I was brought up in Doncaster. It really is a dump. Some of the surrounding villages are quite pretty, eg Bawtry
But it's a post-industrial town that once had coal, coking, steel, steel rope, glass, and train maintenance activities, but they are diminished or completely gone now. The place has never really recovered, and now trades on its undoubtedly favourable geographical location - on the East Coast mainline, and at the junction of the M62 and M1 - having become a distribution centre.
People with any ambition grown up and run away from Doncaster. e.g Jeremy Clarkson, Diana Rigg, BRIAN BLESSED, me.
What's left is the mass rump of educationally and socially underperforming, disempowered, dispirited people, administered by a small "officer class" of local government, legal, medical and managerial middle class people, who mostly live in Bessacar.
I have some Indian heritage, and over the years I've come to see Doncaster as a sort of internal domestic colonial territory, with local low-skilled "coolies" (as my Indian uncles would have called them), overseen and looked after by a socially-isolated "district commissioner" caste, as it would have been under the Raj, having their future determined by distant decision-makers in London.