Places you really can't stand.

[Sebastian Cobb]

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.}

Megabowls with maybe a forlorn Wimpy in the corner seem tame by comparison to what bowling alleys have become, with UV lights and simultaneous discos and shit.

To be honest I could probably make do with a few pubs that still have a skittle alley.

[poodlefaker]

Upstairs on the bus

[canadagoose]

Upstairs on the bus

On the contrary, downstairs on the bus is usually crap. Noisy and smells of piss.

[The Mollusk]

Bit of a generic answer, but anywhere with big crowds of people. The old claustrophobia kicks in.

Lifts for me. And since I'm a property inspector in London I have to get in lifts all the time. It's gotten easier since I started on the anxiety meds but still, as soon as I get in a lift I start playing a distracting and relaxing game on my phone (the game is Threes, for the curious), and with every lift journey the small amount of time between the lift stopping and the door opening feels like a lifetime. If a lift is particularly small or looks old and knackered, I will take the stairs. 19 flights is my record.

You'd think modern fancy lifts for luxury apartments would be better, but they have their own unique faults. Firstly a lot of them are key fob activated and it's not always clear whether you need to use the fob just for the penthouse flats or the whole building, or if you need to tap it on the pad outside the lift or the one inside or both. This has on a couple of occasions resulted in a lift door closing and then not moving and me immediately feeling on the brink of a panic attack and hammering the door open button, and they don't always open until a few seconds later. These lifts also move at higher speeds but the floor display screen will go even quicker than that for some stupid reason. So the number on the screen will whizz from ground floor to 32 but the lift will only be passing floor 25 or something and that space of time between I'm left thinking WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING HAVE WE PASSED MY FLOOR IS THE LIFT MALFUNCTIONING AM I GOING TO DIE

I really dislike lifts.

[Blinder Data]

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.

I was extremely offended once when a bunch of women at the table next to me in our local pub started slagging off our village. They had come here for a weekend from Livingston. No self-awareness whatsoever.

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).

Ya big West End ponce. Obviously it's lovely in its way but its influence can be malign - the South Side has been gentrified to an astonishing degree by hipsters priced out of Partick/Hyndland/Whiteinch/North Kelvinside/whichever area is next to desperately claim to be part of the West End.

However, Kilmarnock should definitely be on the list. It has a fantastic ice cream shop (The Forum) but its layout is appalling. The town has no sense of walkability and, more tragically, there is very little worth walking to.

[DJ Bob Hoskins]

Maastricht, Netherlands. I visited on Carnevaal day so it probably isn't the foetid shit-strewn aids spraying crop dust victim I went away thinking it was.

Yeah, Maastricht is fine. Not as pretty as some Dutch cities, but by and large I find the people in the south of the Netherlands to be much more friendly, relaxed and polite than their counterparts in Noord-Holland. It feels like a bit of cultural mish-mash of Dutch, Belgian and French influences. The local food is much better than in the north due to this, and great beer is widely available.

It's also a student town, so it's lively but still quaint (when the carnival isn't on) and if you're a music fan who's into metal you'll be happy as a pig in shit as you can't move for metal festivals in that part of the country.

Of all the places I've visited in NL, my least favourite is Almere. It's the Milton Keynes of the Netherlands. If you've seen the film Vivarium, it's basically exactly like that.

Lush. Fucking stinks in there.

You're not wrong. Funnily enough, the last time I was in Maastricht with my girlfriend, we had just crossed the river on our way into town from the train station, and she sniffed the air and said "There's a branch of Lush near here somewhere". Now, she is really into perfumes so she has a good nose, but frig me: not only was she correct but it turned out the shop was about 5 minutes walk and around a few corners from where we were stood when she first smelled it.

[shoulders]

Lifts and plane flights are things that should make primates get anxious tbh.

The rational fights the irrational. I think the people that never think about it and just accept these things work fine and are machines designed to serve us are the real morons. Not us quivering and sweating in our dark personal cupboards.

I employ a coping technique although I hope no-one finds out about it as it does involve rubbing my glans up and down until a weird sticky goo comes out of the end.

[Stigdu]

Lifts for me. And since I'm a property inspector in London I have to get in lifts all the time. It's gotten easier since I started on the anxiety meds but still, as soon as I get in a lift I start playing a distracting and relaxing game on my phone (the game is Threes, for the curious), and with every lift journey the small amount of time between the lift stopping and the door opening feels like a lifetime. If a lift is particularly small or looks old and knackered, I will take the stairs. 19 flights is my record.

You'd think modern fancy lifts for luxury apartments would be better, but they have their own unique faults. Firstly a lot of them are key fob activated and it's not always clear whether you need to use the fob just for the penthouse flats or the whole building, or if you need to tap it on the pad outside the lift or the one inside or both. This has on a couple of occasions resulted in a lift door closing and then not moving and me immediately feeling on the brink of a panic attack and hammering the door open button, and they don't always open until a few seconds later. These lifts also move at higher speeds but the floor display screen will go even quicker than that for some stupid reason. So the number on the screen will whizz from ground floor to 32 but the lift will only be passing floor 25 or something and that space of time between I'm left thinking WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING HAVE WE PASSED MY FLOOR IS THE LIFT MALFUNCTIONING AM I GOING TO DIE

I really dislike lifts.

Been on anti-anxiety meds for nearly 25 years, so I know exactly how you feel. Not keen on lifts either. I found CBT quite useful.

[Glebe]

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.

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

Lush. Fucking stinks in there.

Addendum: CEX. Smells of shitty unwashed arsehole and stale sweat.

[Gurke and Hare]

Lifts and plane flights are things that should make primates get anxious tbh.

Yeah, planes. Oh, so it stays in the air because the underside of the wings is curved slightly differently from the top of the wings, you say? Fuck off.

[Icehaven]

Bristol. I've been there about 5 times and something's usually gone wrong, so it's just this cursed space to me.

[seepage]

Every Wetherspoons

The Peter Cushing 'spoons in Whitstable is quite nice

[badaids]

Telford. The only town I've been to that doesn't have a Main Street or proper centre.  It just looks like the Commercial Towing Vehicle Nostromo has just illegally parked its trailer there on the surface of the earth and people have built some roads and roundabouts around it.

[badaids]

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.

Add Brent Cross and Harlesden to that list. Two areas that have avoided stubbornly any attempt at regeneration.

[badaids]

Oh and Brussels. A mixture of characterless airport lounge international, cretinous tourist kitsch, sinkhole slums, filthy horrific engineering works that haven't changed in a decade and unbroken bland rows of terraced houses with garage doors on the ground floor. And it's boring - Everything practical closed on the weekends or after 1700 at night. And it's impossible to pay for anything because they refuse to use things like visa. All infested with wall to wall traffic jams and the worst drivers on the planet.

[Psybro]

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

I adored Detroit for how utterly, utterly empty the downtown was.  Europeans aren't nomadic enough to pull off depopulation that effectively.  It's like 28 Days Later in the land of giants, all skyscrapers and 8 lane roads and just total abject silence.

[poodlefaker]

Telford. The only town I've been to that doesn't have a Main Street or proper centre.  It just looks like the Commercial Towing Vehicle Nostromo has just illegally parked its trailer there on the surface of the earth and people have built some roads and roundabouts around it.

Spent three days at a work thing in TefLord this month. It calls itself an international conference centre, but there's one pissy train an hour to the nearest city or airport, and none of the local hospitality venues can handle the numbers. I ate in Nandos three nights in a row because it was the only place that wasn't full or had run out of food by 9pm. There's nothing apart from the conference centre, a shopping mall, some chain hotels and restaurants, then just parkland, but it's full of bored teenagers hanging about. Fuck knows where their houses are, underground maybe. I was embarassed for the colleagues who'd come from abroad, all eating in the Hungry Horse, then crammed onto the four-carriage slow train to Birmingham, standing up with their suitcases.

[poodlefaker]

I adored Detroit for how utterly, utterly empty the downtown was.  Europeans aren't nomadic enough to pull off depopulation that effectively.  It's like 28 Days Later in the land of giants, all skyscrapers and 8 lane roads and just total abject silence.

Spent a long Sunday in Detroit a few years ago. Jetlagged and awake at 5am, end of April but freezing - ice falling off buses and buildings. I had the wrong clothes and shoes and everything was closed. Motown Museum - closed; art gallery - closed; huge rambling secondhand bookstore that I walked about ten empty blocks in the sleet to get to - closed.

[phes]

https://mobile.twitter.com/Reece3__/status/1541010106061561856?t=of-ZCQR99raaT_d5px7Ang&s=08

That thread has some Special Desolation. Town center after town center just dead malls

I not fond of Manchester. Every time I'm there it's grey, shitting it down, the sky feels about the height of a ceiling, it's expensive, everyone looks unfriendly and miserable and when someone does talk to you they're often a chippy twat.

Add to that Marple, where many absolute wanker commuter professionals live, meaning you have to tolerate their incessant self centered aspirational bulshit on the train for half hour.

[The Mollusk]

Been on anti-anxiety meds for nearly 25 years, so I know exactly how you feel. Not keen on lifts either. I found CBT quite useful.

Cock and ball torture?! I guess whatever floats your boat but that sounds like it would make me more anxious.

Lifts and plane flights are things that should make primates get anxious tbh.

The rational fights the irrational. I think the people that never think about it and just accept these things work fine and are machines designed to serve us are the real morons. Not us quivering and sweating in our dark personal cupboards.

I used to be really anxious about flying, but my wife is even worse than me - I feel like she's almost broken my hand from squeezing it on some takeoffs - so weirdly my VALIANT CHIVALRY MODE kicks in whenever we fly now and I am completely chill so that it helps her remain as calm as possible.

Admittedly whenever we hit any turbulence I am secretly and silently shitting myself in the extreme whilst adopting the template Reassuring Brave Smile like the temp from Darkplace:

[Shaxberd]

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.

When I moved to Nottingham in 2015 it was still there and had definite post apocalyptic vibes. Bleak, beige, half empty. Had an appropriately desolate burger with my dad at what must have been one of the UK's last remaining Wimpy outlets.

There were big plans to revamp it but that got fucked by the pandemic so now it's just being torn down. It's a hole in the ground at the moment and already a significant improvement.

[Ferris]

Orangeville, ON. Asked the person at the tourism desk "we've looked at the shops for 10 minutes, is there anything else to do?". She gave the bleakest head shake "no, not really". Never to return.

St Andrews - wife gave me stick because I made us late and missed the early train ("so we won't get the full day there now"), we still ended up sacking it off after about 2hrs because it was shit. There's nothing there.

Bath/York/Nottingham - utterly indistinguishable in my memory, tedious and empty with nothing to do unless you like twee shops stuffed with gingham. They are how I imagine it is to be in a sensory-deprivation tank, but with train stations. Avoid.

I grew up in the nothingy suburbs and left, swearing never to return. I visited the family home for a few weeks when my son was born to "meet everyone" and (similar to @Sebastian Cobb's post on the first page) couldn't get over the sheer despair and ennui on display. You can't fucking go anywhere, but if you walk for 50 minutes that way along a B-Road, you'll get to a Harvester (closes at 9pm).

Airports: LaGuardia is the worst place known to man. Washington Dulles almost as bad.

Ok cheers.

[phes]

York/Nottingham - utterly indistinguishable in my memory

Nottingham wishes it was York. They tore all that stuff down and dissected the city center into inaccessible and invisible pieces by running a massive road and the Broadmarsh Center through it

[shiftwork2]

Bath/York/Nottingham

Crikey.

[shoulders]

Yeah that's like Ferris' version of Jockice hating curry.

[Ferris]

You can't argue I'm not consistent.

[Clatty McCutcheon]

Commercial forestry plantations - vast tracts of land covered in identical conifer trees with miles and miles of identical tracks. Once you find yourself in one of these 'forests', you could be pretty much anywhere, and you start to wonder whether you're ever going to be able to find a way out of it. They're total wildlife deserts because the trees are so tightly packed that they're as dark as midnight in a coal cellar. Sometimes they actually have signs about 'forest walks'. Why would I want to go a walk through miles of identical trees?

I know they're a useful source of paper, toilet paper and low-grade building timber. Like everyone else, of course, I like paper, toilet paper and low-grade building timber. I like these things as much as the next man - but not enough not to want to raze all of these places to the ground.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I like these things as much as the next man - but not enough not to want to raze all of these places to the ground.

That's the idea.

[Glebe]

Grim Victorian institutions, horrible old 1970's buildings, industrial estates, etc.