Chesterfield
Famous only for the fact that it is so shit even the church steeple was bodged.

(turtles head is touching cloth poked a dwarf on the forehead at, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 19:24, 14 replies)

New Zealand
The country with loads of towns whose names serve as punchlines.

Foxton - "It's the Fox Town!" according to their own PR
Bulls - Where most of the buildings have a bull pun on them somewhere (eg. Style-a-BULL on a hairdresser's, Afford-a-BULL on a second hand store, etc.)
Masterton - Probably hassled more than any other city, although I don't know why
Rolleston - "Town of the Future" says the sign on the way in. They're mostly known for their prison. Hmmm.
Rangiora - They finally got a McDonald's the other month.

There's probably heaps more, but I'm not that well-travelled.
(ElGranto, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 19:22, 5 replies)

It's prob been mentioned but haven't time to read all the posts to find out

but 'Rhyl', it's like a grave yard, quite sad really cause I remember it being ace when I was a kid.
(Kip, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 19:19, 5 replies)

Wednesbury
There is absolutely nothing to do. It is essentially in between West Bromwich and Wolverhampton just to make up the numbers. And provide pubs for the general populace.

There is a Morrisons there though.
(welshyboy, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 19:12, 4 replies)

Preston
i might be moving there next year and after reading some of the QOTW responses i'm worried.

guess its off to wales for me then!
(stitched, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 18:59, 8 replies)

I've been to Scunthorpe 3 times
When I was very young, I thought that back in the 'olden days' (pre-1950), the world was in black and white like it was on telly in old films.

I soon grew out of that. But I now know that I was right all along. It's just that Scunthorpe never managed to get colour and as such, it is still monochrome. I approached the town on the bus and there was a lot of scrap yards unless it was a storage facility for rusty steel. There was the steel works and then mile after mile of concrete all the way into the town centre which culminated in a bus station which looked like it was made from recycled multi-storey car-park stairwells.

I got off the bus, and the first thing I saw was a fat tramp asleep on an ugly metal bench, with his shirt wide open challenging the relentless drizzle with his grotty matted-hairy torso.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 18:50, Reply)

Is this QOTW going to be made into a book?
"The worst bits of Britain" or something similar?

Anyway.

I've been living in Wrexham for 2 years now. It's no coincidence that it sounds similar to Rectum.

I've met a handful of cracking people - people from work, the people I go mountain biking with and a couple of my neighbours. The majority of the residents seem to be fat/ugly and chavs. There might be more nice people but I've not come across them.

As mentioned, I'm into biking. 4 of my friends have been followed home from bike rides by previously mentioned scum and later had their sheds/garages/houses raided and bikes stolen (ranging in value from £200-£2000).
Another of my friends was riding home from work this week and was followed for about half an hour by 2 lads in a car, we're assuming they were after his bike.

There are regularly fights outside my flat which were amusing at first but it's getting boring now.

The streets (especially near me) are covered in shit - mostly from dogs but some is probably human.

Instead of using the bin that the council kindly collects every fortnight or going to the tip where you can dump rubbish for FREE, a popular option for rubbish disposal seems to be the local river.

I'm moving as soon as I can afford to!
( thistle, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 18:41, 4 replies)

A little story
Disclaimer - this may well be familiar to those of you who watch QI.



It is an interesting fact that the town of Berwick upon Tweed isn't technically part of England or Scotland - it's got a special designation that allows it to be both. It is a related fact that the Queen's title is therefore "Queen of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales and Berwick upon Tweed. When the official declaration marking the start of the Crimean war was produced in 1854, this was the title used. However the peace treaty in 1856 makes no mention of Berwick, which was therefore still fighting the war. This state of affairs continued until sometime in the 1960s when the mayor of Berwick finally signed a treaty to mark the legal end of the war.

So there we have it. Berwick upon Tweed. Most violent place in Britain.
( MatJ LOOK, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 18:40, 4 replies)

skegness
this place really lives up to its name. went there last year for the half term with my sister, niece and nephew. it was freezing cold, most of the shops were shut and it was quite grim. there were more old people than i've ever seen outside of eastbourne. it was like the waiting room of a very low-rent god.
we stayed in butlin's, which was about the most interesting thing in the whole town. walking to breakfast through a blizzard was not exactly fun, as i am not roald amundsen. we got severe rashes from the swimming pool, the nightclub was like a strobe-lit barn and the entertainment wasn't very entertaining.
i will not be going back.
( Smash Monkey lowering the tone of the whole internet, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 18:39, 2 replies)

Leicester.
I have only just got back from my little 'business trip' (read: sorting out the shit - not literally - my ex-colleagues left in the Leicester office when they were made redundant in September) to Leicester.

I had vague memories of it being grey and depressing, 15 or so years later, it hasn't changed. The first thing I saw upon walking out of the train station was someone shooting up. At 9.15 in the morning. Whilst I was in the former building (alone), a gang of youths were peering in the windows, seeing what was left. Upon seeing me they buggered off, the cheeky bastards.

Don't go to Leicester, it's a shithole full of druggies and cheeky fucking wannabe robbers.

Excuse me, I'm going to go and wash Leicester off me now.
(Lucoire tutted and shook her head in disbelief on, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 18:36, 5 replies)

rotherham
if you like charity shops, travel agents, pound shops, B&M's, primark and banks, then rotherham is for you! not only home of the chuckle brothers, william hague and ive bunny, but we have the largest sex superstore in europe andthe kp nuts factory.

wow.

ain't it all enough to make you cry with pride?!
(PrincessTinkle is charlie brooker's secret wife, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 18:36, 2 replies)

Oh and Hornsea
Just up the coast from Withernsea is fast becoming a ghost town for pretty much the same reasons I mentioned below.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 18:19, 2 replies)

Nobody appears to have mentioned Withernsea
Festering ulcerous sore of a seaside town on the east coast about 18 miles east from Hull by road (and preferably 18,000 miles by choice).

It has been in decline since the Beeching Report closed the railway line sometime in the early 60s. Being on the coast means that the vast majority of the business is geared towards tourists. So commerce is a bit non-existant out of season. Limited trade, not much money in town to be spent on things.

There are some amusement arcades with sun-bleached hoardings with letters missing and peeling paint.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 18:15, 2 replies)

Scunthorpe
I wandered lonely as a dog
Through The Foundry's fake marble pillars
Breathing in 24-hour fog
From the blast furnaces, atmosphere killers
Belching pollutants, grey miasma
Guaranteed to give you asthma

Continuous as the drunks that vomit
At the Lincoln Imp and Desert Rat
The tracksuited Mums with homes from Comet
And dirty old men after under-age twat
They congregate outside the club Garbo
They've literally no place else to go

A black man ran on Froddy road; for he
Was pursued by a xenophobic foursome
And then they elected the BNP
To sit in Europe and endorse 'em
They shot - and stabbed - and often knew
The complete inadequacy of the boys in blue

For oft when the internet I'm browsing
I recall in vacant or pensive state
The endless prefab terraced housing
And the burning skips on the Riddings estate
I think, as I view this town askance
I'm glad I got out while I had the chance
( ousgg is not seeking approval, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 18:11, 2 replies)

I'm going to put in my money for Mablethorpe, Lincolnshire
If you've ever been to Blackpool remove all the charm and you get Skegness, beat Skegness with a piece of rebar and you get Mablethorpe. There's nothing to do there except get drunk, aven then there's no good drinking establishments. This also explains the massive teen pregnancy rate. The biting northeast wind and sewage pipe sticking out of the main beach simple serve as icing.

When I was young I do have fond memories of it, but I just can't tell any more.
( Cadmus has teh uplikn coeds at, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 18:10, 1 reply)

Lincoln
Just to balance the books on my previous post, Lincoln is a lovely, quiet, clean town to live. Sure the new Uni brings a few drunken chavs, but at least they're clean!

Love it here!
( The Lone Groover has mal des nuts., Thu 29 Oct 2009, 18:01, 5 replies)

Aberdeen
It can be a pretty enough town with some intersting architecture, but that impression is short lived. Spending time there reveals it to be a grey, cold, wet, miserable, depressing place indeed.
Nobody smiles, nobody makes an eye contact with others, conversations are mumbled and brief.
2 universities means a LOT of bars, but it also means a LOT of pissed up idiots stumbling about the streets at kicking out time. Fights were the norm, and a sunday morning walk down Union Street turns into a hop-scoth game of dodging puddles of puke, piss, blood or spilt kebab.
I lived on one of the main streets from the town centre back to some of the uni residence blocks and every weekend without fail, student assholes would run over the roofs of parked cars, or kick off wing mirrors etc etc as they stumbled home.
I worked in a retail estate in an area called Bedford. I was mugged at knifepoint once. People used to stroll into the shop and steal what they wanted - no way as I going to risk a fight with some junky for £50 of the companies property. One regular shoplifter used to always get violent when confronted, and would spit at and try to bite everyone. He had heppatitus and was trying to infect everyone else. Whenever the place was broken into at night, rather than take their pick from the hundreds of thousands of pounds of stock on the shelves, the junkies would instead spend their time trying to batter open the vending machines to get the change out of them.
The overflow carpark was a dumping ground for stolen cars and home to a pack of feral kids trying to sell on whatever they had just shoplifted. One girl must have been 10 or 11 years old, and would regularly ask to be bought booze or fags. Since she had no money, she would offer the only payment she could - 10 fags for a BJ, 20 fags for sex and 6 Smirnoff Ice would get you a hour to "do whatever you want to me". Two or three times a day she would be seen getting into cars at the far end of the carpark, and emerging again a few minutes later, pulling her tracksuit trousers up.
A sad, sad place.
(dave likes cheese, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 18:00, 14 replies)

earls town
its one of those places that you just look at and think "what a shit hole"

it looks like the aftermath of a zombie attack.
(stitched, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 17:58, 1 reply)

Everywhere
If it has the following, it is likely to be a shit-hole (and if it doesn't, it's probably hiding it's failings well):

- One-O-One off-license (or brand of choice for the local muck-swillers)
- multiple bookies
- large percentile of fast-food outlets
- chain pubs
- bingo halls
- etc etc etc

Honestly, you could go at this for days. The fact of the matter is that most of the UK is a dump. Granted, there are more than a few nice places, but these are harder to find and usually more expensive than hen's teeth.

Live in the country - you get to own firearms legally, and there's loads of space to hide the bodies.
(mymilkshakebringsallthemongstotheyard poison hearts, poison minds - joining hate, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 17:57, Reply)

Burton on Trent
I grew up in a grey town, full of grey people who greeted you with "ey up mi duck" (and still do). It smelled of hops and Robirch Pork Pies being smelted (never cooked, that's too kind a word). The 76 Club had half decent bands in the seventies, but like everything else in Burton, it shut! I dislike going back there, even to see my mum. I avoid it like the plague, which would actually improve the place. Hate is too kind a word to describe my feelings.
( The Lone Groover has mal des nuts., Thu 29 Oct 2009, 17:56, 2 replies)

A few short rants
...since my bigger rants have been well covered by other people.

Bexhill-on-Sea
Awful depressing hole of a place - imagine Clacton (see the first link above) with a few thousand less people and slightly posher accents. There's absolutely bugger all to do there, except avoid the junkies.

Paris
Dirty, boring and so prohibitively expensive that we subsisted entirely on McDonalds for the whole weekend. What really topped it off was when we got firecrackers thrown at us for having the nerve to be English. We were 11 years old, on a school trip. The best part of the whole trip was sabotaging a PE teacher's attempt to pull an American girl, by wandering up to him and saying "hey Dad, where's Mum?".

There was going to be more, but I hit post instead of preview and now I can't be arsed.
( Dave McF wrote some words on, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 17:55, Reply)

Middlesbrough
...there really is nothing more to be said.

Am currently in the 3rd year at the Uni there, so unfortunatly not in student accomodation anymore - and living in probably the worst street in the town. Its the kind of street where no one owns clothes other than pyjamas and all the kids are on crack.
At least once a week a police van turns up in our road and takes someone away, breaks up a fight or raids a brothel. I wish I was joking.

Some memorable occurances -

- Watching a wedding party seperated and taken away in police vans outside a KFC, the bride screaming blind drunk, with blood all over her dress.

- A man piss up the side of a house, before taking out his keys and going inside

- A man walking his very small child to school at 8.30 in the morning drinking a can of guiness

Everyone here is utter scum. Never come to this God-awful place.

And also is home to the PARMO, the worst food ever invented. They practically bottle feed that shit to their kids.
(Strangemiester, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 17:54, 3 replies)

This QOTW may likely be surmised thus
but may indeed be expanded hereafter:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crap_Towns
(mymilkshakebringsallthemongstotheyard poison hearts, poison minds - joining hate, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 17:47, 4 replies)

I forget the town's name, but it's in Scotland
They have this library I went to, and I went on the computers last week and wanked over all the fetish stories.

Now whenever anybody browses /qotw at that library, they get put on the sex offenders register, and automatically branded a peado.
(__, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 17:46, 1 reply)

Alsager
I went to Uni there. It wasn't my first choice. I didn't visit it first. My A-levels didn't turn out as I planned. I left University there three terms in. I don't miss it or the three fields, two pubs, one Kwik Save and packs of locals driving around student bashing because there was nothing else to do of an evening.

Actually part of that was a lie, I do miss one of the pubs. Addlestones cider on tap, oh yes, you beauty!
( number5 has been fighting tramps and losing., Thu 29 Oct 2009, 17:41, Reply)

'I wish I could think of just one thing I could tell you about Hull, oh yes...it's very nice and flat for cycling.' Philip Larkin
Hull was the second most severely-bombed town by the Luftwaffe's finest (much to my grandad's chagrin). So after the war, the corporation begged some cash off that nice Mr Attlee and rebuilt the town centre. Then it seems they ran out of cash and did very little for 40 years. Even now, there are parts of the town-centre that have ben neglected.

and probably everything for a mile in every direction from the town centre needs pulling down and rebuilding.

A more dispicable eyesore I have yet to see. It didn't come first in the "Book of Crap Towns" for nothing.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 17:32, 3 replies)

America
Over-hyped, self satisfied, smiling everywhere, fake everything, shite service (just because it is fast and accompanied by "Have a nice day" style bonhomie it is not necessarily good), small minded, insular, god ugly architecture, pointlessly bland food, and FFS what is going on with their Immigration Control....jumped up, petty, OTT, little Hitler complex, etc., etc.

It's not all crap: the scenery is lovely in some parts of course and a lot of non service industry oriented folk are very welcoming but on balance, well, its's bollocks. Canada is much nicer.

EDIT: Sorry I know it isn't a town! Promise to read the question properly next time.
( number5 has been fighting tramps and losing., Thu 29 Oct 2009, 17:32, 1 reply)

Grim by name, grim by nature
I'm not the first to mention Grimsby, and I won't be the last.

I used to be a market researcher, one of those types who does wanky focus groups. For some reason, my company won a contract to do research into BBC local radio. Now, I could have told them everything they needed to know: men in argyle sweaters, feeble MOR music, listened to by old ladies with cats and people with imaginations that stop at their city borders. But that wasn't enough. My firm thought it necessary to send me to Carlisle (which was really nice), Newcastle-upon-Tyne (has its good points)... and Grimsby.

I forget what time I arrived, because the place looked exactly the same at every hour of the day, but I do remember having to take a 'local' train from some extremely distant place like Coventry. The train had two carriages, which I thought was very optimistic (presumably the return journey to Coventry was usually much more full than the outward).

When I got to the hotel, I discovered it had been converted from an NCP car park without any of that irritating refurbishment nonsense in the interim. You could have walked past it fifty times without realising there were people inside. Come to think of it, there weren't any people outside it, either. Apart from the hotel staff and the people who took part in the focus group, I don't remember seeing a living soul. Plenty of undead, gurning and groaning, yes, but they don't move very fast.

The focus group was a laugh. Yes, a laugh. One laugh in the entire two hours. What made my brain goggle was that the good folk of Grimsby considered themselves superior to the people of Hull, over the other side of the Humber. "They're not like us," they said. Presumably Hull people have a pulse. One man boasted that there was a house on his street on sale for £19,000. "You could afford that, easy," he told me. "Yes," I nearly replied, "but then I'd have to live in Grimsby."

The weather was grey. The buildings were grey. The hotel decor was grey. The people were grey. Even the food was grey. Grimsby Grey - Dulux are working on it.

I thought Liverpool was horrible when I went there, but at least it had some character.

Penis joke.

[EDIT: Thanks for reminding me about the smell of fish. I don't have a very good sense of smell, but I did detect a lingering scent of marine produce. That was grey, too.]
( Sonic the Hedgetrimmer doesn't care what you think, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 17:20, 4 replies)

My grandad used to work in the planning department at Coventry City Council
His best tale was when the Queen popped up to do a bit of shopping at Primarks (or to open the shopping centre, one or the other), and Elizabeth Vagina turned to my dear old Grandad and said:

"This place will be lovely when all the building work's finished."

To which my grandad replied: "Erm, it has finished, Your Majesty."

Coventry - dissed by the fucking Queen herself... I rest my case...
( SpankyHanky, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 17:19, 1 reply)

The Clacton Experience
Oh God it’s awful.

Such brazen ineptitude surely warrants some kind of achievement award, the monumental shittiness of Clacton-On-Sea cannot be solely attributed to the guiding hand of mankind alone. It’s hard to imagine that even the combined efforts of the Great Plague, Hermann Goering’s urban remodelling committee and Thatcherism in a hellish frenzy of municipal misery could possibly conceive of something to rival the suppurating nastiness of an Essex seaside town. Indeed, the very thought of such awfulness is why I’m inflicting on you the most florid metaphors for “Squalid”, “Pox Riddled” and “Rectum” that my simple brain can conjure on a whim.

Clacton-On-Sea owes its very existence to the efforts of Victorian holidaymakers, who each year would flee the slums of London for two weeks by the seaside. Now the morale destroying unflushed lavatorial ambience of East London during the 1880s is well documented, but I can’t quite shake the feeling that sharp pangs of homesickness would have lured all but the most masochistic back from the Essex Coast before too long.

The Pier

“Clacton Pier, Clacton Pier, come and spend your money here!” jingled the advertisements in the 1980s, accompanied by the smiling mugshots of Chas n’ Dave.

The reality is even worse. The pier itself is a blocky, carbuncular structure constructed from decaying wood, seaweed and crumbling concrete, lit by swathes of pink neon in the most garish pastiche of an episode of Miami Vice. The aesthetic appeal is in the same league as the end result of a Lego building competition for war traumatised nine year olds. Once you’ve gotten past your ocular distress, you realise that your nose has been stung by the acrid stink of rotting seaweed, jellied eels – jellied eels, for fuck’s sake! – and the swaggering unwashed East End wideboy types who exist merely to transport gold sovereign rings from place to place. Your patronage is rewarded with stingy portions of chips drenched in life threatening amounts of salt and slovenly filled beakers of warm, pissy beer. All priced at a premium. The so called “amusements” consist of knackered fairground rides, a rusting wheel and a few ageing arcade games which appear to have survived a recent nuclear apocalypse.

The Arcades

Viewed from above, the Clacton promenade must look like a gigantic pink cock, flanked by neon lit cubist testicles on opposite sides of the road. These are the home of Clacton’s more miserable attractions, namely the slot machines. A quick wander around rewards you with the spectacle of watching men with vacant facial expressions slap buttons on blinking fruit machines in the futile hope of a payout. Feral kids charge around everywhere while overpriced video games empty your wallet. Once you’ve had your fill of this object lesson of cynical bad taste, you may wander over the promenade to the delights of its mirror twin, containing more of the same, but furnished with a slightly less smelly carpet.

Indeed, my sole cherished memory of the arcades at Clacton was happening across a barely functional, cigarette burned Outrun cabinet, which served admirably as a knicker elastic loosening ice breaker during an early date with my very first serious girlfriend one Sunday morning.

Unemployment

I had the massive misfortune to be enrolled at a higher education establishment in the town during the mid nineteen nineties and vowed that wherever I went in life, I’d never settle for anywhere worse than Clacton. The effort expended in maintaining this vow has thus far been minimal but with wholly successful results.

The thing that most struck me was the universal lack of ambition demonstrated by of any of my college mates. There was the chap whose dream job was to work in the local Vauxhall dealership and the girl whose idea of a life achievement was to get to the age of twenty without being impregnated. Clacton suffered (and still does) from high youth unemployment and piss-poor wages because it dies a seasonal death every autumn when the boarding houses close and the supply of tourist pounds dry up. Those with any nous whatsoever got the hell out of town as quickly as possible. I’m not sure which was the more depressing spectacle, seeing the aforementioned girl drop out at nineteen and eleven months due to an unplanned pregnancy or the chap on our course who never spoke to a soul and leafed through Commando war stories comics during lunch.

Climate and Ambience

For fifty weeks of the year, Clacton-On-Sea is grey. Grey skies, grey concrete and grey pavements conspire to inflict SAD on all but the most robustly jovial of souls. The only colour to be seen is either pink neon or on the track suits of the many Cockney Wankah types swaggering around presumably in between buying and selling clapped out Fords, slapping their wives and shouting “Yew faackin’ shtoopid caah!” at the very same.

For two weeks of the year however, it all changes. The grey skies turn blue, the temperature rises above dreary degrees centigrade and prompts the population to shed clothing and head for the beach. Baywatch it ain’t. Imagine a writhing sea of pale wobbling tits, greening elongated tattoos and ambitiously sized swimsuits. The females are even worse.

One sunny weekday afternoon, I took myself, my textbooks and my notes down to the beach to complete an assignment. Within half an hour, a whale of a man appeared and wasted no time in strutting about in a pair of microscopic red speedos, randomly bending over and pointing his lardy arse everywhere while his wife sat on a deckchair and scoffed chips.

Meanwhile, two girls of late teen vintage spread a blanket a few yards away and stripped to their bras and pants. In an act of eye watering vileness I’ll never forget, one girl turned to the other and spoke.

“Shell. D’yer fink me spiders legs poke aaht the side of me fong too much?”

This ghastly speech was followed by some futile furtive gusset tugging as the owner sought to shield her worryingly unkempt fanny from unprepared eyes. Gag.

Indeed, such a metaphor serves to conclude this dismal piece, for I pledge to ensure that when I’m running the country this neglected, unwashed clopper of a town becomes the location of choice for the RAF to practice carpet bombing.
(Bicycle Repairman "you're also a bit of a wanker", Thu 29 Oct 2009, 17:12, 6 replies)