Topic: Crappiest town in the UK

[Clive]

If you are thinking of going on holiday in the UK maybe you should take a look at this website before you book up.

http://www.idler.co.uk/html/frontsection/craptown/craptown16.htm

[TR]

This is what my search came up with  .

Town/Village: Leiston


What distinguishes Leiston is its proximity to the two Sizewell Nuclear power reactors. I would swim in the waters around the station, warmed to a tepid tropical temperature by the heat of the core. My housemate swore by their restorative powers, as if it were an industrial Lourdes.

Although this wing of Suffolk was patronised by the great media clans (both the Freuds and the Waughs maintained compounds further up the coast, the fruit of generations of nepotism) Leiston was quite beneath the moneyed bohemian crowd. There were no crappy shops selling watercolours or "crafts" knocked out by skittish sloanes still recovering from their nervous breakdown.

No doubt the constant prescence of Sizewell's tessellated white dome, looming on the horizon like a compound eye, prevented gentrification. There was a palpable atmosphere of conspiracy and evil, recalling Nigel Kneale's Quatermass shows of the Fifties. When a friend came to visit, I convinced him that the Butcher's Arms in Knodishall was merely a front for an opium processing operation. Opium poppies grow wild in the area, and the prefabricated feel of the bar leant my outrageous lie a certain plausibility. He still cites his visit as to Leiston the main cause of his subsequent psychological difficulties.


Matthew De Abaitua <<<<< good old English/Leiston name  
not

[Clive]

The nearest to me is Port Talbot and I was actually born there although we moved soon after.
The refinery it refers to is where I worked for nearly 30 tears.


Town/Village: Port Talbot

A big steel works/refinery in the middle of a eerie sulphur infused lake surrounded by a few crumbling housing estates. The main landmark is the M4 passing over it and the orange windsock on the side of this which, no matter what the weather always stands at an angle of 90 degrees, a filth encrusted, stiffened warning flag.

The smell is enough to keep your windows rolled shut in August.

Ms Justine Marie Davidge LLB

PORT TALBOT DEFENDED!

What other town of this size has given birth to two of the greatest actors ever (Burton/Hopkins). And only the snootiest, pansiest dilletante would deny the magnificence of the Gotham city-style steelworks that snuggle next to the Irish sea.

Ben Boyd

MORE DEFENCE!

Ms Justine Davidge is right indeed to draw attention to the combination of steel works and chemical plant that makes the air around the town a veritable toxic soup. But she fails to point out the unearthly beauty this gives to the Port Talbot sunset.

Richard John Evans

[Simon]

Here's Burgess Hill, which is next door to where I am, in Haywards Heath.  This is a classic!  

      
   

Town/village: Burgess Hill

Nestled in the heart of rural Mid Sussex lies Burgess Hill.

I grew up in a nearby village and shopping trips with the family often involved a trip there, though God knows why. A few years ago, they built a snazzy new shopping centre, but failed to

even half fill it with shops for the first two or three years. As I grew up and made friends who lived there, we would occasionally take our lives into our hands and visit a local pub or two. I can honestly say that, having been to nearly every one of them over the years, they are ALL crap, filled with overweight, back street hard nuts, just gagging to rip your head off and s**t in the hole. Suffice to say, all the people I knew who lived there, moved away as soon as they were able. To make matters even worse, Burgess Hill is expanding as they build more and more faceless housing estates.

The town is now threatening to swallow up the surrounding villages, villages which have rich histories and which have for years slept soundly in the knowledge that they are separate entities. Pity these poor souls, for theirs is a terrible fate.

Richard Cutler

THERE?S NO DEFENCE

It's pointless even having the "defend Burgess Hill" option available.

No-one who has ever been could raise even the slightest doubt that Burgess Hill is the epicentre of all that is bad about Britain, and I lived there for eighteen long years, I should know.

Neighbouring Haywards Heath is also so unbelievably horrible that some of the residents designed a website, which must have taken hundreds of man hours, bemoaning it's total lack of any features which might make it 'liveable' (see http://www.thisishaywardsheath.com )

Simon Duck

   

[chorleydave]

My favourite, so far, is Rhyl - a place alledgedly in North Wales, but as unWelsh as you are ever likely to find.  Known in Lancashire  as "Liverpool-On-Sea.

Town/Village: Rhyl

Rhyl.

The place where junkies go to die.

It's too depressing to talk about any more.

Leon Walters

Says it all, really.