To ask which towns/cities have NOT gone to the dogs?

Love (and regularly visit) Bury St Edmunds, lots of nice cafes and restaurants, beautiful Abbey gardens and cathedral and a fab independent cinema. Saffron Walden is also really nice, and Cambridge is good too, though very very expensive.

Are subsets of cities allowed? I can recommend Wimbledon village in SW London.

some places between Chelmsford and towards Colchester are beautiful .. very ‘orldy worldy’ little villages which are pretty and timeless

A local taxi driver told me he picked up some of the cast and crew of Netflix"s Stranger Things from Halstead.

Bury st eds still have a thriving market but definitely more foodie based now. Lots of good restaurants and nice bars and lots of small independent shops. There are loads of thriving villages just outside and lots of farm estates with naice cafes and lovely walks. There has been lots of developments which upsets some folk and you don't want to hang around maccies on a Sat night but it is a great place to live. If you are looking for big mall, big chain shops and loads of stuff for teens it's not great but it's an hour on the train to Norwich and Cambridge and 45 mins to the beach at Felixstowe.

Worcester!

I lived all my (well most) my adult life and my children born there - Buckhurst Hill which is lovely as lots of huge green spaces and Epping Forest but also on the central line for work in London (and day trips)
Chigwell lovely (although nothing to do there) but very expensive
up and coming areas which no one would touch with a barge pole just a few years back but now people are moving there an and its massively improved - Debden and Hainult (cheaper than Buckhurst Hill /loughton /chigwell)

A beautiful place in Herts is Sawbridgeworth
Saffron Walden is a lovely market town
Stock is beautiful
Leigh on Sea (voted best place to live in Uk)

After losing my house in my divorce in Buckhurst Hill I moved to Chelmsford and I love it .. has a relatively new cobbled street called ‘Bond Street’ has shops like the white company , Oliver Bonas, high end skincare shops , bookshops with Tiptree cream tea served there, art galleries , a little square where they have adult bean bags in the summer and ‘pop up’ drink stands etc and little wooden cabins/grottos in the winter and mini ice rink .. as well as wagama , all the chain restaurants, and a beautiful dog friendly John Lewis (only John Lewis in Essex ) a beautiful river in town and two cinemas .. odeon and the lovely Everyman cinema with the big velvet couches ..
also has one of the nicest parks called Central Park and a dog friendly cafe (one best cafe /coffee shop award in Essex)
also fantastic schools including the amazing King George Grammar school (looks like an old fashioned independent school)

Billericay is lovely
lots of ‘up and coming’ places in Hertfordshire .. St Albans has always been lovely but places like Cheshunt have massively improved

Stamford in Lincolnshire is beautiful (all grade listed buildings and homes) or surrounding towns around Stamford .. Wansford (is lovely as long as you don’t mind being out in the sticks)

Lots of places in Kent are gorgeous

some places between Chelmsford and towards Colchester are beautiful .. very ‘orldy worldy’ little villages which are pretty and timeless ..

People always say Southend is up and coming and has come a long way but I personally disagree ..
Leigh on sea is a 1000 times better but it’s also so much more expensive than Southend

Witham is a lovely pretty little town and really quick to get to Chelmsford for shops

Maldon is a pretty little town too

Hutton and Brentwood are both lovely and lovely places nearby

Lastly (and only ideal if you WFH , don’t mind getting any job that doesn’t pay well or don’t mind a long commute) is Frinton - on - Sea .. it’s absolutely beautiful and on a warm sunny day the beach could be anywhere .. it’s so clean .. it’s the complete opposite though of Southend .. so could be seen as ‘boring’ but still picturesque and beautiful and not an unsafe place or scruffy etc

I grew up in Sherborne and it has a massive drug problem (although beautiful and “naice” on the surface).

ha yes Yeo-vile has been it’s nickname for ever, and it certainly wouldn’t be a town I would ever suggest as a nice town to move to, but it’s fine.

Interesting. I haven’t noticed any issues and I also visit often (live fairly close) but I guess this just proves that different people will like different place.

I used to work on the community in Bath in the evenings and was very surprised when I realised the extent of its dark underbelly. It’s the same in a lot of cities where two totally (mostly) separate worlds exist alongside each other.
Would I move there? Probably not, but that’s more to do with traffic and tourism than anything.

Kenilworth
Warwick
Leamington Stratford upon Avon
Solihull

Warwick is still lovely and a super
location. Lots to do nearby.

Saffron Walden is expensive and quite dull with appalling connections for public transport. It is pretty, but the high St is either wildly priced home wares or coffees shops or charity shops. The recent building has put huge pressure on the secondary schools. I'd look at Cambridge over SW any day!

I'd move to Oxford - yes expensive - yes full of tourists and students - but fabulous dreamt architecture - great intellectual stimulation like concerts - debates - good schools - lovely shops - especially book shops - restaurants - cafes - vibrant business park with cutting edge companies paying quite high salariea - and it does get quiet in the evenings when the tourists have left..... and only half an hour from the Cotswolds for weekend days out - best of both worlds! And although there are students - they are usually wealthy enough to create demand for the nice things in life.

Yes! I was recently introduced to it.

Does anybody else watch Turd Towns on YouTube? It's very eye opening!

Definitely not Skipton. I’ve lived here for the past 2 years and can’t wait to move.

Gorgeous if you have £400k to spend on a 1 bed flat

Agreed. I won't take my bike into Cambridge, bike theft crime is so high (funding drug problems), homeless sleeping in doorways, county lines, drug addicts camping out in the main town centre car parks, witnessed fights outside pubs etc. No individual shops, lots of empty premises. It scares me for when my teenage son starts going in at night. I have very little desire to go into the town centre for anything. The surrounding area is being heavily developed with no infrastructure to support it.

I live in Sudbury but think all the smaller towns are lovely. Love Bury and Woodbridge

We've just moved to Woodbridge! It's so lovely.

Re, Colchester WTF is the roadworks about near Hythe Tesco Been there for months causing traffic jams

@Serencwtch I agree- yes they might not be 'quite' the same as they were but still all perfectly pleasant I think and far from 'gone to the dogs' I think though that having an affluent customer base is a big help- yes there will be people struggling in those areas but like around here in Bath there is 'old money' where people can still spend.

Try living up here in our NW town. Virtually a city of 300k and we have a poxy M and S on a shopping park out of town and that’s basically it. No other dept store if you can call it that. Big M and S in town centre was shut down last year.

Guildford, Godalming, Haslemere, Farnham, Dorking, Cranleigh, Winchester, Salisbury

Englefield Green? It's a housing estate made up of ex council houses, with a large amount of students in them. Basic amenities. Definitely not somewhere I'd want to live again.