http://www.eveningexpress.co.uk/Article.aspx/3461491 The violence in this city is becoming very worrying indeed. To be serious though 30 odd years ago Aberdeen was a fairly pleasant place to go out. Nowadays I would not even venture into the city centre late at night, it really has gone downhill dramatically. What's it like where you all live? Safe enough? Or best just to give it a miss?
I don't believe eiter of you Mick and Tina. And I can vouch for first hand about Glasgow. Much as I love the place it is ****in mayhem at night.
Lovely sunny day today and looking out the window at the beautiful clear view of the mountains but you're right can be hairy in city centre at night,like any city really.
The closest I get to Saturday night mayhem is tip toeing round the puddles of puke and broken WKD bottles that litter the streets, as I go to buy the Sunday papers. Doesn't look, from that evidence, as though much has changed since I was an active pisshead myself. Britain's been going to the dogs since the early 15th century btw, when Henry V had his stag do in France culminating in an almighty drunken ruck at a place called Agincourt. The French were outraged by the behaviour of the bawdy drunken louts from across the channel. Plus ca change...
Hackney has recently attracted a vitriol usually reserved for Tory politicians and *****philes. Until lately, the area was famed for warring estates and knife crime, but now Hackney is widely perceived as embodying the worst aspects of gentrification. Vintage boutiques, French-style cafés and pop-up art galleries adorn the streets, and you are never more than six feet away from a babyccino. Nowhere are Britain’s ever-rising levels of inequality and lack of social mobility more evidently pronounced. The central problem is that house prices in Hackney and the rest of London are going up. This is pricing out the locals, but compared to similar areas, Hackney is still relatively cheap. This means that young professionals who can no longer afford the inner City have been moving in en masse, with their university degrees and penchant for artisan sourdough loaves, and friction with the local working class population is inevitable. On the one hand, in Hackney you are confronted with some of the worst poverty in the UK. It is no longer ‘murder mile’: the levels of serious crime are much lower than they were a few years ago. However, the murders, suicides, muggings and gang-related violence*continue to happen on a daily basis. Schizophrenia and delusional disorders are five times the national average, the rate of people citing mental health conditions for being unable to work is amongst the highest in the country, and a large proportion of children is going to school hungry. Hackney also recently came top in the national ‘cuts per person’ league: a £266.17 cut per person from 2010-11 to 2012-13, four times as much as the rest of the UK. Your bus journey home is just as likely to be disturbed by a stabbing, a local religious fanatic informing you that you will go to hell because of drinking, smoking and pre-marital sex, or by a jaded yuppie sitting behind you, trying to convince their friends that they ‘deserve’ the right to do huge amounts of cocaine every weekend, because they work so hard. Ultimately, the transport is slow, the rent isn’t actually all that cheap, and everyone is sick to death of talking about the perils of gentrification. But Hackney these days is too much of an easy target: the parks are beautiful, the area’s history is incredibly rich, it’s one of the most culturally diverse boroughs in the country and, at the moment, there is nowhere I would rather live.
Many yokels think as you do, but you're wrong. Think you'll find London is in fact the capital city of planet earth, humanity's crowning achievement. Glad I could help.
Was in Tottenham last night. They've spent some serious money doing up that High Street. Reckon the riots were one big insurance job.
We're the ones paying all the ****ing tax. And don't be deluded into thinking you'll get to keep all the oil when the flow of tax revenue from London to the provinces stops at Hadrian's Wall.
**** off. The North East of Scotland and it's associated Oil and Gas revenue has been propping up Britain for 40 years and you ****s in the South East have pissed it all away. I have always been undecided about Independence because I feel it will largely be The Central Belt that will benefit but congratulations I think you have finally made my mind up. **** the South of England. I'm voting yes and you southern softies are gonna suffer big time.
