Upminster Area has gone downhill

[Bunintumm]

We were considering moving to this area however a few friends already living in Upminster/Hornchurch have advised us to look outside of London as since after Covid the area has gone downhill with lots of car theft/muggings etc.
im torn as the schools both primary and secondary are good and I’m currently pregnant (well less than 6 weeks) so am thinking long term too. Advice welcome.

I live several hundred miles away but my OHs Grandparents live there and we stay there quite regularly. It seems like a really lovely, quite affluent area to me and they've never mentioned any car thefts or anything like that

They’ve also mentioned crime because of youths coming from neighboring areas due to the easy links with the c2c train there.

Locals always say the area has gone downhill. Near me local forums are full of how bad the traffic is, crime rates shooting up, no GPs. What they mean is a 10 minute jam at rush hour on one roundabout, a bit of shoplifting and occasional vandalism and not being able to phone a GP at 10 and go in on the same day. I often think about when I lived in north London and it would take me an hour to get to the M25, I took literally everything out of my car every night and kept the keys in the microwave and the GPs reception was like a scene out of the night of the living dead. It’s all relative!

You can look online and get crime stats for areas (I think based on a postcode) how do they compare?

I didn’t know that!

Bump

It's not a great area, we considered it and felt it really wasn't for us, Havering is a problematic area.

It's not in London.

It is true Upminster/Hornchurch has gone down hill just like many places. We use to live there and still have family and friends there who are trying to move out. Was in Hornchurch on Friday evening and there was police handing out leaflets outside the station due to a related crime.
Many gangs coming down from further London to mug the local teenagers. Car thefts and pick pockets are also getting worse. Havering has gone downhill over the last few years, but saying that everywhere seems to be going down hill. Where we live now also is having the same problems rising.

It is, it's in Havering.

What did you feel was off with the area in your eyes?

I was brought up in upminster and my goal was to move back once I had a family and could afford it. We are at that stage now where we are considering moving and upminster is no longer the goal. The high street is not great, the people to be honest are quite rude and kids come down on the train to rob the local kids. My parents still live there and I'm only 15 min away in a car.

Both primary and senior schools are very good though.

We are looking at Chelmsford/billericay.

Have you ever been somewhere and just felt off like it's going to head south quite soon and that you're not welcome? That's how we found it.

Yea that’s what I heard kids coming in from other areas and rude people.

We considered those areas too and weren't impressed there either, we went the other side of the city instead.

Was it ever uphill?! I’ve always felt uneasy going through there. Are you worried about people coming down from Essex etc? I’ve not heard about this, but I had a friend in Chelmsford once and he hated it and I hated visiting, it was a horrible place so I’m not surprised people wanting to get out of there!

Chelmsford was just not nice. Not in a crime way like we got from Havering but in the way of no one seemed happy to live there and there seemed to be so much building work when we went, we struggled to find any green spaces.

Anywhere on the London Underground is London imv

Also felt the high street wasn’t great and saw some kids at that time smash the window of the department store there.

Amersham (end of the Met line) is 27 miles outside London, in Buckinghamshire.

I think Hornchurch was in Essex until the mid sixties when they changed the boundaries and everything east of Romford got reorganised, but it's not my turf

It’s lb havering

Where are you based?

I can’t remember Upminster ever being uphill. 🤷‍♀️

Upminster was definitely des Res in the 90s, more so than Hornchurch. I occasionally visit now and it feels a bit tattier but I think that's true of almost everywhere now. Charity shops and vape shops and empty shops. I think if you were quite central, used the closest schools etc you get a bit of a villagey, everyone knows everyone else kind of vibe.

Whats des res