Worse places than Wolverhampton in Britain and Europe

[The Mighty Trin]

Hartlepool at least has HMS Trincomalee, which is magnificent, even if the town has seen better days.

[3 Colours Red]

You know I'm gonna say Rhyl and I won't disappoint. You know a place is a shithole when it has a smaller population but even more smackheads than Wrexham.

[Lymeswold Snork]

Crewe.

Granted I was hungover and it was raining, but it made Walthamstow look like Florence. It felt like the spirit of the people there had been utterly crushed as I walked around the town. I'm sure it's fabulous if you like trains.

I've a soft spot for Wolverhampton - As a child we'd have an annual visit from Yorkshire to relatives who lived just outside there and on the drive down weŽd pass a derelict church on the outskirts of the town. IŽd see it every year and ask why it hadn't reopened. It eventually got saved (the exterior at least) and incorporated into a supermarket development. Sadly the supermarket had closed down when I went to watch Wolves v Birmingham close to Remembrance Sunday a few years ago. Neither group of fans could respect the minute's silence, I'd made the schoolboy error of sitting too too close to the away fans and the game was a dire 0-0 draw.

Having said that, me and Miss ex-TMT did spend a good amount of time before the game in the Wolverhampton Art Gallery and then in Primark, so it wasn't all bad.

I had to stay overnight in Crewe for business once. I asked the locals what they do for a good time there.

Apparently, they go to Stoke.

[The Mighty Trin]

Speaking of Stoke, I went to watch Port Vale v Plymouth last month and the walk from Longport train station (boarded up) to Burslem made me very sad. Not a walk I'd be keen to do by myself late at night. Boarded up pubs, shuttered or to let shops and empty industrial buildings, including PriceŽs National Teapots.

The fact that Stoke is made up of six towns blows my mind.

[Guy Profumo]

Merthyr

[Balderdasha]

My home town is quite the exemplary rural shithole. It was a small market town, with a working train line up until the 50s. Then two different plans collided. East End gentrification meant that thousands of homes were being levelled, so some genius of a town planner built concentric rings of council estates around the market town centre, and filled them with ex-East-enders, without building any extra amenities or giving any consideration to how or where these people would get jobs. Simultaneously, the Beeching plan assessed the train station as under-used so it was closed down just as the thousands of extra people arrived, trapping them in jobless, council house hell.

My mum will defend the town to her dying breath, but it is objectively crap. People I know who work in any type of education, musical, sporting, etc, know that they get extra funds for projects they're willing to run in my hometown because it is classified as a "cultural coldspot".

My middle school which I attended for two years, was put into special measures the year after I left. Then it was closed down. Then an ex-pupil burnt it to the ground. Nothing has been done with the site since.

One of my ex-classmates was stabbed to death on one of the council estates age 17. A mum of a child I went to primary school with was jailed for hitting another mum in the face with a brick and her excuse was "I forgot I was holding it". Another ex-classmate regularly appears in the local newspaper for having roof top shoot outs with the police defending his crack den.

Anyway, something that gave me pause for thought was that when I moved to China to teach English, I based one lesson on my family and my home and I included a few photos from my hometown. My childhood house, a couple of the old buildings in the town centre, a church, the one timber building that survived a 16th century fire, a park and playground. The kids in my classes were uniformly overwhelmed by how beautiful my hometown was compared to the sterile communist architecture of their town. It's all relative.

[Nocturnal Submission]

Another ex-classmate regularly appears in the local newspaper for having roof top shoot outs with the police defending his crack den.

Is he still up there or something?

[seand]

BTW, have any of you been to holyhead? I get the impression that Holyhead was designed to be this disastrous and fucked, to provide an even more vivid contrast with the rest of that train journey. It's unnecessary.

Fuck yeh. In the late 90s I had a couple of several-hours layovers in Holyhead in between ferries from Dublin and trains to civilisation. Grim.

I had to briefly visit Slough on business, that was pretty bad. Lots of hideous shitholes in the north too.... Carrickfergus, Larne, Antrim, Omagh, Newbuildings, Keady, Lurgan, Craigavon, Glengormley, most of north, south, east, west and central Belfast

[Lang Spoon]

Eh Belfast City Centre has a proper urban feel. Leeds meets Manc meets Glasgow. It's terrible out the core bar the Botanics area I grant.

[Furtho]

I’ve never been to Wolverhampton. How does it compare to Coventry, if you leave out Cov cathedral?

[Guy Profumo]

I’ve never been to Wolverhampton. How does it compare to Coventry, if you leave out Cov cathedral?

Doesn't have the ridiculous ring road with motorway grade junctions every 20 yards...

[Guy Profumo]

And the self-same ridiculous ring road that strangles the city centre from anywhere outside.

Particularly for pedestrians and cyclists

[treibeis]

It's terrible out the core bar the Botanics area I grant.

As always, I love it.

[Hot Pepsi]

What's wrong with Wolverhampton?

[Guy Profumo]

I've heard bad things about Peterborough, particularly from Glasgow Catholics.

[Hot Pepsi]

My home town is quite the exemplary rural shithole. It was a small market town, with a working train line up until the 50s. Then two different plans collided. East End gentrification meant that thousands of homes were being levelled, so some genius of a town planner built concentric rings of council estates around the market town centre, and filled them with ex-East-enders, without building any extra amenities or giving any consideration to how or where these people would get jobs. Simultaneously, the Beeching plan assessed the train station as under-used so it was closed down just as the thousands of extra people arrived, trapping them in jobless, council house hell.

My mum will defend the town to her dying breath, but it is objectively crap. People I know who work in any type of education, musical, sporting, etc, know that they get extra funds for projects they're willing to run in my hometown because it is classified as a "cultural coldspot".

My middle school which I attended for two years, was put into special measures the year after I left. Then it was closed down. Then an ex-pupil burnt it to the ground. Nothing has been done with the site since.

One of my ex-classmates was stabbed to death on one of the council estates age 17. A mum of a child I went to primary school with was jailed for hitting another mum in the face with a brick and her excuse was "I forgot I was holding it". Another ex-classmate regularly appears in the local newspaper for having roof top shoot outs with the police defending his crack den.

Anyway, something that gave me pause for thought was that when I moved to China to teach English, I based one lesson on my family and my home and I included a few photos from my hometown. My childhood house, a couple of the old buildings in the town centre, a church, the one timber building that survived a 16th century fire, a park and playground. The kids in my classes were uniformly overwhelmed by how beautiful my hometown was compared to the sterile communist architecture of their town. It's all relative.

I suppose that's true around here too. Old towns with dense housing along the old main street, perhaps some interesting Victorian houses, old churches with impressive stained glass, parks with lots of trees, and old brick factories and warehouses that could be cool if they were spruced up a bit. But underneath all that there's a lot of misery - poverty, meth, etc.

[elguapo4]

There's large areas of west and south west Dublin that are absolutely horrendous places, I'll probably be shot down by other people who were there, but I thought Trondheim was a bit of a dump.

[Lang Spoon]

Dublin within the canals is agreeably dense, about on a par with Amsterdam, and much greater than Copenhagen or Rotterdam. Beyond there it's a disaster of low density sprawling housing with fuck all facilities. Ongar is one of the most depressing places I've ever been. Folk move there when they start a family, but there's nowhere for kids to play that doesn't involve a car journey. No pavements on half the roads, nightmare future slum stuff.

[Lang Spoon]

My girlfriend thinks my hometown is lovely, but she's only really seen the park and castle by the sea, the quaint Harbour at Dysart, the very good art gallery and pleasant enough late 19th century tenements and cottages. The full dereliction of the high st, the sheer fuck all to do, not even a cinema in the town, will have to await another visit to Kirkcaldy.

[Lang Spoon]

I could take her to a Rovers game and then she'd know true Fife despair and emptiness.

[Lang Spoon]

Peterhead is fucking awful. Bleak and grey as you like.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Keady,

???? Keady is just a small country town. A reasonably nice one by most standards.

I think you want Coalisland. A town that filled in its canal to build a carpark and a petrol station, and which is completely dominated by the absurd fortified police station that looks like all the greenzone all at once, which rather bizarrely is situated besides the biggest hunger striker mural I've ever seen. It's also the only place I've ever been where I've seen people shit-faced drunk at 2 in the afternoon, while their kids run around the bar.

[San Bernardhinault]

There are swarms of charmlessly rubbish places within about 30 miles of the M25 - Slough and Watford and Aylesbury and Bracknell and Luton and Crawley and so on and so forth. But I feel that possibly the worst that I ever went to was Grays.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

I was born in Grays. I've never been back.

[Lang Spoon]

which is completely dominated by the absurd fortified police station that looks like all the greenzone all at once, which rather bizarrely is situated besides the biggest hunger striker mural I've ever seen

I'd say the two things aren't unconnected.