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

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I don't know if I'm just feeling a bit down and bitter lately but I just feel like lately our country seems to have gotten very run down. I went out into town today and couldn't help but notice how grotty and rundown everything looks. Litter everywhere, security guards everywhere - in nearly every clothing shop there is security on the door now, security wandering up and down the high street. It makes you feel really unsafe but they must be there for a reason now? Shops are dirty; filthy floors and used Starbucks cups just left off the shelf for some poor worker to clean up. Clothes for sale that are covered in makeup stains. I just found it really depressing. It's just not one town either, I've noticed it nearly everywhere I've been. I'm in my late 20s so it's not like I've had decades of life experience to draw from and I have a rose-tinted view of yesteryear, but it seems that in the last 5ish years things have really declined.

It’s really not! Great Yarmouth is awfully run down and deprived. The back streets of Norwich are graffitied and closed up.

Tourists visit the best bits of course.

Shhh on Mumsnet those families don’t exist that live on benefits and breed more benefit claimers.

Every aspect of society and our living environment has gone to shit . It’s very depressing to see what this once great country has become .

I genuinely feel a bit uncomfortable in certain English towns.

I often think what did Victorian Britain look like?

Our towns are like some kind of sci-fi set that are basically everyone either scurrying around trying to not make eye contact or just loitering around as there’s no other free third spaces.

Nobody has any money any more. How often do you see families sitting outside cafes/pubs just stopping for a drink/snack? In nicer areas cafe’s are just people ‘hot desking’ or having meetings. Nobody has money to socialise outside of the home.

But worse than that, I find my self in town’s surrounded by people that just look impoverished. People just loitering around within swarms of litter. Hanging around the numerous Turkish barber shops. You don’t see families with two parents as why would you do a family day trip into town? Nobody looks happy, just trying to survive another day.

Empty mobile phone case shops or ‘bargain’ clearance stores. Kid you not there’s a shop selling BHS clearance items. Who on earth wants to buy a faded, discoloured and misshaped BHS pillow for £10?! Even WH Smith’s feels soul destroying. Walk a couple of steps and there’s those sleazy ‘do you care about dogs?’ chuggers.

Everybody is skint, but everybody is fed up, skint and given up. British are down-beaten. Town centres are just the melting pot of our population. It’s a sorry state of affairs.

No, I don’t think that’s correct actually, it obviously depends on when you’re measuring to and from when.

We are certainly the best money launderers shufflers in the world though, or amongst the best. Does that help the average person or high street…no.

The Tories certainly managed to wreck things, it is true.

I’m south London , I go litter picking and the top” tossers” I can see areEastern European depressed looking men with rucksacks full of tins of beer ( remarkable how many tins of Tyskie I pick up), yoofs who seem to think it’s uncool to put their empty boxes of fried chicken in the bin , intravenous drug users who toss their cans in the park or the river and let their Staffies/ XL bullies crap on the ground. There is an erosion of common, civic values and I think the retreat of religion, insecure family structures for some as well as drugs have a lot to do with it.

the irony of calling someone else thick when you can't understand that fewer people dying = more people alive = larger population 😂

My hometown is feral heavy, very depressing to see uneducated generational estate families not breaking the cycle of deprivation and ferality. For years TV spoofed them and made fun of them, we all laughed at the Vicky Pollards, all the while their prevalence quietly exploded and now this feral underclass are a significant portion of the population. It’s very sad when you see the potential of some young children stifled by the influence of idiotic parents.

It doesnt increase, ffs, it gets more disporportionate as one side is bigger than the other.
The irony here is ignoring the fact that the demand for housing would be decreasing with the decreasing birthrate yet the price of property is kept high by immigration and buy to let investments. Nevermind though love, it's only your kids who are going to inherit this mess.

🤦🏻‍♀️

I’m interested to see if people’s expectations about Labour do actually happen.

My estate is approx 15% Indian, Nepalese, Thai and they aren't the families screwing it up.

All the scummy families, who have been scummy since the day I moved here, are white. They litter, fly tip and never bring their bins in. They all work but are antisocial thickies.

At this point Labour are in the unenviable position of having to pick up the scorched earth policies left to them from the previous administration.

I don’t disagree that a higher population has partly caused higher house prices and rental prices- supply and demand will always play a role.

But in the UK, unlike in other countries, no government has had the balls to risk a proper house price crash or correction since the last real one in 1989/90. In this country many people are obsessed with incessant house price growth (a dinner party topic that never seems to go out of fashion) and those people are more likely to vote.

Whether it’s with quantitative easing or temporarily reducing stamp duty at pivotal moments (eg in the Covid lockdown), the successive governments have intervened to prevent the housing market taking its own course which has caused the ridiculous and unsustainable growth we’ve witnessed over the last few decades. So lots of older people are sitting on hundreds of thousands of pounds (if not millions) worth of unearned wealth, that eventually gets passed down to their descendants who will consequently also be in a great situation property wise. Tough luck for those whose parents or grandparents who couldn’t ever afford to buy or only in less affluent areas that haven’t seen much growth, though…

How do the Tories ( or Labour for that matter) make people litter the streets, spit,let their dogs shit everywhere? I must have missed that memo.

I agree with a PP about the large amount of seemingly unemployed men that seem to be loitering around on weekdays. I had a day off today so never paid it much mind before, but today I really noticed how there were so many men just standing aimlessly around. One starting making comments to me and following me. It was a sunny Spring day in half-term; town shouldn't have felt as uncomfortable as it did.

I have also completely given up on being able to afford a decent life. I'm master's educated with a professional job, and I can't even afford to rent a maisonette in my town, let alone buy. Any 'affordable' flats listed for sale are actually £350k flats on shared ownership where you only own a measly 5-10% of the property and pay outlandish rent and service charges on the rest. Long gone are the days of my grandparents and parents where one bog standard salary was enough to support a family of four.

They can probably only blame others for so long. And people seem to be expecting things to get worse. When asked, the majority do anyway.

Whether it’s with quantitative easing or temporarily reducing stamp duty at pivotal moments (eg in the Covid lockdown), the successive governments have intervened to prevent the housing market taking its own course which has caused the ridiculous and unsustainable growth we’ve witnessed over the last few decades.

Exactly

Until it is corrected we're going to get more and more of a listless workforce because let's be honest why would anyone work or work hard when there is nothing to gain? The only people working hard now are the ones who either own their own business or are under the false belief that working hard is it's own reward. In the UK you can be worse off working than not, largely because the cost of living often ourstrips wages. It needs to be corrected or we'll tank further in terms of productivity/ attracting investment.

My city (west mids) is holding up in that there are still some good shops still on the high street, but there’s also lots of large empty stores from Debenhams, top shop etc which they haven’t been able to fill, and many more charity shops popping up. Surrounding smaller towns have really suffered however.

I don't know where you are, but pubs and restaurants are rammed where I am. People socialising, eating. Certainly it doesn't seem people are 'skint' when you people watch in towns and cities ...

They can probably only blame others for so long.

I don't see how they can turn around almost 20 years of wage stagnation etc anytime soon.

And people seem to be expecting things to get worse.

I do but I'm intrigued some think Reform will fix things!

I lived in Dunstable in the late 80's and Luton was always a bit run down back then.

I visit Aylesbury, have family there, and think in parts it's being revamped quite nicely.

Hemel town itself is looking a bit run down but Riverside is looking nicer having had a bit of doing up, the biggest change I see has been areas like Chesham.

But I can't get on board when people say such and such a place is a shit hole, a town is exactly that a place.
I live quiet rural and my nearest fast food take away is 6.4 miles away yet there's often discarded packaging on the grass verges from these restaurants, what makes people think that's acceptable to do that, go chuck it your own bedroom.

It doesn't matter how many empty shops there are it's not those that necessarily make it look run down, it's lack of caring about your environment, your community I've seen people chuck rubbish on the streets be it from car windows or when on foot, chewing gum and spit...that's humans that think it's fine to do that.
Houses have old furniture/white goods chucked outside and vandalism seems to be more prevalent now.

Didn't you think it was culturally enriching to be leered at? Sounds a bit racist to not appreciate the enrichment here.