Places you really can't stand.

[Kankurette]

Derby does have a nice metal pub. Hairy Dog?

[shoulders]

Brussels is a fucking dump and the Eurostar drops you in one of the shittiest bits

I think Brussels' good bits and the sheer amount and variety of stuff to do there just about swings it. The melange of languages and cultures are fascinating, there is much joy to be had from the murals and nouveau architecture around the city, the fantastic, fun and weird pubs. Although I have been several times now. It becomes easier to hone in on the best bits.

I can certainly understand people hating Brussels. It's definitely grimy and edgy at times, overly touristy at points.

Also, the Grand Platz is amazing >if destroyed still true< and Brussels is saved for that alone. If you have spent December around there they have a light show in the centre that is often accompanied with a tasteful classical piece and it's a special time of year to be there. I have many fond memories.

[Fr.Bigley]

Has anyone been to Withernsea? Like Blackpool but with even less to do, nothing but WW2 beach bunkers and sewage run offs. It's a bit like the seaside spot in Guest House paradiso.

[Replies From View]

you go in the sea for a bit, and when you start returning to the beach in your bare feet it's only pebbles but they're all inexplicably painful suddenly

[Psybro]

Mansfield is the only place I swore never to return to.  Scunthorpe is really crap but not as aggressively so.

Doncaster is convenient for getting to other places and is inexplicably where I got to see the Young Bucks wrestle.

[canadagoose]

Broxden services in Perth can get in grave. I have ended up stuck there a good few times after Megabus mishaps and it's bleak and shite.

Other places which are S4C:

• Stansted Airport (busy and crap)
• Brewdog (all of them) (busy and crap)
• Newkirkgate Shopping Centre, Leith (noisy, dirty, often wankers around)

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

Lush. Fucking stinks in there.

[Norton Canes]

That endlessly undulating expanse of West Yorkshire where grim moors loom over huddled, sullen towns pooling together like dirty, stagnant puddles collecting in stygian depressions

[Fambo Number Mive]

Cornmarket Street, Oxford. In one of the most beautiful cities in England, it's a length of crowds, hassle, rubbish shops, noise and aggression. It was probably nicer when cars went down it, it's that bad. When I commuted from Cuttslowe to Cowley Centre I had to cross Cornmarket Street twice a day and I hated it.

Queuing for a bus at Magdalen Street. Especially if you need to get to certain parts of Kidlington for some reason and you are trying to get past people queuing for the 2 bus that has stopped to join the 2C bus queue. Hardly anyone bothered to queue and there was a person who was only going one stop who always used to push in, and the one time I didn't let him push in he swore. Then you've got the crowds of people walking down Magdalen Street to get to Cornmarket squeezing by you while you wait for the bus. Sometimes the queues would go along into George Street.

[checkoutgirl]

O'Connell Street, Dublin. It should be the centre piece of the city and has had a bit of investment in the paving and trees a few years ago but it's rough. There's gangs of lads striding around menacingly in the wee hours. A police van parked in the middle, ever present. The shops are shite, the best one is Anne Summers. Empty lots, a gambling arcade.

The track suits have basically won. I'm not pro cop but they should have 4 or 5 of them stationed there around the clock with batons. Any gourier steps out of line and pow! Maybe showing my age there.


Temple Bar Music Centre AKA The Button Factory AKA Centre Point. Used to be a cracking little club in the city centre but it's been chopped up into smaller rooms. It's like a maze getting around it's 5 or 6 different rooms and you can't get a drink quickly in any of them. Understaffed bars, sticky floors. Just an annoying, badly designed mess.

[shoulders]

O'Connell Street, Dublin. It should be the centre piece of the city and has had a bit of investment in the paving and trees a few years ago but it's rough. There's gangs of lads striding around menacingly in the wee hours. A police van parked in the middle, ever present. The shops are shite, the best one is Anne Summers. Empty lots, a gambling arcade.

North side of the river in the centre is shite but seemed particularly shite last few visits. Always expecting things to gradually move on, whether its civic amenities or plain or corporate blandness but still the same fucking scary rotting back alleys, lowlifes and grim streets as before, just even scarier, rotting, lower and grimmer with the advancing years.

All the cash brought in for those fucking green hats and Guinness tshirts hasn't found its way to the Treasury then.

[Sherman Krank]

[The Crumb]

Dresden - a long shopping mall, an almost sad detached feeling classic ensemble in the centre and some mediocre streets north of the river. I know it is the RAF's fault (and Hitler's) but a sad effort at reconstruction.

I had quite a nice time in Dresden, but the best thing by miles was taking the train half an hour out into Saxon Switzerland. Beautiful bit of the world.

[canadagoose]

Broxden services in Perth can get in grave. I have ended up stuck there a good few times after Megabus mishaps and it's bleak and shite.

Other places which are S4C:

• Stansted Airport (busy and crap)
• Brewdog (all of them) (busy and crap)
• Newkirkgate Shopping Centre, Leith (noisy, dirty, often wankers around)

I forgot Dundee Bus Station. Shite.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Broxden services in Perth can get in grave. I have ended up stuck there a good few times after Megabus mishaps and it's bleak and shite.

Good shout! I forgot there was even a service station there as the bus interchange is just a couple of open shelters next to a hut.

On the occasions I happened to drive I always vowed to stop off at The Horn, and inevitably got reminded of this as I passed it, having missed the junction.

[shoulders]

I had quite a nice time in Dresden, but the best thing by miles was taking the train half an hour out into Saxon Switzerland. Beautiful bit of the world.

I don't know if it counts but I have visited Bautzen which was terrific and Gorlitz which was very pretty and friendly but dull. Is Saxon Switzerland more Lobau/Zittau area? I didn't quite have time to go there. I know the region and landscape was said to have inspired The Grand Budapest Hotel.

[Captain Z]

Struggling to think of anywhere that really makes me shudder to imagine visiting again, although possibly Newquay, Cornwall? Went there for the day a couple of times during family holidays in the early 2000s and it seemed quite nice, a couple of OK record shops and a pleasant 'happening' kind of vibe. Went again maybe 10 years ago and it had turned into a desolate stretch of vape/charity/empty shops and a clear sense of being nothing more than James-Corden-stag-weekend-central. I think we walked around a bit of headland for 20 minutes and then ran out of things to do.

[Blinder Data]

Most of SE England, especially suburban London. So many angry people, so many cars, so many busy roads and Greene King pubs and £500K+ houses. Terrible.

[buttgammon]

North side of the river in the centre is shite but seemed particularly shite last few visits. Always expecting things to gradually move on, whether its civic amenities or plain or corporate blandness but still the same fucking scary rotting back alleys, lowlifes and grim streets as before, just even scarier, rotting, lower and grimmer with the advancing years.

All the cash brought in for those fucking green hats and Guinness tshirts hasn't found its way to the Treasury then.

I've worked on the Northside for the last few years and it's noticeably declined over that time. There was a time when I'd consider a day successful if I managed to get in and out of the office without being shouted at or seeing a fight.

Although it has redeeming features, Dublin as a whole feels like it's teetering on the edge of becoming full-on dystopian; there's destitution and dilapidation but also the sheer banality of any new developments, the absurd cost of living (especially with rents) and the destruction of any shred of history or culture by the greedy Randian fuckwits who run the city. It's becoming a tourist trap with no actual tourist attractions, the sort of place where you stay in a chain hotel in order to visit other chain hotels.

[The Crumb]

I don't know if it counts but I have visited Bautzen which was terrific and Gorlitz which was very pretty and friendly but dull. Is Saxon Switzerland more Lobau/Zittau area? I didn't quite have time to go there. I know the region and landscape was said to have inspired The Grand Budapest Hotel.

It's right on the Czech border, and indeed half the area is in Czechia and called Bohemian Switzerland.  It's more about the landscapes between the towns than the towns themselves. We started from Rathen station, near the Bastei.



I can see how it might have inspired that vertiginous, living fairytale aesthetic.

[Ray Travez]

I forgot Dundee Bus Station. Shite.

Bollocks, I've got a weekend booked at Dundee Bus Station in August, looked good in the brochure :(

[canadagoose]

Bollocks, I've got a weekend booked at Dundee Bus Station in August, looked good in the brochure :(

I hope you like piss.

[Gurke and Hare]

Massive cliche, but Slough. About 25 years ago I spent some time working on site at a client office at Heathrow Airport which meant staying at a hotel in Staines - deso enough in itself, but at least it had a nice Chinese restaurant I could eat at on expenses a couple of times a week - and as the alternative was staying in my room in the Anne Boleyn Hotel with 4 channels of telly to choose from I used to go and see what was in the surrounding towns in the evenings. Slough was the worst by some distance - I couldn't find anywhere to eat, and I don't just mean anywhere I wanted to eat, I literally couldn't find an open restaurant.

[Replies From View]

The very top of an up escalator as it shunts you into the floor and someone is haemorrhaging into the back of you.

Or the very bottom of a down escalator, same situation.

[Sebastian Cobb]

The very top of an up escalator as it shunts you into the floor and someone is haemorrhaging into the back of you.

While the cunt in front of you stops to piss about and pull the handle out their wheely bag.

[dissolute ocelot]

Livingston - the epitome of dull new towns. Yes, it has a Wagamamas and a Le Creuset outlet store, but there is more to life than that. Not even easy to get out of.

Glenrothes - a crap new town that also contains a particularly evil arms company and a massive waste incinerator, and the shopping centre is much worse than Livingston's. Makes Kirkcaldy look like Brighton.

Everywhere in the west of Scotland more than walking distance from Glasgow's West End (the centre of Glasgow has some places worth going but then you go into the street and there's a guy with blood pouring off his face trying to staunch the bleeding with a dead seagull).

Wolverhampton - only there 3 hours but not impressed

Aldershot

Cambridge

Every Wetherspoons

Detroit - historically interesting but still an abomination (and it contains a Museum To Kid Rock)

Texas

[Pink Gregory]

There's something about larger Asdas that panics me.  Maybe it's the scale, the enormous uncovered aircraft hangar ceilings, or the height of the shelves, but it awakens a desperate panic in me and makes me quite unpleasant to be around.

[Fambo Number Mive]

Forest Gate in East London is pretty grim and quite dodgy. I remember Debden in North East London being pretty grim and having a real air of menace as well.

[BJBMK2]

Bowling alleys. All bowling alleys. Sweaty, loud, sticky, stinky, sensory overload warehouses of pain and cholesterol, designed to be essentially uninhabitable to anyone over the age of 7.

This may* or may not have been coloured by my brief stint working in one. 


_{*It may.}

[Des Wigwam]

Broadmarsh Shopping Center, Nottingham. Haven't been since about 1992 and have a feeling it may not even exist anymore. Weird lighting and always had a sense of being on the eve of closure.

By contrast I quite liked the Vicky Center.