To think our towns and cities are just so run down lately, and our standard of living has decreased significantly?

I'd say any street vendor with questionable equipment should be held to the same hygiene standards and scrutiny as those with proper licensed facilities. The fact Market St in Manchester often has 3 or 4 of these sellers in a line suggests it’s more of a chancers game than a reputable venture. They make the streets look god awful and a free for all for the other peddlers dragging carts of tat up and down (phone covers, hats, toys). Hopefully councils start taking strong action to get rid of them.

We'll have to agree to disagree. I don't think they look trashy. I think the carts selling cheap mobile phone covers look more trashy but I don't have a huge objection to them.

A lot of us have to work full time. I’m working 9-5 Monday to Friday, which happens to be when the shops are also open during the week. I can quickly pop out in my lunch break, but that only gives me about 20 mins in the actual shops. At the weekend I like to do more fun things than shopping, or I have my young kids, one is autistic and often refuses to leave the house anyway. So there is often no time to go to the shops. We have a culture of working all week, is it any surprise that people turn to online shopping in the little spare time they do have after work when the high street is shut anyway?

Sweetcorn? I'm intrigued, never seen this. Speaking of hygiene and food carts, do the mobile hot dog sellers in London still exist? Hygiene non-existent, theoretically hundreds or thousands of people should have been poisoned by the wretched things over the years but I never heard of one.

They also look trashy.
Its all very well being 'right on' about them but they make a high street worse in my opinion.

I'd like to know how you know they don't have licences or proper hygiene standards. Have you done a full health and safety inspection?

How on earth do you know they have no hygiene standards? They seem pretty clean to me. Roast chestnut sellers (which we have in Leeds) are also just carts dragged around and they've existed since at least Victorian times. Do you object to them as well?

Sorry missed this- they are absolutely a negative thing, no hygiene standards and unlicensed. They’re literally carts dragged along the streets.

No, in Manchester there’s vendors selling tubs of sweetcorn along the main stretch of high street, non of them appear to have proper licenses or hygiene standards.

Plenty of people do. It's very tasty.

We have them in the big high street near me and I think it stinks out the place and looks trashy.
Who the hell wants a cup of sweetcorn as a snack they walk along the shops?!

Apologies, I meant to respond to @Nutmuncherwho mentioned sweetcorn peddlers as if they were a negative thing.

I haven't said there is anything wrong with sweetcorn sellers. I responded to a prevuous poster asking if that was a typo (in someone else's post) and I confirmed that I had seen sweetcorn for sale in Manchester yesterday. The sellers weren't black either...

What's wrong with the sweetcorn sellers?? Is it because they're often black people selling it? We have them in Leeds and it's delicious. A welcome addition to our city.

I normally visit cities in the Midlands and haven't come across mobile sweetcorn sellers before.

I'm local and they're all over the different towns across Greater Manchester. Seen them in other areas too not just around here.

No. I went to Manchester yesterday and there were stalls selling hot flavoured sweetcorn outside the Arndale Centre! They did smell quite nice but I did think it was quite a random foodstuff to be selling. I haven't seen it for sale in any other city, must admit.

@1dayatatime

Nail on the head. Agree 100% with all your points. It is, indeed, managed decline and we're not going to reverse it any time soon as none of our politicians have the faintest idea, so just continue re-arranging the Titannic's deckchairs. As you see, the population aren't ready nor prepared to face what we have to do to turn it around.

Sweetcorn?? Was that a typo

Firstly I agree with you that our towns and cities have steadily become more run down and would say that this is true for the country as a whole, it's just more noticeable in a more built up area. Secondly I don't think that this is necessarily a recent or sudden development but more of a trend that has been going on for the last twenty plus years.

There is no one single cause for this but rather a combination of factors such as:
Population increase - size 2000 the population increases n the UK has increased by 10 million or the equivalent to one new London or eight Birminghams. This is due to a combination of longer life expectancy but mainly due to increased net migration. I don't want to get into a whole migration debate but the simple fact is that infrastructure and services have not kept pace with the population increase (for example the last new water reservoir built in the UK was 1992) so quite simply stuff doesn't work so well.

The de industrialisation and outsourcing of manufacturing to China has removed an entire source of work for those who are not able or don't want to work as say IT professionals or high voltage engineers. The idea back in the late 1990s was that the developing countries would do all the low skilled manufacturing jobs whilst the West up skilled. Unfortunately not everyone is either willing or able to become software engineers and it's not easy to retrain unemployed manufacturing workers into well paid accountants. Plus funnily enough the developing countries also wanted to up skill and coming from countries with minimal social security nets they were more motivated.

This has created over 9 million people that are economically inactive, many on health benefits and many of these due to mental health issues. Again I don't want to get into a benefits debate but the reality is that many of these people are genuinely suffering mentally from the hopelessness of their situation that perhaps might have been averted had they been able to secure work with a liveable wage at an earlier age.

Lastly every Government (Con &Lab) have tried to paper over the cracks in this managed economic decline by spending more money financed by higher debt and higher taxation. The issue that is relevant right now is that increasing debt further is no longer an option (as Liz Truss found out the hard way) and increasing taxes slows economic growth (as Rachel Reeves has found out).

As a result sadly the managed economic decline continues and no electorate would be willing to accept the tough choices needed to fix it.

I come from a large town of about 50,000 people. It was always a well regarded town, not posh but ‘nice’ and a gentle feel to it. I went back in 2013 and it seemed to have got even nicer, more cafe culture type shops, nice restaurants etc.

We did a drive through when we were passing by last week and OMG it’s gone so downhill in 10 years - rubbish and graffiti everywhere, boarded up shops, every other shop is a barber/vape/nails. It had a weirdly menacing vibe and just felt like a totally different place. It’s so sad.

No one goes to shops because they cost more.

People "pop into" town for a look around twice a year and expect it to be thriving by other people spending more in shops to keep them open for when one "fancies a look".

It's unsustainable.

When you walk around Manchester City centre you really do question whether you’re in one of the country’s ‘most exciting and prosperous city’s’ or whether it’s a bad joke. Who is living in all of those glass skyscrapers that dot the skyline? It can’t be all those downtrodden unkempt sickly looking people surely?

From a distance the city can look promising but once you’re there walking the streets, dear god it’s depressingly bad. Given the ridiculous number of Deliveroo and Uber Eats riders swarming the roads someone needs to urgently look into why so many people are seemingly housebound in a city apparently loved by young people? Litter, vomit, graffiti and dirt line every pavement, drug addicts and alcoholics stagger and stumble from doorway to doorway, peddlers of sweetcorn and phone covers fill the main high street whilst very loud ghetto buskers shout and scream all day long. It’s abysmal.

Is this it for the big city’s? They just rot away as services and funding gets stripped to the bare bones? It feels bleak like there’s no coming back because society is largely broken. Yes some areas may have pockets of hope but they’re flashy glossy hotels and bars which don’t cater for the masses. Where do the decent normal people go?

You may believe the water was polluted prior to privatisation but we weren't extorted by owners before privatisation. Since privatisation, consumers have paid increasing bills, money which we were assured was vital for the owners to invest to improve water quality. Instead of which, the monies paid have gone into paying investors, with huge salaries to those at the top. With bonuses. There is also massive debt from borrowing to keep investors happy and our rivers are full of filth. At the bottom of the scale, that's fraud. Up there it's good business practice. Absolutely disgraceful.

before my time as a bill paying adult but wasn’t water usage tied up with rates so no separate water charges but I could be wrong