EARTHQUAKE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Pachyderm]

I don't know what it was like in the 80's, unfortunately, so I can offer no direct comparison. But I suspect that it has gone downhill. At least in the 80's the car manufacturer's still had factories here. It's a heavy industry town, with no heavy industry. The buildings are frequently grotesquely ugly, put up in the 1960's as quick-fix temporary stuff, and still here, with little pretiffication done. (and often, little maintenance). The Council suck at organising anything (hardly an unusual complaint, I will grant you). Then there is the accent, and the massive chip on the shoulder about Birmingham. It feels soulless, and sucks the life out of you. I am heartily glad that I will be leaving in September.

[goat starer]

What's so bad about Coventry? I have seen worse places*. Or did it go extremly down since the 80ies?

it mainly went downhill after the luftwaffe flattened it and as a monument to the futility of war town planners rebuilt it as a kind of geurnica in concrete.

are you sure you have been to the same coventry? can you name one or two of these worse places? I would dearly like to see one!

[The Meromorph]

Gary, Indiana.
Fontana, California.
Detroit, Michigan.

Brazilia.


enough?

[Pachyderm]

Goat's "Concrete Guernica" is by far the best description of Coventry that I have ever heard (and I lived in Birmingham for 2 years).

Can I use it, please, Comrade Goat?

[goat starer]

Pachyderm - you may have it! you may even claim you made it up... it is the marxist way!

Meromorph - those are are gardens of eden compared to Coventry

[Griffin NoName]

I'll have you know that I was taken on an exciting day out as a (London) child to see the splendour of the brand new (post-luftwaffe-flattening) Coventry Cathedral.

I still retain a postcard of the fine (new) stained glass window.

~ so shall every being find beauty amongst the dust ~

[Swatopluk]

I was there in school exchange for 2 weeks more than 20 years ago when my English was still pretty inexistent. Fortunately the host family were Yugoslavian immigrants, so at least the parents spoke in a way that I could understand. The children grew up in Coventry and spoke the local way (maybe today I'd be able to understand it).
I would not say it was an especially pretty city but also not the worst I have seen. Living in West-Berlin surrounded by the glorious "Ruinen schaffen ohne Waffen" (weaponless ruination) GDR may have tainted the perception.

[Pachyderm]

Judging by the state of the litter, I'd estimate the last time any of it was picked up was about 20 years ago.

I may be being a bit harsh, coming as I do from Perthshire, which is green, lush and lovely.

Having said that, my family have lived in plenty of less salubrious places (Nigeria, Cameroon, Libya, Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya...), and I'd still rather be in any of them than here.

The stained glass window in the Cathedral is impressive.

There are good things about Coventry, but, for me at least, they are heavily outweighed by the negative.

[Sibling Chatty]

Gary, Indiana.
Fontana, California.
Detroit, Michigan.

Brazilia.


enough?

Flint, Michigan.

Worse than Detroit, even 18 years ago before it got really bad. (I went with friends to move their aging mothers and grandmother to Houston. I've seen bad, I've seen ugly, I've seen towns flattened totally by hurricane, tornado and flood. I have never seen anything as horrid as Flint.)

[The Meromorph]

Fontana, California.
A moderately sized town in the middle of the High Desert. It was created in the 1940, from scratch, to house the people running the Kaiser Steel plant, which as a 'defence industry' was required to be move 50 miles inland from Los Angeles. It's sole industry, and almost sole means of employment, was the Kaiser Steel plant. In 1982 the Kaiser Steel plant, employing 40,000 people, effectively closed. (I was there, developing a new computer system to service retirees).
Fontana (the original home of the Hell's Angels) had, at the time I was there, at least two out of three shops on it's one main street boarded up. The houses were all single story houses on a small lot. Those that were still occupied, and many that were not, had two or three old (once expensive) cars slowly rotting in their yards. Where the house had a 'garden', it was universally unkempt desert-tolerant plants and bordered by a 'hedge' of 'prickly pear cactus'. The rest of the yards were typically unkempt desert scrub.

Fontana in the bright California sunshine would have depressed Mary Poppins.

For two weeks every year, it rained more or less continuously.

Fontana in the rain... 

 

[Pachyderm]

Pachyderm - you may have it! you may even claim you made it up... it is the marxist way!

It may be the Marxist way (I always had my suspicions. Nice to have them confirmed but it is not the Pachyderm way. If (when) I use it, full credit will be given. It may be the only thing that saves my life....



edited to add quote end marker

[goat starer]

lordy  next you will have me claiming rotyalties on it and living in a mansion sipping a glass of pimms bropught to me by my latvian maid whilst my polish gardener trims the privet. All the while reading the Telegraph and complaining about all the eastern europeans coming over here and taking the jobs of english people....... like Beagle 

[beagle]

... and complaining about all the eastern europeans coming over here and taking the jobs of english people....... like Beagle 

I don't recall ever saying that (feel free to use the board search function). Possibly you are confusing me with that "British jobs for British workers" speech of Gordon Brown. I'm a huge admirer of people who will bus their away across half a continent in order to work. It's good old Tory capitalism in the Tebbit "get on your bike" model. 

The Europeans you will find me complaining about are the EU bureaucrats who have used half a century of lies and deception to centralize power in some new unholy European Empire, totally disconnected from any grassroots opinion. 

[Griffin NoName]

Order!! Order!!

[Pachyderm]

Pint of bitter, please.