What do you most dislike about the town where you live?

[Dieu]

Edinburgh. I'm sitting in bed listening to a mouse scurrying around underneath. They'll be wanting to nest inside, now that the weather's turning colder. And I also have the horror of hearing them inside the walls.
All very normal here in the New Town.

What are your bugbears where you live?

@BonnesVacances if you lived on the "opposite edge" of somewhere lovely to me you could very well be 5 minutes from a motorway and less than an hour from at least one major city - it's a big old somewhere lovely

Developers (including the local council) building on every square inch, but not a single property is affordable.

Developers giving notice to the businesses, but then not developing the massive sites until the council cave and give them several million more.

It's a deprived area run for the benefit of the wealthy who infest the outer areas of the Borough, who don't need to use the town centre. Their green spaces are protected, ours have been declassified, so will probably see the council developers build more £450,000 microflats on them before long.

2 out of 3 shops are boarded up. Even Starbucks has fucked off from the centre.

Kids come to the non academised schools on constant alert for danger. You have to know what the postcode borders are so that, when the constant roadworks and construction traffic mean they can't catch their usual bus, you aren't expecting them to cross into another gang's territory.

And its not DP's village. But the property costs are so high, we'll never be able to save enough to move there, as we barely squeak through each month.

I think the worst thing about where we live is the way people slag it off, and the way they slag off the Labour council yet keep voting Labour back in. It has a lot of good points, particularly the beach and the nearby countryside, but the council want to develop the best site for seaside leisure into a housing estate - with no thought for where the kids in those family homes will go to school.

There is a site in the outskirts of the city centre which has been an undeveloped wasteland for years (Vaux anyone) and once it finally got underway the contractor went bust. Sadly, the town centre is suffering from empty shop unit syndrome, which sadly is widespread across the country, but one of the biggest gripes is the parking charges in the car parks, which put people of doing their shopping in town and they go to the retail parks instead.

@beanbag7 i think we live in the same town :)

The people.

Ridiculous levels of sectarianism which is largely unchallenged. In the month of July I can hardly stand to look outside.

The insipid people. No colour, no spark, no initiation of conversation; no banter. Beige bobs and 4x4s and little Joshua's swimming gala.

The drunks that take over the city centre on a Saturday afternoon.

The 2 degrees of separation. Everyone knows everyone and has vile attitudes

The pub is shit.

So many cars on the roads and you have to drive your car like you stole it 😂 really, this is not a joke.

Too many people, expensive housing as it’s commutable to London. The shopping centre in the town is dire, and parking is expensive. I haven’t been to the town centre since Christmas and I live about 3/4 of a mile away.

The way half the city centre has become a ghost town with empty shops covered in fly posters & graffiti, the fact that I no longer know the way round my own home city in a car. The location of disabled parking is a total mystery. If any of my family needs emergency hospital treatment, the only hospital in the city is 9 miles across town in an unsafe area where muggings & assaults are a regular occurrence. The amount of spice & problem drinkers there are, not only in the city centre but in the suburbs & the rise of knife crime amongst teenagers, in a two week period last year there were 3 deaths, all young men under 20. Even after all that, I live in a beautiful city with some amazing green spaces & incredible history which has been preserved.

Greggs on every corner, though, @MuddlingMackem :o I think your markses will go the same way as our city centre one, though.

The locals like to blame everything bad on students but crime doesn't go down when they aren't in town--it's the locals (and their teenagers, haha) being anti social. There are many people drinking to excess and I don't feel safe alone in town on a weekend evening around them, after several incidents (I used to work evenings.).

Litter everywhere.

Every time a new restaurant opens in town the local Facebook group goes nuts saying NOT ANOTHER RESTAURANT and yet it is impossible to get a table by walking in anywhere. Why do they hate restaurants so much??

@helpmeiamatoad up north and starting with a G? Have a friend who lives there and it has been a massive drama all over the village Facebook page apparently!

Mine- the people... If you haven't lived in the village (different one to the above!) for at least five generations you're not really welcome.

Small market town in Yorkshire - over the last 10 years it's had a bit of a renaissance with lots of interesting shops, festivals, etc, and there's lots to do in the surrounding area, but for some reason it completely shuts down on Sundays. Nothing is open! It makes no sense - the place is bustling on a Saturday but then everybody has to go to the next town along the next day if they want to do anything or buy stuff.

The local police spend most of their evenings eating bacon sandwiches and drinking coffee with the night watch security guards down on the industrial estate, so the area around the pubs becomes a bear garden on Friday and Saturday nights. I regularly have to wash vomit off my doorstep on Sunday mornings, usually full of partially digested curry from the takeaway down the road.

And although there's a veneer of middle class aspiration about the place, a lot of the people who have been here all their lives are swivel eyed National Front types. I'm not exaggerating, they regularly leave flyers on the community notice board. The contrast between the image the tourist board wants to portray and what the place is really like is quite funny really...

The lack of diversity. I really like the town i live, in terms of the area, and surrounding countryside,and it has good transport links and good schools but it really is (and i didn't really consider it when i moved) very undiverse in terms of race, social and economy. I grew up in london (suburbs, then more centrally) and stupidly didnt really think how other places would differ in terms of people!! My DC think they are deprived because we dont go on foreign holidays every year, and they have 2nd hand phones and clothes sometimes. SAHMs bemoan to me the stress of not having booked the hotel for 1 part of their 4 week holiday or say I'm lucky to be working (and kids in childcare) and not to be going away because of the stress of packing and jet lag!!

I don't like the hugely inflated price of property (Trendy SE Seaside town) and the lack of good quality affordable rented accommodation for people who can never dream of buying a home in their home town.

Trendy shops full of expensive, upcycled or wacky/high end object d'art and furniture.

No police presence. At all.

London has much to recommend it but falls down on:
Incredibly expensive housing - both rentals and purchasing
Tubes rammed and like saunas which makes my commute v unpleasant
Air pollution
Homelessness

@PomBearWithAnOFRS @hidingtonothing

Hartlepool isn't that bad. My parents live there and it's slowly getting better. The main road has just been redone which will make it miles better, new business are coming in (new big aldi store, burger King, has Starbucks now too! 🙄😂)

The Navel museum is great and Seaton is being revamped.

Maybe I'm biased because I grew up there but it's not that bad. There are some beautiful areas too and many of the outlying villages are lovely.

just not the one where my friend lives

I live within a National Park, we have a County Council, we also have a National Park Association. They are mostly useless and many of them are really only interested in box ticking. I could expand on the officers of this particular park but for the sake of my sanity I won't.
Our town centre is a haven for charity shops, no business rates for them, also coffee shops, there are far too many for a small town. They do pay business rates though
I also fucking hate the bypass around the town, on Bank holidays and weekends it's a race track for bikers- the noise sounds like angry bees, they are an absolute fucking liability. When you hear a bike screaming around the bypass then the next sound you hear is a siren you know inside that some poor fucker has crashed.

^ hythe?

The large number of Small minded, loud mouthed, selfish people.
HS2.
Dog shit.

@PickAChew, oh aye, can't fault it on the Greggs front.

QuestionableMouse, are you telling someone who actually lives in Hartlepool that it’s not that bad? That’s a bit off, it’s probably changed a bit since you were a child. I remember playing on bombsites as a child and thinking they were wonderful, as an adult, I can only wonder wtf my parents were thinking.