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

JASR said:
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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Did you ever go in the swinging sporran or the Straw Hat in the shopping city? I had mates who lived in Beechwood and used to hate the walk from the shopping city and on past Southgate. Runcorn itself was a mad place especially if you ventured into the old town. Some mad nights and brawls at the Cherry Tree pub as well. Lived in Hough Green on the other side of the Mersey for a while.
 
Every town and city on planet earth is fucked. It's just some can afford to inoculate themselves against the fuckedness.
 
shackattack said:
Did you ever go in the swinging sporran or the mad hatter in the shopping city? I had mates who lived in Beechwood and used to hate the walk from the shopping city and on past Southgate. Runcorn itself was a mad place especially if you ventured into the old town. Some mad nights and brawls at the Cherry Tree pub as well. Lived in Hough Green on the other side of the Mersey for a while.
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Went to the Beechwood a lot, best pub within the compass points of the grid like ways out of Southgate, other than the Castle which involved walking across Southgate, through shopping city and up the hill.
Never knew there were pubs in shopping city!
There was another pub, at the other compass point, which was empty/boring as hell, the name escapes me, as I only went once.
Didn’t go much into Runcorn old town, though some did. Went to the Linnets (football?) christmas (?) do- Christ it really was an alcoholic time.

Edit: hmmm maybe the boring pub was the Beechwood… memory…
 
dronefromsector7G said:
I remember going to Cole’s supermarket in Mildura with this hippy Kiwi bloke who decided to go barefoot, about half a mile from the open prison I was in
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Yeah very common in NZ and Oz. See kids and teenagers all the time barefoot, it's like a culture thing which I don't understand.
 
Bill Walker said:
Yeah very common in NZ and Oz. See kids and teenagers all the time barefoot, it's like a culture thing which I don't understand.
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I was hanging out with him in Melbourne and then again in Sydney and he never went barefoot iirc. Think he was just pissed as after picking grapes we all used to get back mid afternoon and just get the slabs of beer out
 
JASR said:
Went to the Beechwood a lot, best pub within the compass points of the grid like ways out of Southgate, other than the Castle which involved walking across Southgate, through shopping city and up the hill.
Never knew there were pubs in shopping city!
There was another pub, at the other compass point, which was empty/boring as hell, the name escapes me, as I only went once.
Didn’t go much into Runcorn old town, though some did. Went to the Linnets (football?) christmas (?) do- Christ it really was an alcoholic time.

Edit: hmmm maybe the boring pub was the Beechwood… memory…
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The Beechwood was full of a lot of off duty police and local heavies, best place for a lock in for that reason. There was about 3 pubs in the shopping city if I remember, the sporran was at the top of the escalators from the bus station and it was run by an ex everton player ( Alex Young). Mackinnons later called Foxys was a club but not for the faint hearted. Was a weird place with a lot of united fans along with both of the Liverpool clubs bit like Warrington
 
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