I lived at Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppy when I was a kid and went to school at Sheerness. I have happy memories of visiting the amusement arcade after school and fishing off the beaches, getting the train into London to visit places like the bike show when it was At Earl’s Court. The family moved to Durham when I was 12 and I never went back to Sheppey for 30 odd years. When I did go back I wished I hadn’t it was bloody awful. My parents made a good decision to make the move when they did even though it was tough at times starting a school in Durham with a southern accent ( I soon lost that ).
^I used to live in Grangemouth. Not the best. We used to go to Sheppy to visit family and look for fossils on the beaches. Great for fossilised shark teeth.
Widnes. Oddly, I only just mentioned that hell hole in another post The Lame & The Alleged Lazy.. From my recollection of growing up near there in the 70s and 80s.....Imagine soviet era Eastern Europe but where everyone doesn’t sound like an exotic Bond villain but instead sports possibly one of the worst accents in the world. If the wind blew in one direction you were enveloped in clouds of toxic gas from the chemical factories while if it blew in the opposite direction you were treated to the stench of dead horses being boiled down for glue (they also disposed of most of the mad cow disease infected carcasses there - nice). Like most places where nobody else in their right mind would ever want to live, the inhabitants were fiercely proud of the town and very territorial. Given that in the little polluted pocket of misery which encompassed Merseyside and the industrial north west, accents changed markedly within very short distances, so the locals could tell where you were from when you ordered a drink in one of the many and extremely violent pubs, bars and nightclubs and you’d be liable to turn around with your round to find a headbutt (or worse) heading towards you. I have lived in many places and I can say without a shadow of doubt it had a greater proportion of nutters per square mile than anywhere else and I have the scars (literally) to prove it. On the upside, I did become quite handy at scrapping though and when I started boxing, I found was pretty adept at slipping punches. I didn’t live there but I had family who did and it was on the train line to/from Liverpool so if we didn’t fancy going into the city centre my mates and I would often end up in the town. I also went to sixth form on the outskirts, so all in all I spent quite a lot of time there and I know that of which I speak.
I also lived there for a year and that was another smelly place. If the wind blew east everything smelt of Mars Bars but if it blew west, it was Horlicks instead. I still can’t stand either.
Ashton under Lyne is way worse than any of those. It is the most utterly depressing shithole in England, which is, let's face it, the most utterly depressing shithole outside the third world apart from Wales
