Middlesbrough
Without a doubt the worst place I have ever lived. Even friends I've met who were born there say he place is a shit hole.

Don't get me wrong the surrounding areas including Yarm are nice, North Yorkshire Moors beautiful and Newcastle great to go out in but avoid Middlesbrough like the plague. Actually don't avoid it... seriously, if ever you feel that the place you live is bad, just pop up their for a weekend - you will come back think Hull, Basingstoke, etc are veritable paradises.

Highlights of my two years living there at Teeside University (they were too ashamed to call it Middlesbrough?):


1) Picked up mate from train station and walked back to my Halls. On route pass a pub with a bloke staggering out surrounded by two mates... his face pissing with blood having just been glassed. Not too perturbed we get back to mine and drop off his bag before cracking open a couple of cans. Our catch up chat is rudely interrupted by the sound of screeching tyres outside. We look outside to see (on the other side of the car park) two blokes jump out of some convertible chav chariot with tacky custom paint job and start pummelling the shit out of this bloke - stamping the lot - before hopping back into their pimped monstrosity and screeching off. Guy brushes himself off and carries on his merry way. Needless to say nobody does anything as it's undoubtedly drug related. Oh, did I mention this all happened at 2pm in broad daylight?

2) On the very first day we'd driven through the moors up the hill and then seen the massive ICI factory pluming out smoke, which is effectively Middlesbrough. We ended up in the center of town so my mum asked someone where the university was, only to be told there was no university. So we parked up and tried finding someone who didn't look like they killed people just to watch their expressions change. A group of kids converged all aged between 7 and 12 years old and they surrounded a car, fortunately not ours, before starting to rock it from side to side and eventually roling it onto its roof! Sat in stunned silence, we then watched as rather than run away the kids gathered on the bank and waited for the Police. Only when they showed up (in fairness they were very quick) they kids jeered at them at shouted such lyrical gems as "Ahhhhh, ya wankers, you can't do anything!" before finally running off unpursued.

3) Some friends had their door kicked in as they were watching Eastenders by three men in ski masks and armed with a baseball bat. They simply walked calmly over to the TV, unplugged it, said "Alright" before marching out with it.

- Witnessed numerous fire bombings
- Managed to avoid numerous fights for being a Soft Southern twat (bearing in mind they classify people from Leeds (great place) as Southeners?!)
- Didn't always manage to avoid fights and got mugged once... I'm 6ft 3 and fairly well built
- In the first two weeks I was there 6 people were stabbed and two girls were raped

I have lived in some rough places in my life, but nothing compares to Middlesbrough for sheer random acts of violence.

Unsurprisingly, I can honestly say I never ever want to return to that God forsaken place.

Apologies for lack of fluffy humus but never for the length.
( @><|= w0nu!) or cunt to my friends, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 13:32, 15 replies)

Well there you go
2 hits on the first day

www.b3ta.com/questions/rubbishtowns/post553787
(insomniac-surfer oh go on then, just this once, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 13:34, closed)

could be worse
you've done alright i lived there for 25 years without any problems, it took me 6 weeks of living in Oxford to get mugged.

You can't whinge about it to anyone from the north they just call you soft!
(calder83, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 13:46, closed)

Ha
I'm from Oxford originally!

I quite often daren't speak in Middlesbrough with my accent.
( @><|= w0nu!) or cunt to my friends, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 14:10, closed)

Went to Middlesbrough once for the footie
...where the home fans used to throw darts at the visiting support.

They threw darts at us.

Charming.
( Scaryduck LIKES EGG, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 14:35, closed)

Aah Ayresome Park.
The most depressing football ground I have ever managed to avoid getting the shit kicked out of me at.
( Ping_Pang_Piddley_Dee couldn't give a big shiny fuck., Thu 29 Oct 2009, 17:12, closed)

At least we were considerate to visiting fans though
At one end of the ground was the towns major hospital - and just beyond that (for the terminal cases) was the cemetary.

No such luck at the new ground - you'd just get chucked in the river now.
(apollo36uk, Fri 30 Oct 2009, 12:39, closed)

Yep
Sounds like it's tons worse now than since I was there from 89 to 91, when I was at Teesside Poly. Apart from being told never to walk around Brambles Farm estate, I didn't find it a bad place, just bloody boring. Though me and a bunch of mates wandered into a pub in Billingham one night and were actually recommended by one of the patrons that we should leave because "this is a regulars' pub and we don't like students...". I only managed to save myself from a kicking another night because the knuckle-scraper had family in Doncaster and I'm from Yorkshire...
I dropped out after two years and returned to the sunny Yorkshire Dales, returning to 'boro briefly a few years later to shag a bird from Redcar.
(Ghostlight, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 15:04, closed)

I was born and bred in Middlesbrough, stayed til I was about 16/17
Have visited a few times though, and apart from one assault, have had no problems.

It depends on where you live, I guess. I lived a stone's throw away from Grove Hill, and though I knew that allsorts has been going on there, problems never crept up the hill.

They've done a bit of it up now though, so it's not so bad in the town centre.
( Methylene Blue - electrohead, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 15:17, closed)

I went there for a conference
To get from the travel lodge to the university car park we had to go through an area of mostly metal-shuttered, closed-down shops. On the first day there was a burning mattress in the middle of the road.

On the second and third days there was a partially burned mattress in the middle of the road. A main road. For three fucking days.

It was charming.
( Mockingbird Practitioner of SCIENCE, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 17:12, closed)

I used to live
just next door in Stockton-on-Tees [whilst at Durham uni - unfortunately trapped in their Stockton 'Queen's Campus'], and between the two, I'd have preferred Middlesbrough because at least it had some reasonable-ish shopping.

i.e. there was a bookshop or two in the city. Stockton is the only town i've ever seen that does NOT have a bookshop, barring a shitty W H Smith that mostly sold DVDs and top-shelf wankrags. HOW CAN A TOWN NOT HAVE A BOOKSHOP?? The vast majority of the high street was budget or pound-stores. sad.

Mind you - Stockton does have a fucking brilliant piercing shop, so it wasn't all bad.
( Seventh is somewhat subdued, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 18:13, closed)

I was born in Stockton
and keep going back as I've got family there.

There are a few places that sell books... supermarkets and the like generally.
Also,
www.touchlocal.com/nat/c-218-t-22844-Bookshops-Stockton+on+Tees
has a list of them. I'm pretty sure a good few of them were there last time I was on Stockton High Street. Though I'd doubt that most of the locals would be able to point you towards them...
( uberdeity Wondered why Owen Lars knew of the term "hell" on, Fri 30 Oct 2009, 3:08, closed)

Spent 4 years there 88-92
It wasn't too awful, provided you stayed south of the river and avoided the obvious knuckle draggers on Linthorpe Road. Lived on Ayre St, a stones throw from the footie stadium - had some Newcastle fans do a drunken conga around our living room, once, after foolishly leaving the front door unlocked. That house was broken into twice. Actually, it was a shithole.
(Mousy Tongue ...Generally bemused by life..., Fri 30 Oct 2009, 7:04, closed)

Why?
When people are slagging off somewhere do they feel the need to lie through their arses just to get a point across?

"Witnessed numerous fire bombings" - no you didn't
" In the first two weeks I was there 6 people were stabbed and two girls were raped" - didn't happen
Rolling cars over in the town centre - utter bollocks

Any of those would generate headline news in the local paper and a quick search of their site failed to find any.
And that isn't smoke rising from the "ICI factory" it's steam from the cooling towers. Middlesbrough has cleaner air than Newcastle or London.

Oh and if you're gonna slag somewhere off at least learn to spell it right - it's Teesside not Teeside.

Jeff Stelling knows what he's talking about www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdBuDSEokz0
(apollo36uk, Fri 30 Oct 2009, 13:27, closed)

..
i love that Jeff Stelling quote! it happened not long after i moved south and filled me with pride :)

middlesbrough i still love the old shit hole!
(calder83, Fri 30 Oct 2009, 17:03, closed)

I have to apologise....
You're right of course I didn't "Witness numerous fire bombings", I actually only ever saw one happening, the rest were houses in varied states of inferno with scorch marks which, while admittedly I'm no expert on fire, looked as though they'd come from some kind of Molotov Cocktail-type device. So the fact that I saw four or five houses (sorry if it's that's not precise enough for you, but it was 10 years ago) in various states of being suspiciously burnt down was probably misrepresented by me writing "Witness numerous fire bombings".

Equally, I was a student at the time rather than a Police Officer, CSI or even Hercule Poirot character. So I went on what people said in relation to the stabbing and raping statistics. Especially when it there were notices stating not to walk around alone - even in daylight - put up by the university in our Halls. Please forgive me for not keeping them as evidence.

"Utter bollocks" about rolling cars? No. Sorry I did actually witness this, so it's not utter bollocks. I've never seen my mum so nervous. Neither is the other bit about walking from the train station... that all happened in broad daylight - and that was the only time that mate ever set foot in Middlesbrough, so it wasn't some medley of events. The story has been carefully not embellished, as there's really no need to embellish it. We did not see the guy actually being glassed in the face... so it could be that we got it wrong and it was actually a nasty steam burn injury.

Apologies to for confusing steam for smoke, but frankly it doesn't really make the place a whole lot better. Had I known it was only steam then it would have made a town that finds it acceptable to have children under the age of five wandering the streets at 10pm all OK. At least I thought they were under fives, though perhaps I should have asked them for ID.

Cock.

On the plus side I got to work (an huge achievement there) at the Riverside, Yarm's nice (as I said originally) and we had the best chippy I've ever been to round the corner where you'd pay £1.20 for the finest Fish and Chips and guacamole - though personally preferred the curry sauce. But then even Victorian sewers have their good points as they're architecturally pretty impressive - but essentially they're still full of shit.


And Jeff Stelling can list all the people he wants who've come from there... how many still fucking choose to live there?
( @><|= w0nu!) or cunt to my friends, Mon 2 Nov 2009, 11:33, closed)