DarloRich
Veteran Member
May I add Bedford to the list? I find the route from the station to the town centre and the town centre itself utterly depressing. The riverside area is pleasant but the town seems to have suffered some kind of modernisation at some point in the past which no doubt swept away lots of older buildings. The bloody town hall looks like something the Soviets rejected as being overly brutal! it is the kind of place you could imagine seeing in some eastern European country being shelled and machine gunned by tanks during some independence struggle!
I think a lot of it is architectural. MK has been very good at updating the building stock. Most of the other new towns haven't and still have lots of 60's/70's concrete structures, which while having a certain kitsch charm, are not popular with the natives and give a depressing vibe to towns especially on those gray, damp days we get in the north east! I am thinking about Newton Aycliffe and Peterlee here but I bet it holds for others.
There’s new towns and there’s new towns. Somewhere like Stevenage has very different issues to Kirkby.
I suspect part of the antipathy towards new towns is that most of them are “down south”, and in most cases tend to have an ex-London bias to the population, even half a century or more further on. We’ve already read here how London seems to lend an aggressive / miserable influence, so if you stuff a place full of displaced ex Londoners from the lower end of the tree and it’s possibly no surprise that the place might seem unpleasant to outsiders.
I dunno, Skem and Kirkby are certainly in the running for being nastier ones.
I think a lot of it is architectural. MK has been very good at updating the building stock. Most of the other new towns haven't and still have lots of 60's/70's concrete structures, which while having a certain kitsch charm, are not popular with the natives and give a depressing vibe to towns especially on those gray, damp days we get in the north east! I am thinking about Newton Aycliffe and Peterlee here but I bet it holds for others.