What's the worst place you've ever been in the UK?

[In2mindsss]

Ill go first.

Morecambe. Nice views but proper creepy.

I have a relative who moved to Bradford and loves it there. She is very glad she made the move. She has been there decades now.

I have a soft spot for H’west. You don’t feel scared or intimidated as you do in so many places that have been mentioned. Lots of towns are fighting a losing battle because we just don’t need the shops that we did 50 years ago. It’s like other places on here, where you might not make a special point of visiting but it seems a pleasant place to live. It has a few good coffee shops, castle ruins, a good view across the river, a decent hospital and the usual large stores on the periphery. A good florist, an art materials shop, a park, and other independent shops. The geography gives it character.

And the Vincent Davies store is good.

Have to speak up for it!

I can't believe how many people have actually been to Jaywick. I would never have even heard of it but for that TV programme about 10 years ago.

Merthyr Tydfil.

Same here.

I think so many use Portsmouth for the ferries they only see Buckland and Landport which - let’s be honest - aren’t the best advert for the city 🫣

I used to do a lot of travel for work and the two areas that unnerved me the most were Barrow and the Forest of Dean. The first is like travelling to the end of the earth to find nothing. I was working on a project with kids from deprived backgrounds and it was truly sad how little there was for them (early 2000s), an the Forest is beautiful if you visit as a tourist, but something terribly down at heel once you start looking beneath the surface. Also, one of the few places where they all stare at you as "outsiders" I have been to (barring some parts of rural Wales).

Got very bad vibes in Bridgwater, Somerset. Couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

Bradford…felt very quiet and a bit intimidating when I was there. Such a shame as it had a great vibe in the 80s.

Bournemouth town centre has gone downhill, as a lot of town centres have, but it’s seven miles of coastline and beach, and close proximity to beautiful countryside and forest, is its redeeming feature.

The whole of Kent gives me a sense of foreboding. Not sure why but I find it a depressing place.

Luton Town centre
Tilbury

Southend-on-Sea
parts of Manchester (not the whole city)

I went in the 90’s for a wedding. It wasn’t so much the place it just felt behind the times.

Pitsea
Ponders End
Peterborough
Cumbernauld
Great Yarmouth

They get really fed up with people driving around to gawp, like a modern day Bethlem hospital. There are people leading decent quiet lives in Jaywick.

Northampton. I couldn't believe what I was seeing in the middle of the day. Just shocking, and profoundly depressing.

Redcar.

I’m going to throw a curveball and say sevenoaks. No charm nothing unique and all the people who live there are the kind of people who want to live in a plastic town filled with plastic people with no character

Blackpool is vile, Lancaster is depressing.

Bradford is a total shithole. In london, Acton is particularly bleak.

Oh no… I’ve always wanted to visit the Forest of Dean. I knew someone whose family lived there and she was trying to move back. I read an autobiography of someone who grew up there in the early C20 and the poverty she described was humbling

Manchester - but specifically the canal that runs through it (we were on a narrowboat and canals do pass by some run down parts of towns/cities)

One end is a huge pub which looked like a lovely place to sit and have a drink, thought 'oh this looks lovely' as we used the lock. Got to the other end and the last lock which is now under buildings and encased in concrete, plastered with 'No soliciting' signs. There were clearly a few people ignoring those signs. DD1 was told to keep the boat away from the tow path and in clear water and to try not to get into conversations, as DH and I worked the lock as fast as we could.

Portland Bill lighthouse. This is more Woo, gave me the creeps as we drove down to it and the whole week we stayed there.

It's all very subjective. I like a lot of the places mentioned here but can see why others wouldn't.

That’s surely not the worst place you’ve been to, though?

I’ve got a soft spot for Newport- have been many times. It’s not posh or affluent or gentrified but the people are mostly friendly (even to English folk like me!) and there is some lovely countryside around the area.

I hate these kind of threads, it’s basically bashing the whole of the north! No wonder we are all peed off and annoyed everything is London centric! There’s so much deprivation because we don’t get the funding.

its just a thread about laughing at all the ‘poor northern people’ in their horrible towns! We can’t all afford to live in fancy areas but we have feelings!

No, thats how it USED to be, up until about the mid 2010s I'd say.

Its now more like a hooray Henry playground. Im from Brighton and have to go back every other month and feel it reached and surpassed the tipping point and is now overly gentrified

It's noisy, litter, graffiti, full of weirdos students, traffic everywhere, insane parking prices, horrid beach, did I mention students....

Yes, Bedford doesn't really belong on this list : otherwise you'd have every really very dull and slightly overlooked market town in the UK on here. People actually born and bred in Bedford are often very attached. On a list which includes Jaywick you can't really have Bedford!

It's very well connected so it's easy to get out of. As I was told when I came for interview once.

Apparently it's going to be amazing once we get Universal...

I mentioned Basildon upthread as being somewhere I found depressing, which I did, but there was nothing creepy about the place.

Lot of posters have mentioned places that had a sense of foreboding and it reminded me of how I felt when I visited Portland. It’s a nice enough looking place with lovely views but I felt a weird vibe as soon as we arrived and was glad to leave a couple of hours later.