation of fantastically gloomy and lugubrious rain storms and lashings of lazy Atlantic sunshine, and the general healthy and optimistic glow this (along with the clear sea air) gives everything; and a general historic and cultural atmosphere and sense of idenity that remains despite being built on fluke, i.e. King Arthur's Stone, or Dylan Thomas. Swansea (described by Dylan Thomas as the "ugly, lovely town"; affectionately called by its citizens, "a pretty shitty city") is probably the nicest Crap Town in the country. Whereas Coventry is an unremitting, unrepentant horror; the exemplar and locus classicus of the contemporary Crap Town. I have never seen the sun shine in Coventry, never found anything I was looking for in any of the shops, never been spat or sworn at so many times - except for the day I spent in Aberdeen, which was, come to think of it, even worse than Coventry...

 

[...]

 

[IdleRich]

"That's possibly true, to an extent."

Sure, I don't think it's a hard and fast rule. But for a quintessentially crap town the surroundings would also have to be uninspiring wouldn't they?

"I have never seen the sun shine in Coventry"

I seem to remember from my one visit to Coventry that the whole town centre is buried under a grey concrete roof - can that really be true or has time just transformed a feeling into a literal memory?

 

[baboon2004]

I remember a few years back having troubles at work, and some helpful dickwad said that I just had to "play the game", keep my head down and get on with it, irregardless of whether it was a shit game, with shit players and ultimately denied my expression of utter contempt for it.

This is so on the money. Not allowing someone else to express the anger that they genuinely feel is one of the worst qualities a person can exhibit.

Hey, there's an idea for a whole new thread...

 

[Shonx]

This is so on the money. Not allowing someone else to express the anger that they genuinely feel is one of the worst qualities a person can exhibit.

Hey, there's an idea for a whole new thread...

I do like how when people talk about expressing emotions they generally don't mean anger - "when we said emotions, we meant things we could use to fuck with you - this is like pro-active depression. Please stop"

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Coventry

I've got to see loads of unprepossessing places through my quiz machining hobby (which is profitable as long as I keep moving about) - Coventry was distinguished by presenting groups of people on the lash at 9am on Sunday morning (Spoons, obv).

Swings and roundabouts for some: one might win a place at Warwick Uni but have to go out in Coventry. Tho' there was a boho enclave converted church hosting IdleRichesque rockabilly DJs and selling interesting beers.

The area by Coventry Uni is rough as f**k - those students are the ones that really suffer.

Boltthrower live in Coventry - a mate (aka the Guitar Hero joint UK number 1) has seen them mooching amongst the terraced houses.

Mebbe another thread: places where you wouldn't expect to see the locals surprised to see an outsider, but you do nonetheless. I nominate Halifax.

 

[IdleRich]

"I've got to see loads of unprepossessing places through my quiz machining hobby (which is profitable as long as I keep moving about)"

I'm surprised by this. I know that in the past it was merely necessary to know the answers to win on a quiz machine but I thought that nowadays they have ways of refusing to payout. Eg if it has paid out up to its limit Cluedo one simply won't let you land on the jackpot square with it's "randomly" generated dice throws, however many questions you answer correctly. I don't see how you can beat these machines even by moving around - or do you just abandon them when you realise it's not paying out and go somewhere else?

 

[mixed_biscuits]

in the past it was merely necessary to know the answers to win on a quiz machine but I thought that nowadays they have ways of refusing to payout...do you just abandon them when you realise it's not paying out and go somewhere else?

Correct on both counts!

 

[...]

I've got to see loads of unprepossessing places through my quiz machining hobby (which is profitable as long as I keep moving about)

Wow, this is a whole new concept to me.