Boring towns and cities!

You should hear those folk from Kidderminster. Like something from another planet

 

Good point Malc..
Bet it's not the same in France, spain and italy..?

YouTube
Has alot of people doing town tours..

"Joolz guides' london,

Turdtowns.. . is entertaining

 

all the big stores that have been built on the outskirts of towns and city's are to blame , if theey were not given permission to build in the first place things probably would be more like the old days .
But lets face it we all went and bought from these places and watched the nucleus of towns big and small start to become redundant and ultimately scruffy .

Youth in small and big towns all go to UNI and never return to there homes as they establish relationships and find work elsewhere , where as before a lot would go on apprenticeships and live at home and socialise locally making the old towns busy and fun to go out .
Where i live is a classic example of this .
Pubs decline due to smoking ban ( fair enough ) bit it didn't help in the decline along with booze rocketing in prices .
Off licences being literally dirt cheap compared to pubs prices leads to folk stopping in with booze damn near less than half the price .
Then the big BOOM covid comes along and mops everything up .
Local accents ...Yes you are right Malc not as strong as they used to be .
People travel around more and move more , as i said earlier youth off to uni mix with allsorts of accents until it gets watered down .
The young actor that was in the classic 1969 film KES was interviewed who had the strong Barnsley accent said himself that the accent is disappearing fast and his Barnsley accent was almost non existent , and boy was it broad in that film .
Our town to be fair is making efforts to improve it ...we shall see how it turns out .

 

Great post...

 

That is pretty much it summed it up perfectly

 

I remember when they built the out of town Tesco
At Wadebridge in Cornwall
Not only were they happy with pulling shoppers away from the town but they put on a free bus going round the villages collecting people and taking them to and from their supermarket when it opened ,
Taking trade from the village stores

 

Well that's one way to cut down on home deliveries.

 

Hello everyone,

it's the same thing in Germany - the same boring drugstore and department store players everywhere...
Rent prices and prices for small quantities were hardly affordable for small retailers.
In the past, there were still specialist staff in the shops who could give advice - everything has been cut back.
We customers only have ourselves to blame: in the end, being stingy is not cool.

But with this interchangeability, more and more people are buying online -
shops are dying and a lot of city centers are becoming deserted - if they do not invite you to stroll with cafes and pubs.

And here too, there are fewer and fewer spoken dialects - with only some exceptions.

regards,

 

A great example of "progress" meeting tradition is in the French village where my friend lives, a number of years ago a supermarket (Super U) opened but the mayor imposed a number of conditions on it that are still in place today:-
It cannot undercut the local shops
It cannot sell bread on a Monday (the village bakers are closed)
It must close for 2 hours at midday, the same as the local shops
It cannot have a coffee shop
It cannot sell any pharmacy or tobacco products

It is based in the village within walking distance of the other shops and as a result most locals use the Super U for things such as washing powder, frozen and processed food, pet food, booze, tinned food etc and then go to the local shops for bread, meat, veg, phamacy products, fags and so on, it works a treat and the village is thriving.

 

And the vanishing point when the online shoppers have killed the retail chainstores, is you have one Subway, a bus stop with a bus sometimes, some medical charity shops and an estate agent. e.g. Gosport.

 

Gosport has always been down market when it came to retail. The decline over the past 20 years is probably a reflection of the demographics and small sized retail units on the High Street, coupled with the fact that if you have made it down to Gosport then it is easy to catch the ferry across to the bright lights of Gunwharf.

 

This is great but impossible here. In the UK any agreement like that would never be adhered to, it would be made purely to jump a hurdle with every intention to break it. I remember a pub in Ely getting planning permission on the basis that it would be a family pub. We all looked forward to it opening as we needed such a pub. From day one no kids, nothing family friendly. Complaints fell on deaf ears and that was that.

 

It seems that there are only a few options when it comes to high streets ,
As the different shops throw in the towel for whatever reason they only ever change into charity shops, coffee shops or Turkish barbers or boarded up
It seems that the council are also reluctant to allow at least some the boarded up ones to become converted into living accommodation ,
I think they think that there is going to be someone who will open another failed business that they can get rates out of ,
And by some sort of miracle the high streets will go back to the good old days,
To me if they were allowed to change the use of some,it might create a bit more of a community rather than a street of derelict looking shop fronts that nobody wants to walk down or look at.

 

Rotherham are demolishing shops and building houses in/close to the town centre….but I’m not holding my breath for any big changes to the town.