I spent a really unpleasant evening in a club in Widnes a few years ago, A photographer and I were looking for ladies to intervierw and photgraph for a feature onm the town's main disco. The ladies didn't have to be Ms.World, but they did need to be presentable, and we almost gave up and came home by 11.30! I've never been back since!
Grim places? Try B&B's in Wolverhampton :( I worked there for a month a couple of years ago, and goodness knows I stayed in enough of them. I never did find one that was a)clean and b)not staffed by perverts who drilled holes in the bathroom door so they could watch you in the shower!! Needless to say, I won't be looking to stay there again.
Bury Park in Luton, Bedfordshire, has got to be the s**t hole of the Universe! You would never believe it was once a thriving 'hat making town' in Victorian times. You now require a passport to enter it!
true, they say it's "grim up north" - Hull is pretty dire, as are parts of Manchester. My personal worst is the Meadows area of Nottingham where i had to stay in digs for a couple of years - not only was the place grim but i thought the people were grim too. apologies to any meadows-dwelling ABers. All this said i love living up north and i think certain places "dahn sarf" are godawful - how anyone can live in London beats me, Slough etc etc etc. the noise, the traffic, the overcrowding, no trees, hills, fresh air - London gets my vote for the grimmest place p1$$ed off The North
I can vouch for darth vader's comments about the meadows etsate in Nottingham. It is a place devoid of beauty and hope. Gun crime and drugs are rife and I pity any of the decent people holed up in there.
Looking for accomodation in Leeds a few months ago for a new job, and I drove into an area called, I think, Beeston, just off a hellishly bleak, busy main road. High-stepped back-to-backs behind metal security doors, strewn with debris,rusting car hulks and the clear remains of street (!!) bonfires... Looked like 1930's Harlem, but without the police presence.. Didn't stay with the job long... Stayed with my sanity instead and left Beeston..!!
Newport Gwent. During the war the Luftwaffe dropped 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,001 tons of high explosive bombs in one night, right into the heart of the town. The total damage of this massive bombing run was approximately 10 schillings!