“You’ll not find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”

Apathy can be the only reason that Dunstable has not yet appeared on your list. The place is so bad we can’t even be bothered to write about it.

It is a crossroads patrolled by ********.

Enough said.

James and Eleanor.
Consumed with bitterness.


The place was and probably still is a one-horse backwater. Here are the horrors in brief - arts and craft fairs, BNP stickers (nazi bonehead band Skrewdriver were pin-ups round these mostly white parts), violent pubs, a bus service to Luton that terminated at 7.30 pm, a Ritzy disco and the infamous Dog Kennel Walk, which ran alongside a disused railway track and was the scene of several hundred unpleasant sex attacks.

I spent most of my time dodging other kids in flat tops and shellsuits - try and imagine Grange Hill crossed with Deliverance. Claims to fame - there’s a load of dead vikings buried in the dog turd-strewn gluesniffer’s haven of Dunstable Downs. And the Clash once played a gig at Queensway Hall, which has now been knocked down in favour of an ASDA.

Martin Conway

Stroud

It's no accident that Stroud's turn-off on the M5 is at Junction 13. Bordered by a number of nauseating Cotswolds villages, Stroud is where the skint went when the retired civil servants, teachers, solicitors and brothel madams bought up all the cottages in their home towns. Unable to afford £350,000 for a two bedroom cottage, they moved south and bought three bedroom semi-detached Wimpy 'homes', where they passed the time by hanging George Cross flags in their upstairs windows and mounting their Austin Maestro on bricks under the living room bay window.

The dispossessed have flocked to Stroud, turning into a large rural sink estate. Its delights are obvious, from the Merrywalks shopping centre, where pride of place goes to the Mobility Shop and Argos, to the miracle mile of charity shops all the way up the pedestrianised High Street. Park in one of the car-parks at the top of town and meander your way to the bottom and, by the time you've arrived at McDonalds on Merrywalks, your very soul will be the colour of pitch.

Stroud deludes itself by thinking it is a centre for an alternative way of life - in reality this amounts to little more than seven retirement-age hippies standing opposite Dixons decrying the war in Iraq with all the enthusiasm of a fluffer at a 150-bangs-in-a-night porn shoot. Its cafes fall strictly into one of two camps - artery clogging 20 Lambert and a fried egg greasy spoon, or colon clogging kaftan and a focaccia with spinach vege.

Stroud is the sort of place where they knock down a bus station to replace it with a cinema that has all the visual charm of Buchenwald Concentration Camp. It's the sort of place where the pikeys rub shoulders with crustys outside one of the Pound shops. It's a stinking rectal sore of a place whose only advantage is that thanks to the proximity to the motorway and the mainline train station, it's very easy to leave.