Wally ha ha i lived in roundhay for a bit and bus always went through Harehills. Some really nasty things happen there whilst we were living up the road. remember some Irish bar near the main supermarket being a hotspot for stabbings.
Hardest place you've ever lived?
hugopal i lived in moorland road in hyde park which run along the back of the park. we had loads of problems, especially with attempted break ins. only time they ever got through was in roundhay which was supposed to be a more respected area
Raised in Chelmsford…the only badlands was the Melbourne area. Pretty sure Grant will testify it was a khazi.
Haven’t lived anywhere rough but if I were pushed I’d say the Cowley Road in Oxford and even that was super friendly.
hugopal Wally Not ‘hard’ but ‘sketchy as fuck’ was Harehills in Leeds. It’s the BME (‘Black and mixed ethnicity’ as the council’s like to call it) area of Leeds but I think that’s kinda inaccurate - it was more ‘The loser degenerate’ area of Leeds. Junkies, prossies, gangs, benefit scroungers, the royal flush.
I lived not too far away in Hyde Park while I was a student at Leeds. A large percentage of the population is students, so it probably wasn’t quite as sketchy, but it still got a lot of the spillage and typically features in the top 10 postcodes in the country for burglaries.
We were burgled twice in the 2 years I was there - once they smashed our front door in with what must have been some kind of battering ram while I was brushing my teeth in the first floor bathroom and then proceeded to quickly clear out our living room.
I never ventured as far as Harehills, but knew a few students that lived in Woodhouse and Chapeltown between where I was and there, and heard a few horror stories.
I got burgled in Hyde Park on the first night I lived there. And when I moved in to a place on Potternewton Lane (not far from the park Wally) a Dutch drug dealer was shot in the back of the head, in the car park of the pub 30 yards away.
Ended up off Goldhawk Road in London for a bit. It really wasn’t bad, but there was a schoolkid got hunted down by a pack of little shites and stabbed to death near the tube station while I was there. It happens often in London now, but at the time (2003-ish) it was still fairly unheard of and pretty shocking.
Alias-The-Jester …lived on the Haringey Ladder in ’91/92, Sydney Road. I can confirm it was rough as fuck, but having been out in Cockfosters the previous year, it felt like we’d stepped into the city and we didn’t care.
Remember once taking a piss in the lav at the Wetherspoons (Moon Under Water IIRC?), and peering up and seeing someone had left a carving knife on top of the condom machine to ‘collect’ later in the evening. I remember putting it in my coat and taking it home because A. I didn’t fancy witnessing someone getting carved-up in a bar brawl, and B. it was a significantly better, sharper knife than anything in the cutlery drawer in our cockroach-infested shithole
Shirley this is a competition only the Oirsh contingent can win?
- Edited
Houses in good neighborhoods get burgled too. It’s hardly the measure of a hard place to live.
Utila for me. Scuba paradise by day, crack fueled warzone by night. The cops were bought off on the island by I assume cartels as the landing strip was used as a staging point. Black Hawk helicopters often came through there at night from the mainland chasing shipments. We left the island not long after a 15 year old was hung up on a lamppost with his gut cut open, rumour was it was the cops themselves that did it. Nobody knew for sure because there was so many psychos on the island. Many of which I had the pleasure of serving at the bar I managed. Plenty of nights I had to hand over bottles of Flor De Cana without payment for fear of being cut to ribbons.
The marching powder was proper scarface grade though so swings and roundabouts.
I lived in Levenshulme while on my uni placement year working in Manchester.
“Highlights” include my mate popping out to buy cigs and returning 10 mins later sans coat and trainers.
Smallman1 the Cowley Road in Oxford and even that was super friendly.
It was “super friendly” alright. Mainly down to the large gang of (now convicted) predatory pedophiles roaming up and down.
mono-stereo Had quite a few mates go to Manchester unis, ending up living in Levenshulme.
Pretty minging.
I spent some time on Utila Liqui though sadly couldn’t dive due to being asthmatic.
Mad old country Honduras, found Tegucigalpa genuinely terrifying.
Probably Aberdeen. It’s all made out of granite.
There are a couple of housing estates less than 5 miles from where i live that the british army and the local police wouldn’t enter during the troubles, unless it was a planned operation and there were significant numbers of them. Proper next level shit. RPGs at police/army landrovers, multiple person machine gun attacks on same. Gun battles against the loyalists who grew up on the other side of the fence. And none of that fucking mugging shit. If you were born on the other side of the fence and were caught in a housing estate you shouldn’t be in, it never usually ended well. Thankfully that was the 90s. 99% of that shit is gone now. Belfast was a fucking insane place back then. The mad thing was everyone knew the majority of the lunatics involved in the paramilitaries, whichever side you were from, particularly from the protestant side i am from. Wouldn’t be uncommon to be sitting in a bar back then, a well known local face would walk in, then someone in your company would say, there’s such and such, he done that shooting the other night. Quite unnerving also. I have some school mates that went the wrong route and joined some of these organisations, the dickheads. I went the the drugs and music route which helped me turn out the beautiful, balanced, bastard that i am.
Si, that’s nothing compared to the QPR-‘Chels’ dividing line where I lived in West London.
Smallman and his rugger mates unable to get served very easily in the ‘wrong’ pub in Chiswick.
Leve’s on the gentrification tip now though still reasonably grim. Need to shut all the shit Irish pubs imo.
Turnpike Lane
Surely you mean the Blackbird Leys estate.
I was on Frobisher Road in 92/93
…around the same time then. I remember the kebab shop opposite the Wetherspoons that used to sell after-hours booze. They had a solitary Stella can on the shelf which you pointed to, and the bloke would say ‘how many?’. Then he went through this strange ritual of rolling and wrapping each can individually in that shiny white paper they used to wrap the donners in
Hahaha ace
How many ‘Daddies’ do you have Smalls? Thought he lived in Corfu?
Splits his time between Chiswick and Corfu Millsy.
It’s a real struggle for him.
Have to be honest, he never looks overly stressed nowadays.
And with a son like me, he knows the bants and hot choccy at Chelsea are never too far away either.
Literally living the dream.
….you’re a good egg Ed, but match days that involve ‘hot choccy’ remind me of this bloke