Jump to content

Worst Town In Scotland


I'm Brian

Recommended Posts

8 minutes ago, TheScarf said:

Looked up Rigside on Google Street view, f**k me, it looks like something out of a Rob Zombie film.  I'm half expecting to rotate the view and see Captain Spaulding standing there looking at me.

I just did the same. And the very first street I looked at had this:

image.png.da86a6490d0d0bb37f768dc8d13647f0.png

How the hell do those car parking spaces work? If they're all full how the hell are the cars behind supposed to get out?

Unless Rigside actually has a valet parking scheme of course. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 minutes ago, Cardinal Richelieu said:

I just did the same. And the very first street I looked at had this:

image.png.da86a6490d0d0bb37f768dc8d13647f0.png

How the hell do those car parking spaces work? If they're all full how the hell are the cars behind supposed to get out?

Unless Rigside actually has a valet parking scheme of course. 

I think it must do.  Some boi in a red waistcoat and bow tie stood there waiting for you.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Any town with those 1930s looking sodium coloured streetlights is verging towards a dump.

Lanarkshire is full of them, places like Carnwath, Glespin or my nomination for worst town - Rigside.

As a kid, we would drive through Rigside and my Dad would tell me about a murder that had taken place there recently. This has scarred me, every single time I go through now I see police tape in my head.

Fortunately we would then quickly arrive in Ayrshire and he would start to talk about football again. (Or sometimes the RAF bombing a train bridge near Muirkirk for target practice.)
It's a pity the RAF didn't obliterate the rest of Muirkirk. Some nice wee hamlets between Ayr and the M74 but that ain't one of them.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

There has been another two murders in "Rignam", one four weeks ago and another a couple of years ago.

 

Some place, Rigside.

It's funny Rigside being mentioned here, as I was literally just there about an hour and a half ago and was thinking to myself that for a town that's really just a small housing scheme it has some murder ratio per inhabitants.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 minutes ago, Cardinal Richelieu said:

I just did the same. And the very first street I looked at had this:

image.png.da86a6490d0d0bb37f768dc8d13647f0.png

How the hell do those car parking spaces work? If they're all full how the hell are the cars behind supposed to get out?

Unless Rigside actually has a valet parking scheme of course. 

RIgside is the trial village for Elon Musk's new Hover Car Range.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Hammer Jag said:

I walked along Allison St a couple of weeks back. It’s had a bad reputation for years but f**k me, I was shocked at just how much of stinking mess the place was. The streets and gardens were filthy, household waste everywhere. It’s also the only place other than Albania where I’ve witnessed large groups of people just loitering in the street for no real reason.

I live in decidedly middle-class Strathbungo, but Govanhill is a stone's throw away and I spend a fair bit of time there for various reasons, and I've got a fair bit of affection for the place. Govanhill has some serious, well-documented social problems, but I actually wonder if things are looking up for it a bit. A few decent shops, bars, cafes, etc have sprung up over the past couple of years - probably influenced by what's going on in the areas surrounding it but with comparatively very cheap rent.

It's still treated like a dump by too many of its residents, and too many of the flats are owned by crap landlords who don't give a toss about the quality of the housing as long as the rent is coming in, but as people and businesses move in I'm hopeful that might change. There's a long way to go though.

Edited to add: the thing about people loitering in the street is apparently much more of a cultural norm in some of the communities that have moved to Govanhill in recent years. I see it quite often but never encountered any trouble.

Edited again to add: and it's within a short walk to plenty of good bars/cafes/parks/fancy shops/places people like spending time in, and a short ride on public transport away from anything Glasgow has to offer - more than can be said for some of the places named on this thread.

Edited by Adamski
Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

 

 

I also want to throw Dalkeith in the mix. I lived there for about a year with my birds folks, and had talked about buying a house there.  Glad I changed my mind. Again, a not bad town in general, just full of ****ing roasters. I now reside in Musselburgh, a far better calibre of people.

 

Congratulations on escaping Dalkeith! I too have escaped after a 15-year term, and then a second 10-year term when I was stupid enough to go back after my first escape!

 

It has the potential to be a nice town - barring the disastrous 60s carbuncle bit (where even pigeons only go to die) it has a nice town centre, it is close to Edinburgh, it is surrounded by green countryside and woodlands with great walks abounding - but by Christ it was a hard place to love, or even feel part of a community of.

 

The people can be as dour as they come, the pubs can be welcoming and violent in equal measure, and there is absolutely no culture to speak of in the place unless you count the stuff that grows on the sandwiches in the Ship Inn.

 

Everybody has to go into the city or around the bypass to get to work, and they never get above 5mph on their commute so hate it. (Unless they work in the big council building in Dalkeith or the SQA, and then they simply find other things in life to hate.)

 

It's by no means the worst town in Scotland, but I'd put it up there as the worst town in Midlothian.

 

It really should be so much better, much more close to say Haddington than to say Bucharest.

 

EDIT - I should add in fairness it was a great town to grow up in. As a kid you enjoy the countryside bits of it (albeit that's rapidly turning into houses), and you don't have to care that an eight-mile car journey to your work takes nearly an hour sometimes. You love it because you have loads of mates at hand and it's all you really know. But as an adult, no chance!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Was Dalkeith not where that paedo guy tried to move to and folk ended up beating the shit out of his identical twin?
There's been a few!

One guy who lived above the takeaway in Woodburn got hounded out of town by a vigilante group, based entirely on a whispering campaign.

The guy I suspect you are thinking of was the Da Vinci rapist who got housed near to Dalkeith on his release, but I think is from Penicuik. He was hounded out by a mob who kept a vigil outside for weeks.

There was also the Luke Mitchell murder near the town, he lived in the town.

There has been various murders over the year, shootings now and again, gang wars - it was lovely walking about the place of a night.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Got to laugh at some of these nominations to be honest, Wishaw, East Kilbride, Cumbernauld, Auchinleck, Dalkieth, Hawick just some of the towns mentioned recently. Every single one of these places has 'at least' something going for it, while there are large tracts of areas with absolutely f**k all about them. The A8 corridor between Motherwell and Livingston, is stowed full of places that make Auchinleck look like a thriving metropolis...Blackridge, Caldercruix, Hartfuckinghill, Salsburgh,  Allanton to name a few...worse than that corridor is the area to the South, where as the boy above says 'Rigside'...I've drove through this place umpteen times and never seen anything, bar a pub that looks like its shutdown and a roll shop that looks like it should be shut down, I've never seen anybody walking about, a fucking weird place...there are also a clump of villages within a reasonable distance of each other with nothing what-so-ever to offer the outside world and why anyone continues to stay in these places is fucking beyond me...Carnwath, Carstairs, Forth, Tarbrax, honestly these places are like the land that time forgot, and when time was forgetting, so was evolution. Backwards, backwards places full of folk with f**k all to do, and nowhere to go...

 

...so to those mentioning Wishy, and all the rest of the towns with at least a supermarket, a thriving fitba' team or a train station to get the f**k out of the place every now and again, go and take a day out to Forth, Carnwath or Rigside and live a wee bit.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 minutes ago, Le Tout P'ti FC said:

There's been a few!

One guy who lived above the takeaway in Woodburn got hounded out of town by a vigilante group, based entirely on a whispering campaign.

The guy I suspect you are thinking of was the Da Vinci rapist who got housed near to Dalkeith on his release, but I think is from Penicuik. He was hounded out by a mob who kept a vigil outside for weeks.

There was also the Luke Mitchell murder near the town, he lived in the town.

There has been various murders over the year, shootings now and again, gang wars - it was lovely walking about the place of a night.

Aye the rapist got housed up on the road between Cockpen and Gorebridge, the hounders were the usual Mags Hainey types, middle aged working class heavy smokers wi deep voices who get more manly as they get auld.

i remember the Luke Mitchell thing as the schools were breaking up for the holidays and some of the lassies I taught knew the victim, roaring and greeting everywhere. Awful at the time.

30 minutes ago, Le Tout P'ti FC said:

 

It's by no means the worst town in Scotland, but I'd put it up there as the worst town in Midlothian.

 

Because Rosewell only counts as a village  ;)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 09/01/2019 at 12:55, MixuFixit said:

I've never been but I'd assume Tarbrax is awful mainly because it's called Tarbrax and there's only a road into it.

I went to Heriot-Watt Uni back in the day. Some of my flatmates were from West Lothian and we took a drive out to Tarbrax one night. They took me to this pub out in the wilds. Maybe somebody can confirm I haven’t dreamt this. It was called something like The Lazy Y, it was like a ranch, and people wore cowboy gear.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, The Mantis said:

I went to Heriot-Watt Uni back in the day. Some of my flatmates were from West Lothian and we took a drive out to Tarbrax one night. They took me to this pub out in the wilds. Maybe somebody can confirm I haven’t dreamt this. It was called something like The Lazy Y, it was like a ranch, and people wore cowboy gear.

The La Ronde in Coatbridge had regular cowboy nights. I believe it was quite hard to tell when if you weren't familiar. My parents went for a change one night and Dad, as a neutral, was asked to judge the quickdraw competition. Unknown to him the same guy had won for years. He picked the other guy, which led to an OK Corral situation. He was asked to leave on the next stage/taxi.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 minutes ago, Snafu said:

It must be the absolute pits growing up somewhere which has nothing to offer and you can't wait to get out. I know there are small towns and villages which are nice places to live but I suppose it depends on what you want out of life.

When I think of worst towns I think of this song

 

Nice #Staunch ending.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 minutes ago, Cardinal Richelieu said:

Surely if one of your selling points of your town / village is that "it's easy to get to somewhere better", it's not really a selling point?

Of course but in the context of the shittest places in the country being a 13 min journey from Waverley for example means it's far from the worst imo. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

27 minutes ago, Melanius Mullarkey said:

Ive never been to Rigside but I feel that it might become a pilgrimage. 

In the car though and Im not stopping. 

I'm glad it's not just me that's planning to allow some time to check out Rigside and Tarbrax next time I'm in the central belt with a bit of time on my hands.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...