I think this post says more about you than about them!
Are you happy where you live? If the answers yes then why does other peoples opinion of the town matter, they have an opinion and like you they are entitled to it.
The fact that you need to defend it tells me you are not comfortable about living there, if their comments didn’t matter then you would not have taken the time to post on here, you would have shrugged your shoulders and moved on, have you asked yourself why you need other peoples approval?
i grew up in Islington London, its heavily gentrified nowadays, though in fairness its always had nice Georgian Squares and other neighbourhoods with a small population of what I guess what we would call champagne socialists today, but outside of those neighbourhoods and that demographic it was a very working class run down slum ridden area.
i grew up in a damp basement no central heating, heating was by paraffin, no double glazing or bathroom, and an outside loo. We had our own front door but people upstairs had access to our flat via an internal door because they needed to use the coal cellar for the coal for their coal fires
Secondary schools were holding pens for 1500 hundred disadvantaged and dysfunctional kids, I hated the school so much, I firmly believed i would have been better off starting full time work at eleven years old because I learned very little in that environment.
i cannot recollect one child being taken and collected from school by their parents driving a car, not many people had cars and most people had to work full time in manual labour intensive jobs with very few workers rights.
We had some advantages, there were never burglary’s or robberies because no one had anything worth stealing, there wasn’t a drug culture so no one had to steal to feed their habit.
When I tell people I grew up in Islington I get comments like, oh lucky you, then I tell them it was a dive and a dump and they would never have survived there and I would never move back their in a million years
I left home at seventeen, and bought my first place eight years later in 1985. Very few people had heard of the area I bought my property , despite it being at rhe end of the Victoria line. The Dog Track was its well known landmark, and some who were better educated knew that William Morris was born here. Later the pop group E17, came along, the groups name is named after our postcode then they released the album Walthamstow which named after the area.
I liked the area, it felt familiar and comfortable and reminded me of a better version of the Islington I grew up in. Like you I got the derisory remarks, Walthamstow, where’s that? It’s rough there, yet they never knew it, and people were generally looking down their nose at me. But after what I grew up in I felt rich beyond comprehension. The remarks usually came from the people from other gentrified areas, Notting Hill, Battersea, Clapham, Battersea, Clapham etc. Even my own family made comments like, why do you want to live there? It never bothered me I liked where I lived, it felt like I was living in a comfortable pair of shoes
Over the years there were incremental changes to the area , accents were changing from traditional London and foreign patois to more refined educated accents and accents from all over the UK, they were usually professional people who obtained their degrees at a London University and forgot to go back to whence they came.
Then on July the 6th 2005 something happened that was to change Walthamstow and the neighbouring boroughs forever, Stratford in east London ( rougher than Walthamstow) won the Olympic bid, over the next ten years Walthamstow grew exponentially, the area was socially cleansed and the demographic changed completely, out with the old and in with the new wave of Champagne socialists chasing coin! .
Whereas before I used to buy a cup of instant coffee in a crinkly plastic cup, now I can get ten different types of coffee that can be made with one of six different types of milk with a motif made of chocolate powder on the froth, at about seven time the price of the old coffee! Gone are the egg and bacon sandwich for three pounds, in with the smoke salmon and cream cheese Beigel for eight pounds. (Proper east end Londoners call them Beigels not Bagels, the latter pronunciation and spelling is American, that’s how we can tell if people are originally from the east end or not!)
Gone are the old boozers, Asian corner shops in with the gastro pubs and overpriced supermarkets with the organic and green stuff that no locals can afford
Now when I say I live Walthamstow Village, people know where it is, they usually say they know it because they saw it some property program on TV, and then they say things like, oh how fab, you lucky thing and other platitudes. My family have forgotten their comments of the past, now they tell me that I’m smart and some want to take credit because they say they advised me to live here, they don’t even know where it is! I think they’re trying to wiggle their way into my will lol
A friend recently sent me a recent property article from the Telegraph, the headline read, How one shabby north east London borough became the fastest growing area in the UK ( or words to that effect, it definitely had shabby in the headline though)
The house across the road from me is on the market for 2.1 million, no kids who grew up here can afford that, l would not be able to afford to it if I was twenty five’ years old today. Yes the area is prettier the whole borough has changed beyond comprehension, it’s a lot less ‘shabby’ than it used to be.
Am I any happier that people know where a live and make nice comments, and am I happy about the area being socially cleansed even though it’s added a lot of equity to my property, no! In many ways I miss my shabby neighbourhood and my neighbours and I prefer that people didn’t know it and made derisory remarks about it. One by one my neighbours are dying off as they age , lots of them have lived here for over half a century and were born here, the new people that move in don’t want a home, they want an investment to make money so they can move up the property ladder, they don’t want to mix or talk with the locals they have their own cliques, they tolerate the locals but they don’t won’t to live next door to them.
Be happy with your comfortable old shoe of an area, would you be happier in a nicer area surrounded by judgemental people trying to please them all the time and then write about your negative experiences on Mumsnet ? Buttress your emotions and take no notice of other people’s remarks. Who knows what they might build down the road from you that may raise the status of the area you live in the future. If someone had said to me in 1985 that an Olympic stadium would be built in locally in 27 years time I would have thought they were tripping on acid.
You can’t change people or opinions but you can change the way you think about them and deal with them!