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Dudley's saving grace = funny accent.
What about Port Talbot... set to become even grimmer by all accounts.
Surprised nobody's mentioned Hartlepool yet, Sort of like Feltham but without the weather.
Yeah Port Talbot is grim but it's got the mountains.
Didcot. It's a powerstation with a ****in' dismal shopping mall attatched to it...
...and that's about it.
I'd rather stay on the bus untill it reached Grozny* than have the misfortune of alighting in Didcot again.
*(Officially the most destroyed city on earth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grozny)
Telford's not that bad is it? (wife's from Ironbridge, so I've done a fair bit of cycling round there). Bland housing estates but there's so much open space and greenery to offset that.
Fort William's an imbecile of a town. Guess you can't call it miserable, as you walk down the road 5 minutes and there's epic grandeur on tap. The town itself though is well ropey.
Cities.
I grew up in Preston. It is categorically nay catastrophically worse than Hull.
I grew up just down the road and I agree. However, I recently met a Spanish bloke from Madrid who had worked at the university (sic) there, and claimed to love the place - bizarre.
Harlow.
Grew up there, never want to go back. Its one saving grace is that as a new town it has a lot of well established bike paths. Trouble is they all lead to the town centre...
A pilot friend of mine puts Lagos at the top of his list.
Barrow-in-Furness is pretty depressing...
Didcot - it just sounds rubbish. Glad to hear it lives up to its name.
Me and Harry the Spider work in Middleton. It's a town about four miles west of Oldham and is just ****ed.
It has quite an impressive bus station but that does nothing to offset the sheer ghastliness of the place. It's a meeting place for unemployed people with tracky bottoms tucked in socks, cheap tattoes and no point.
Off the places I've visited the biggestshitholes have been
Lennoxtown
Accrington
Stoke area
Rawtenstall
Calgary
Barnoldswick
I live in Nelson, nothing to see here either 🙂
Agree with Depreston.
Roman Lakes in Stockport anyone? Should be lovely, really isn't.
Can people stop doing Preston down please, it's a lovely place.
In completely unrelated news, I've just discovered prozac tastes really nice if you eat loads of it 😀
Bolton
and I'm from there. I go back to visit friends and family a few times a year and my heart sinks everytime the train pulls in to the station
Middleton Arndale is like something from a horror movie and 1 in 3 of the "walkers" have a pot on their arm or leg or a neck brace.
Port Talbot and Aberavan are ok mountains and would you believe some good surf. Locals can be a bit heavy.
Here is Spenner the landlord of Middleton's fave boozer - The Nob & Basket.
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Harlow might be a bit grim but at least it's not very big - unlike the endless suburban sprawl of the west mids.
I was a newspaper reporter in Harlow for a coupe of years and at least there was plenty going on. Think I covered a Combat 18 murder in my first week.
😯
Cumbernauld
So bad they have even dug up the A80 to stop people escaping
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"In December 2005 the entire Town Centre won a public nomination for demolition."
Allow me to show you around Swinton, Salford:
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derek_starship - Member
I reckon this must be one of the most miserable places in the world.*Picture of Uranium City*
Imagine having to live and work here.
I couldn't believe it when I saw the picture you posted derek_starship. I spent my last five years in Canada living and working not in Uranium City, but in a small town in the same region.
What kills you is the isolation and complete lack of culture. But I have to say that the cycling, both on- and off-road, is excellent!
LOL @ twinklydave 😛
I have the mis-fortune of working in Rotherham, it makes my skin crawl.
However I don't live here so it's fine, i can deal with it
Milton Keynes
Oh and milton keynes isn't that bad... I grew up there. it gets a lot of stick but actually it's quite nice compared to other towns mentioned here 🙂
Portsmouth
Its a tough call. I can't make my mind up whats worse.
Whether to go for the Bermuda Triangle of stinking, polluted, brain-dead, hopelessness that is Warrington/Widnes/Runcorn
Or any of the god-awful, soulless, featureless, identikit satellite towns darn sarf - Reading/Woking/Swindon/Basingstoke
Grimsby's also pretty grim.
Rhondda valley, especially around Ystrad and Pentre. Always grey and miserable. Gives off an air of no money and no hope. Just completely depressing. And I like Wolverhampton and Dudley, friendly folk.
[i]Allow me to show you around Swinton, Salford:[/i]
+1 for the sheer ugliness of that building. Although to be fair if you turn around you have a lovely church or the Salford council offices which are much nicer to look at (yes i do live in Swinton).
Mind you if you walked up a bit further up and took a photo of the actual precinct then we are back to your original point 🙂
Widnes is a horrible place. Warrington is redeemed only by the fact it's possible to cycle through it on TPT and Sankey Valley Trail, oh and I'm in it.
As above, a lot of the Reading/Woking/Swindon towns are soul destroying but if I'm going to have to pick.... it's an unusual choice. Lincoln. It's not that it looks depressing in anyway, it's actually quite pretty. It's something far more sinister. You don't really notice it unless you're there for more than a few days but then it slowly dawns on you that everyone is either drugged, hypnotised or lobotomised. Nobody seems to do anything, they just wander round in this slack jawed daze, existing.
Very odd.
John o'Groats
Not my pic:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/salfordandmanchester/2452069815/sizes/l/
Even McDonalds has closed down (probably due to violence and lack of people who can afford the food). Its that bad.
I was once walking through and two school teen mums pushing prams both gave me 'the eye'. It really depressed me.
Basingstoke deserves a special award. I had the misfortune of having to work there quite a bit a few years back.
The first day i arrived there, my new colleagues asked me what i was doing that evening. "I'm going to find a decent pub and watch the footy" I replied. They looked at each other, startled, then looked back at me as if I'd said I was going racing Unicorns on the Moon.
"There are no decent pubs in Basingstoke" came the communal reply.
They were ****ing right too! The whole place is like a vacuum
Rhondda valley, especially around Ystrad and Pentre
Merthyr is worse. Spend an hour waiting for a bus in the bus station. Amazing.
Many a Friday night I spent watching people hitting each other here..
One review: "avoid this at the weekends unless you want a fight."
http://web.beerintheevening.com/pubs/s/13/1328/Walkabout/Croydon
Manchester's Piccadilly Gardens has to take some beating. The crack dealers and scallies hangoing around Cash Coverters at the bottom of Oldham Street is like what I'd imagine hell to be. It has to have the highest proportion of nutjobs anywhere and is grim, grim, grim, no matter what anyone tells you.
And that's during the day. Still, Sacha's Hotel is lovely.
yes i do live in Swinton
Bloody 'ell mancjon - I bet you nearly spat your sprouts out when you saw that picture of the Lancy 'all.
Whereabouts are you?
mancjon - Member
Allow me to show you around Swinton, Salford:+1 for the sheer ugliness of that building. Although to be fair if you turn around you have a lovely church or the Salford council offices which are much nicer to look at (yes i do live in Swinton).
Mind you if you walked up a bit further up and took a photo of the actual precinct then we are back to your original point
I used to get physically ill even thinking about the old precinct! But I don't totally agree that the church opposite is all that nice, either. St Augustine's in Pendlebury - in spite of the hideous industrial setting - is much nicer.
The picture of Uranium City that started this thread may flatter it somewhat. This is Wikipedia's picture of its main street:
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According to Wikipedia, it was a thriving town with a population in the thousands until 1983 when the local uranium mine closed. The population now is 89. Other attractive features of it include the fact that "there is no normal road access connecting Uranium City with the rest of Canada" and that the airport has a gravel runway.
[i]But I don't totally agree that the church opposite is all that nice, either. [/i]
It's all relative though isn't it. Compared to Derek's pic the church really is bloody beautiful !
Can't argue with that GlitterGary. I used to like sitting in the Gardens in the summer and seeing how many minutes/hours would pass before you heard someone/anyone speak English in a form that you recognised
You can also enliven it even more by visiting it a 2am. Then you can witness it awash with piss and broken glass and playing host to running street battles
[i]Bloody 'ell mancjon - I bet you nearly spat your sprouts out when you saw that picture of the Lancy 'all.
Whereabouts are you?
[/i]
Actually the "posh" bit if you can use that term in regards to Swinton (which you can't really) ie. over the East Lancs road towards Worsely. Near the White Horse pub if that helps.
Ironic post of the day. You know, in the centre of Manchester there is a peaceful and small park with the distinction of having 22,000 people buried underneath it.
Miserable place or peaceful place?
I've had many a sesh in The White Horse. One of the few decent boozers left in Salford.
I live up near the Henry Boddington.