Crap Towns
- Thread starter Slothrop
- Start date
mixed_biscuits
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Slothrop
Tight but Polite
Yeah, I'm trying to avoid that as being the obvious conclusion... I'm trying to avoid saying anything objective based on my personal (fairly middle class) ideas of what makes a place nice to live in. But I'm still waiting for someone to mount a convincing defence of the social and cultural life of Bexleyheath
Maybe there's a degree of self fulfilling prophecy here too - that the sort of person who reads Dissensus and lives in Stokey and Dalston because they're a bit edgey but safe enough for middle class honkies like me, sorry, I mean because they're vibrant and multicultural and energetic has avoided suburbs and new towns like the plague, hence there being nothing much that seems interesting to us there.
Another question, partly related to the beautiful location thing, is the relation between a good location or nice historic architecture and actually being a nice place to live. Does a depressingly generic setting actually hinder people from doing anything constructive and interesting and enjoyable, or does it just drive away a lot of the people who might potentially start or support constructive and interesting and enjoyable things? If you transplanted the population of York to Stevenage, would they still run an early music festival (and, latterly, a "late music festival" for contemporary stuff).
IdleRich
IdleRich
Maybe. But, like you (kinda) said, you never hear anyone saying how fantastic it is to live in Slough do you? Maybe the people who do love it are simply less vocal and more concerned with the business of living their life (washing the car, watching the Grand Prix, some other stuff) than showing off about how great their home town and, by extension, their life is. Somehow I doubt it though. I mean, you hear people like Iain Sinclair or Patrick Keiler extolling the virtues of unlikely places but it's usually because they've dug a bit deeper and found something that the average person won't know about. I would be very interested to hear someone who chooses to live in one of these places explain why they do so, I suspect that the answer would probably be a number of factors coinciding that make it the least worst option eg it's the only place within an hour of the town where I work and in which I can afford a three bedroom house (obviously I'm talking about the dead kind of commuter towns and their denizens rather than somewhere like Hartlepool here).
Oh sure, I wasn't making a connection between the beauty of a town and the creativity of its occupants, I was just saying that all other things being equal some nice scenery makes the situation better and thus the very worst places are those that lack it.
mixed_biscuits
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It probably helps a crap town if there is a nearby university, which may provide a critical mass of arty-farty continental philosophy masters students keen to display their reproductive fitness to each other by playing odd music or pinning up drawings in a room.
I'd say that in Bognor when I was growing up, the youth of the town basically split into townie cunts, people that left the town for entertainment and everyone else, which pretty much meant goths, hippies, metalheads, geeks, acidheads, ravers, punks and quite a few other subcultures that have probably fallen by the wayside (bleakos anyone?). Although I think people are generally more eclectic in their tastes nowadays, I do feel that larger towns and cities' youth culture generally seem to be way more splintered and cliquey ("sorry cyber-goth night is on Wednesday, this is romantic vampire goth night - no lace,no entry").
I also noted that proportionately, you do seem to find much odder folks who given the fairly conservative attitudes of a lot of these places feel little or no compulsion to dilute their eccentricities due to their being nothing worth conforming to. I used to love seeing the solo punk around town, unhindered by any sense of hipness or peer pressure. A lot of people only like being "individual" in a group of similar individuals it seems. I was the sole kid into metal in my year (I was young) and I thoroughly enjoyed not fitting in, school mates mostly thought I was on drugs anyway and the neurotic midget who was headmaster fretting that this was going to cause an influx of ne'er-do-wells into his precious little school.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
A couple of weeks ago I stayed for a night in Veldhoven, a small town abutting Eindhoven in the southern Netherlands. It's basically just a big dormitory for families and pensioners, almost entirely residential apart from a titchy pedestrianised centre with some very pedestrianised shops. Doesn't look like there's a single building in the place more than about 40 years old. Couldn't live there, it would suck out my soul. However, I'm not sure it really warrants a true appellation of Crap Town, as there's been at least some attempt to prettify the houses and there isn't the patina of litter, inept graffiti and dogshit that are the calling cards of a really classic English C.T.
I've spent the last couple of days in Eindhoven proper and it seems pretty neat, actually. Very different in size from London and very different in appearance from Oxford, where I've also spent a lot of time in the last couple of years. It's not a beautiful city, in fact much of it is quite brutal-looking but it's an honest, utilitarian, modernist brutality that I can cope with - far preferable to the appalling po-mo kitsch that's infected so much of urban England in the last couple of decades. Um, excuse me, I appear to have turned into Jonathon Meades for moment there. The town centre seems reasonably happening, loads of bars/clubs/restaurants (had a really good kebab for lunch in a place with delightfully awful mock-Egyptian decor) and there's a SUPERB gothic-revival redbrick cathedral. Actually I think it's just a big church, but it's cathedral-sized. Oddly enough this part of the Netherlands is traditionally Catholic, so there's loads of candles and icon and stuff inside, in fact I just looked in for a minute around midday yesterday and there was a small choir (not decked out as such, they were clearly just church-goers) singing in front of the altar. Some of the stained glass is yer typical C19 mock-mediaeval stuff but some of it looks early-mid C20 (post-war repairs?) and is oddly religio-modernist. By the sound of it the place was basically just a village until industrialisation in the late 19th century and then had the shit bombed out of it for good measure. But it's only a short distance from some other towns that really old and beautiful - Maastricht is meant to be stunning.
Had a job interview a couple of months ago in West Byfleet. Now is THAT ever a shithole. The absolute epitome of an ugly, nothing-y, commuter-belt void. Well, from what I saw of it anyway, but unless there was a gorgeous half-timbered Old Town lurking just out of sight (which I doubt), I think I'm probably not too far off in my assessment. You just know it's going to have no shops that aren't the same depressing chains you find anywhere, a tiny neglected scrap of park, an overlit pub with a loud, vast TV screen permanently turned to the football...it's just that distance from London where it's too far to actually have any kind of proper urban culture or the slightest hint of a cosmopolitan feel to it, but not far enough to have any kind of personality of its own.
Although I did smile when I got off at the station and looked at a map of the local area - there's a village nearby called New Haw which I assumed implies the existence of Old Haw, sadly I couldn't see it on the map...
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mistersloane
heavy heavy monster sound
And you're right near Antwerp n all, which the Doc swears by for a Cape Verde bar there. I saw him after a night in it and it looked like a good time was had by all. Or he looked like a good time had by all...
Ulala
Awkward Woodward
Not seen this thread before so I feel obliged to rep my ends - Ipswich.
I suppose it depends on whether you consider mediocrity to be worse than outright shit (I do, incidentally), but this is truly a town with no defining characteristics at all. It is the living embodiment of beige. There is literally no culture at all. Gigs? No, unless you want to see haggard 40-somethings doing covers of the Commitments doing covers. Clubs? Nah. It's all £6 shots and Guetta. The 'arts'? Pfft... maybe the odd touring theatre production but largely 'no'. There is one quite satisfyingly landscaped park but that is scant consolation. The occasional classical music event exists but I am too much of an oik to appreciate that. Slags and thugs? Bingo.
The problem is that 50 miles north = Norwich. 50 miles west = Cambridge. 50 miles(ish) south = London. All interesting things bypass Ipswich and so it festers as do many rural market towns. Yet for all this, we have given the world Nik Heyward, Klute, Extreme Noise Terror and Kieron Dyer. Yay Ipswich. (Irony, there, for inattentive readers.) The only place I have been which is worse is Southampton. Or Colchester.
I suppose it depends on whether you consider mediocrity to be worse than outright shit (I do, incidentally), but this is truly a town with no defining characteristics at all. It is the living embodiment of beige. There is literally no culture at all. Gigs? No, unless you want to see haggard 40-somethings doing covers of the Commitments doing covers. Clubs? Nah. It's all £6 shots and Guetta. The 'arts'? Pfft... maybe the odd touring theatre production but largely 'no'. There is one quite satisfyingly landscaped park but that is scant consolation. The occasional classical music event exists but I am too much of an oik to appreciate that. Slags and thugs? Bingo.
The problem is that 50 miles north = Norwich. 50 miles west = Cambridge. 50 miles(ish) south = London. All interesting things bypass Ipswich and so it festers as do many rural market towns. Yet for all this, we have given the world Nik Heyward, Klute, Extreme Noise Terror and Kieron Dyer. Yay Ipswich. (Irony, there, for inattentive readers.) The only place I have been which is worse is Southampton. Or Colchester.
S
simon silverdollar
Guest
"What you know about Ips? We are the top boys in Ips"
Ulala
Awkward Woodward
Ah, Hectic Squad. According to Grime Daily:
The question is obviously rhetorical, but I fear that what the average person knows about 'Ips' is that it's home to Britain's fattest man and begat a serial killer of prostitutes. And that the football team once got a 9-0 dicking off Manchester United. Quite some claims to fame.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Oh yeah, and last month I did some tutoring work with this girl in Neasden. It's not called 'The Venice of England' for nothing, you know. Actually it's not called that at all. Quite possibly the most hateful place I've ever been in my life. The poor girl's house opened straight onto the North Circular (for those who haven't had the pleasure, this is a 3-lane A-road, pretty much a motorway - the address of the house was [xxx] North Circular, I mean for pitty's sake...).
don_quixote
Trent End
there's this horrible place in the south of england. it's disgusting, it smells of buses, the rivers is just disgusting, full of pollution, it is just busy all the time and it so expensive that you can't afford to do anything there. anything at all. even worse all the people are just up their own arses and are really rude and they are so thick about the rest of the country around them and so insular, it takes the piss. all the do is obsess about their jobs and never think what they are doing is killing them slowly. some of them haven't had a gasp of fresh air for years and the only way they get a gasp of fresh air is to hop on a plane to somewhere foreign. can't remember the name of this place.
don_quixote
Trent End
sorry mr tea i am going to call you out for this
i would much rather live in kettering than london. like there aren't "soulless booze shed"s in london? it's not so small that there's only one place to go. kettering is a place with history and culture. i don't know much more about kettering, but i can definitely see why someone would choose to move back there.
1) it doesn't cost a fucking packet to live there
2) he might still have his sense of smell in 20 years time
3) he wants to believe that yes, snot can be yellow, not black
4) he might be able to raise a family in decent surroundings outside of a crime infested hell hole, he can aspire to own property with a *garden* and *it's own roof* and *a drive*
i saw someone fronting on coventry in this thread. yes coventry has it's downsides, but you've just picked on a place that has it's own pirate reggae station broadcasting 24 hours a day.
i spoke to a friend recently who was applying for jobs and was only applying for jobs in london. when asked why not the rest of the country; london has theatres and parks. well there's theatres in every major town in the country and we've got the fucking countryside so we barely have requirements for parks, but hey we have parks too, and they actually have wildlife in too.
the only legitimate complaints i can see in this thread are those towns which just act as commuter towns for london. there's a reason these places are crap - 90% of their inhabitants are zombies on a train to london.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
DQ, are you posting from the 19th century? Black snot? Yes, I'm sure the air quality in London isn't what it is in the Lake District or the Scottish Highlands, but in most parts of the city it's perfectly fine. I live not far from a fairly busy road and even that manages not to "stink of buses". London has an exceptional amount of green space in it for a city of that size. And yes, it does have some soulless pubs but so what? It's also got millions of great ones. It also has amazing nightclubs and restaurants offering food from practically every country on earth.
As for Kettering, my mate lived on the edge of this utterly vast council estate that was just miles and miles of identical little boxes. On the way to the social club we passed a number of pubs that looked like archetypal SBS's. Granted, I was only there for two days and a night, but none of it looked particularly appealing.
And Londoners are "up their own arses", huh. You might be right about the effect of London on towns in the commuter belt but that doesn't apply to most of the country. Elsewhere there are plenty of small towns and villages that are full of narrow-minded, ignorant people. I'm not saying *everywhere* is like that, obviously, but these places do exist. Places like where I grew up and went to school.
As for Kettering, my mate lived on the edge of this utterly vast council estate that was just miles and miles of identical little boxes. On the way to the social club we passed a number of pubs that looked like archetypal SBS's. Granted, I was only there for two days and a night, but none of it looked particularly appealing.
And Londoners are "up their own arses", huh. You might be right about the effect of London on towns in the commuter belt but that doesn't apply to most of the country. Elsewhere there are plenty of small towns and villages that are full of narrow-minded, ignorant people. I'm not saying *everywhere* is like that, obviously, but these places do exist. Places like where I grew up and went to school.
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don_quixote
Trent End
i can only assume you have built up a tolerance to it, every time i go to london i spend the next week having to unclog my nose from the dirt and oil.
should we all live in vast conurbations so that we can all experience milder more diverse restuarants and somewhat better nightlife?
why do you feel the need to critisise people who choose not to live in a shared box for £700 per month?
your argument assumes nothing exists elsewhere. we're not out here in the provinces with our heads in the sand, eating out in wetherspoons on suet pudding and gravy. we do have supermarkets with food other than minced beef and baked beans.
practically all of the people i know from university who shunned the towns they lived in (even really good places like leeds, brighton and norwich) to move to london always espouse the fact that "everyone lives in london" and that "there's so much to do here" and "it's just so fantastic!" but when you scrape below the surface, when you actually ask them what they do they do the same as anyone else living in any other part of the country, possibly less. they work so much and have so little money left over from the cost of living that they can't afford to do anything, they're too exhausted to do it at the weekend and they can't be bothered anyhow. they're dick whittingtons, gone to london to find their fortune but end up scraping together a living.
the majority of people would be ten times better off, happier and healthier living in the provinces than they would be living in the capital.
so they can sneer at our crap towns and our terrible places to live and our shitty architecture. but i'd much rather live anywhere than in the arsehole of the country, our crap capital city.
(maybe we should have a dissensus drinks in kettering?)
and how much does all this cost?
should we all live in vast conurbations so that we can all experience milder more diverse restuarants and somewhat better nightlife?
why do you feel the need to critisise people who choose not to live in a shared box for £700 per month?
your argument assumes nothing exists elsewhere. we're not out here in the provinces with our heads in the sand, eating out in wetherspoons on suet pudding and gravy. we do have supermarkets with food other than minced beef and baked beans.
practically all of the people i know from university who shunned the towns they lived in (even really good places like leeds, brighton and norwich) to move to london always espouse the fact that "everyone lives in london" and that "there's so much to do here" and "it's just so fantastic!" but when you scrape below the surface, when you actually ask them what they do they do the same as anyone else living in any other part of the country, possibly less. they work so much and have so little money left over from the cost of living that they can't afford to do anything, they're too exhausted to do it at the weekend and they can't be bothered anyhow. they're dick whittingtons, gone to london to find their fortune but end up scraping together a living.
the majority of people would be ten times better off, happier and healthier living in the provinces than they would be living in the capital.
so they can sneer at our crap towns and our terrible places to live and our shitty architecture. but i'd much rather live anywhere than in the arsehole of the country, our crap capital city.
(maybe we should have a dissensus drinks in kettering?)
don_quixote
Trent End
incidentally - does he still live in kettering? i realise that post was 3 years ago
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
I don't know, I'm (edit: not) really in touch with him. When I said it was "bizarre" that he wanted to move back there it's because there's so much going on, there's pretty much anything you might want to do in a city, and you have to contrast that with places where - however you look at it - there's a lot less going on.
The cost of living in London is certainly higher than in the Midlands or the North, but unless you're right in the centre it's actually comparable to most of the rest of the south of England these days. My girlfriend lives in Oxford and, as far as rent and council tax goes, she pays about the same as what I do to live in London. And I've got a bigger room. And she's not even in des-res north Oxford (though, that said, she doesn't live in craptastic Blackbird Leys either). As far as pubs and restaurants go, prices are pretty comparable. Yes, in London you can go out to eat in Kensington or Mayfair and blow a bloody fortune, but there are loads of cheap places too - I can go to a Turkish restaurant in Harringay or Dalston and get a great meal for well under a tenner. I'm a few minutes' walk from Roman Road which is overflowing with good, cheap greengrocers, halal butchers and so on - much cheaper than a lot of shops you get in small towns outside the capital.
Also, I'm not criticising anyone for their choice of where to live. As far as the quality of life of people already living here is concerned, it'd be good if not quite so many people moved here. Yes, London is undeniably an expensive place to live, especially if you want to live in a nice part of it, and that's not a good thing. I can certainly see why many people would rather live somewhere else where their money is going to go a lot further, that's totally understandable. Property prices in London are utterly fucking stupid and I think it would be a good thing if they just thoroughly crashed (can't see if happening any time soon though, there's just so much foreign big money here for one thing). The other thing that hacks me off about it is how big it is, and how long it takes to get from one place to another, and some parts of it are genuinely, utterly dire (see my rant about Neasden). But really, if you know where to go you can shop fairly cheaply, eat out well for not too much, there are great pubs that are no more expensive than they are anywhere else in the SE quarter of the country and there are loads of great music nights that are free or cost a couple of quid. And then you've got the parks, museums, galleries, theatres, all the rest of it.
BTW, with there's a good chance I'll be leaving London (and the UK) pretty soon. I like it here, I've been here 12 years now, but I'm aware it's not the only place in the world.
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don_quixote
Trent End
assume this means to read "i'm not really in touch with him"?