Towns & Cities that are F----d.

Protein Junkie said:
Great Fred this.
Maybe we could do something similar to the music ko cup thread.
Oh and Merthyr Tydfil and the Gurnos Estate gets my vote.
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If we’re going down to the level of estates…
I nominate an estate that doesn’t now exist (in its original form):

Southgate in Runcorn

I lived on it as a student on placement at ICI.
It was a concrete and bright plastic design nightmare (originally designed as a modern middle class living space), it quickly filled up with Runcorn’s finest, and students with nowhere else to live.

I arrived at my bright plastic (pink and orange) terrace and said hello to my student flatmates (bizarrely I’d been briefly at MGS in the same form, with one of them), and was shown the local papers front page ‘murder at the merry monk’… whereupon they led me back to the front door and pointed to the left ‘it’s there’… a few orange/pink units down, was the typical 60’s/70’s style pub (no Alsatian on roof though), they then pointed at our front door step ‘they died there’.
The following weeks newspaper had ‘terror at the tricorn’ which was another pub just outside the estate.

So, as well as the plastic Lego houses, there was the 4 storey concrete blocks with round windows (ship like design…) with their wonderful concrete dimly lit stairwells, their piss stained and smelling vestibules for each level. All looking out over the lovely grass and gorgeous tree lined squares … sorry … all looking out over the overgrown weed invested, garbage dumped, shattered glass lined squares.
To escape the estate, you could exit via its one road in (Brinnington nods), or some overgrown footpaths out to some slightly less violent pubs.
There is (was?) a shopping centre to one edge of the estate ‘Shopping City’, which had its shops on stilts with parking underneath, and bus way ramps going up to the shops from the ever lasting circular roads of a new build town.
The shops being on stilts meant (if you were walking from the estate), you had to get up to the level of a walkway that crossed the ever lasting circular roads. This meant that you had to pick a block and a stairwell of the block (they were all interconnected by concrete walkways) to ascend, and then walk past poor people front doors that opened onto the walkways which led to the shopping.

Carefully treading over the piles (or smearings…) of dog muck from the feral and nonferal population of hounds that inhabited the walkways.

There was a garage just outside the estate in its one road escape, that served a few basics , which meant as a student you could survive on a Sunday (shopping city closed).

For those of a FOC bent like me, you might remember the adverts on ITV for ‘come to Warrington Runcorn, call Eileen Bilton today’… her (iirc) empty offices were in Shopping city , just as you entered from the walkway from the estate… no wonder it was empty!

One of the concrete blocks was entirely unoccupied - the rumour was that the builders had plumbed in the new fangled heating system wrongly, and when it was turned on, rendered it uninhabitable and too costly to fix. It looked the best block… (blue and yellow)… which was odd typing that, I’ve just realised there was hardly any graffiti anywhere, including that abandoned block. Nor were its windows smashed up. Silver linings, eh!

Returning to the street of ‘murder’, let’s just say that the native population of Southgate were not of any shade to trouble Dulux’s colour ranges. Which meant for the incoming ‘scientists/engineers to be’ students, that some of them stuck out even more than from just being students.
The local population welcomed one such lad by deciding his car (some students had them) was a touch too flash (it didn’t have rust or a dent larger than half the car), by torching it… and this was again outside ‘that’ front door (I’d moved a few door down by then - actually swapping with the lad who’s car was torched).

I had a great (albeit smashed every night) time there, probably the most relaxed 9 months of my life. I didn’t feel scared (due to drink probably) or threatened (other than once going into the Merry monk… you could hear a knife drop when we approached squelchingly the bar) and for the students (50+ scattered around the place) it was a case of making the best they could do with a shithole.

Edit: near the end of my 2nd stint living there (I got a summer job at ICI), they started moving people out - tastefully (true) blocking up the round windows with the wood painted the same colour as was the block.
And eventually it was knocked down , to be replaced iirc with actual middle class houses (and hopefully some non crap social housing)
 
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NPBlue said:
I think we need some context with regard to violent crime in the UK. Reading an article in a newspaper is one thing, looking at official statistics brings up a more accurate guide to what's happening.

The Police recorded 45,639 knife offences in the 12 months ended September 2022, with 68% of that number being for possession of a knife. The total figure was an increase of 21% over the previous year, but the previous year recorded lower than normal figures due to the lockdown.

Other offences included in the figures are possession of a sharp object and threatening to use a knife or sharp object.

Those figures are for possession of knives, sharp objects, and threatening to use a knife or sharp object, not actual assaults.

The NHS treated 4,171 people in hospital due to assault by a knife or sharp object in the 12 months ended September 2022, an increase of 2% over the previous year, but lower than 2019, when figures for hospital admissions peaked.

Of the 696 people murdered in the UK in 2022, 261 were killed by a knife or sharp object, and knives or sharp objects have always been the most common weapons for murder in the UK, followed by being hit with a blunt instrument.

In global rankings, the UK sits in 66th place for violent crime, which includes all assaults, not just knife crime, and sits in 174th place out of 220 countries for murder, at 1.2 unlawful deaths per 100,000 people, which is less than the EU average.

To put this into some sort of context, 1,695 people were killed on the roads in 2022, with 28,100 people seriously injured.

A person in the UK is at more risk of being run over than being stabbed or murdered. I agree there is a blight of lawlessness among primarily young people involved with gangs, drugs and turf wars, and I haven't checked the figures, but I would suspect a large percentage of stabbings in the UK are confined to those engaged in those activities.

The Independent article did briefly mention the reduction of youth intervention programmes in the UK. Those programmes were axed by the Government as part of their austerity drive. The criticism that decision received at the time about the impact it would have on the lives of vulnerable youngsters growing up in poor, inner city areas was well founded. They had been very successful in steering many of those youngsters away from gangs and drugs, and it's no surprise such a short sighted decision would result in those young people now living such dangerous and chaotic lives.

My own view is we have failed them. They have effectively been abandoned to their fate, and however much money the government thought they were saving by cutting those programmes, the costs to society in general, and those young lives in particular, are far greater.

The same could be said about the reduction in the number of serving police officers, another short sighted action under the guise of austerity.

Violence happens in the UK, of course it does, but for most people living here, it is rarely encountered. I'm 66, and the number of fights I have seen when out and about can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

I'm struggling to think of more than 5 incidents I have witnessed over the years, none of them involved a weapon, and I was probably out every night of the week for decades between my teens and mid 40's, twice a week or so since, including many a night in Manchester city centre.

When I meet my friends, neighbours, or other people I know, the subject of personal safety is not a topic of conversation, and I think that is an accurate guide to the level of threat we feel.

I can't speak for everyone, and I don't know what it is like living in a poor inner city area, but the majority of the population don't live in those areas and probably live lives as uneventful as mine has been over years.
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Excellent, no problem with knives then, I've been misled :)
 
Lovebitesandeveryfing said:
Sop makes you think of “sopping wet”, “milk sop”, etc. And who wants to live in a place that's only got work to recommend it?
(Probably that's a lie — I always think of it as one of these places with structural unemployment, from grandfather passed to son and then grandson, and grandmother through daughter to granddaughter).
Re. Corby. I was once at a rock festival where a group of lads in the crowd started chanting “We come from Corby Town, so take your knickers down” and kept it up for quite a while.
Jeez! that just says it all, eh?
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It's funny how shit places seem to have shit names, maybe the names cause the shitness
The shittiest place around Brisbane is Logan, fucking horrible..
Amazingly it rhymes with Bogan :)
 
Bill Walker said:
It's funny how shit places seem to have shit names, maybe the names cause the shitness
The shittiest place around Brisbane is Logan, fucking horrible..
Amazingly it rhymes with Bogan :)
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Boggo Road prison looked to be in a rough area too
 
Any1aBlue said:
Another vote for Worksop. In the 90’s 5pm Friday afternoon: Old ‘ladies’ pissing in public (Inc one doing it in the roadside gutter in rush hour!), pubs where no shoes allowed - piled up in foyer. Pubs rammed with folks who appeared straight out of Star Wars Bar. Snogging octogenarians with no teeth.
Worksop is The Land That Time Forgot. (Bit like Stoke)……
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No shoes allowed in a pub?! What am I missing as a reason… Imagine walking to a messy toilet in socks.
 
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