I’m actually far more interested in the fact that the Mirror has a reporter named ‘Saffron Otter’ than the story itself. She sounds like an unsuccessful character from Metal Gear Solid or possibly a real ale.
But I was under the impression that Rhyl was “Better Than Life”.
It’s the seaside, you have a beach and sea. What more do you want. Imagine if they said the same about woodland areas. No arcades or bingo here… rubbish
It is an absolute shithole, especially when you consider they had massive opportunities to redevelop, missed their chance, and all the redevelopment money and big names went down the coast to Prestatyn where the town has seen a new lease of life, a massive new retail area, and a big influx of day trippers.
The front of Rhyl is a fucking disgrace, concrete blocks every view, straight out of the 70s. In the evening it’s full of chavs and shitfaced pricks.
The council were too busy trying to find ways to fill the town with more charity shops and pound shops, rather than figure out what the future is.
It’s a thoroughly awful place.
Just the tag line alone is enough to know that they half arsed this report. Rhyl whilst having issues of a more modern making does indeed have a history (it has the oldest miniature railways for example.) Like most of the North Wales coast it has been suffering from a decline in industry/jobs. It doesn’t help that the Government seems to be quite happy to let our waterways be polluted and uninvested in that people rather go abroad than our own seaside. Rhyl is also alot nicer now than it was 10-15 years ago though it’s quite a poor area due to employment issues.
I was in Sheerness recently and they had to build a four metre high wall across their entire sea front to stop the beach attacking the town, so that’s my new standard for bad seasides.
Rhyl is a fucking dive. The whole of the North West from Rhyl up to Scotland is a dive in all fairness. I mean don’t get me wrong there are some nice places but the coast is drab and sad looking.
Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down?
So, I’m moving to Rhyl.
I’m moving to Rhyl from Devon, from somewhere which appears on the list of best places to live in the uk / best seaside town etc.
And I fucking hate it here.
So, I’ve probably doxxed myself before, but I’m from a town called Exmouth. It has about a 2 mile long seafront with a sandy beach.
In the past few years, we were told we were getting a water sports center. They dug up an entire stretch of the seafront, put in an Edge watersports shop, and a restaurant run by Michael Caines (Along a stretch of water which is not advised to swim in) and some changing rooms.
(on a side note, they actually ripped out several business that didnt fit with the theme, evicted them from the ‘council land’ and replaced them with a carpark and a patch of wasteland. They filled in a boating lake with swan boats with sand and put benches on it. Honestly, I’m still mad.
The town center is full of charity shops, barbers and beauty salons, and kebab shops, and not much else.
Last year, the police station got graffitied on a spot which required a ladder to get to. Homeless people sleep in closed shop doorways, pubs are closing all over the place.
I really could go on for a while, but you get the idea.
Rhyl on the other hand, alright, it’s got concrete all along the front. But it has parking, it has a cinema, an aquarium, a leisure swimming pool. They’re investing in new shops, regeneration of the town, the housing is cheap.
(My car insurance is going to double, just for moving there though!)
In the times we’ve visited, walked around, people I’ve met have said hello, they stand and chat in their gardens. In Exmouth, we don’t even make eye contact. I got out of my car after a long journey and made a slightly groaning noise and a man walking past glared at me for it.
Maybe once I’ve moved there I’ll look back on this and think to myself “what the fuck were you thinking” but honestly, Exmouth is a dying town. Its population is ancient. Rent for a 3 bedroom house is 1800. None of my friends can afford that. Buying a house down here is just not viable, and there’s not much reason to come here other than “the sea” which, Rhyl also has.
TL;DR
Woman visits seaside town in off season, sees concrete, is angry.
Man from Devon sees it, thinks it’s nicer than his ‘nice’ town and moves there.
Rhyl is honestly the worst place I’ve ever been too in or out of the U.K. I hated every minute of it. Closely behind is Wick.
Rhyl was one of the places we holidayed when I was a teen. I still miss the Sun Centre swimming complex, one of the best pools I’ve visited.
I dunno about you, but I’d rather visit Rhyl over a place like Minehead, Weymouth, Brighton, Bognor Regis or Weston-super-Mud. Northern Wales seems like it actually has some personality compared to England’s seaside towns…
The main reason I haven’t gone to Northern Wales is because it’s so damn far for anybody living in Southern England. We’re talking 4+ hours by train from where I live.
Clearly they haven’t been to Jaywick. The beach at Jaywick is alright. Imagine if a few millionaires got together and bought up all the properties in Jaywick, then bulldozed them and built some contemporary homes. You would have Essex’s version of Sandbanks. And an hour from London.
I love how I knew the article would be about Rhyl before I even clicked on it
I inadvertently spent a night and a day in Rhyl in 2018, as Llandudno was full at the time. I found the place interesting, to say the least. But not as interesting as what Tom Moore wrote about it in his excellent book ‘*You Are Awful (But I Like You) – Travels Through Unloved Britain*’:
> From residents to erstwhile holidaymakers, it’s hard to find anyone with a good word to say about Rhyl. ‘My aunt is the Mayor of Rhyl,’ began my favourite onslaught, ‘but family loyalty aside, it’s the most awful place I know.’ The town was ‘an absolute scum-hole’, a place where ‘seagulls fly upside-down because there’s nothing worth shitting on’. The Times called it ‘Britain’s first shanty town’, and the Consumer Association took a break from testing dishwashers to slag off Rhyl as ‘depressing and down at heel’. The last time the place made the news was when John Prescott punched a man in the face there, and with the waning of Carol Vorderman’s celebrity the mantle of Rhyl’s most famous daughter has passed back to Ruth Ellis, the last British woman to be hanged. Then there’s the issue of nomenclature. Rhyl: it’s another of those stark and plug-ugly town-names, hanging over the place like an albatross, with a beakful of your chips.
The trouble with Rhyl is that its full of the work shy class from Liverpool and Manchester. It’s cheaper for their councils to send them to Rhyl than to build houses for them in the city.
Most towns are drab though, this is not exclusive to Rhyl or seaside towns in general. The only major difference is that places like Rhyl have no other industry besides tourism, which makes the place feel worse than it should do. That is what a lack of investment in a town does to it.
I don’t really get this at all. Sure, Rhyl may not be the Capital of Earth, but it has a handsome pleasure grounds, an ornamental boating lake, a miniature steam railway, a permanent funfair (three if you count the two over the River Clywd in Kimnel Bay and Towyn), an aquarium, a multiplex cinema, indoor and outdoor playgrounds/soft play centres, indoor and outdoor miniature golf, a seafront grand theatre, several golf clubs, plenty of sports grounds, and a pretty well equipped leisure centre.
If they want to put up £30K, they’ll also get back their promenade observation tower.
OK, so it’s not Vegas, but it’s a damn sight more exciting than every single faded glory seaside town in my neck of the woods.
One former resort near me’s only current claim to fame it that it occasionally has black swans on its town centre park pond, but the vast majority of the time the black swans are paddling around in the reeds of a river estuary ten miles up the road.
They really did Rhyl a big unkindness by declaring it to be devoid of entertainment, culture, or history.
UK seaside can pick up with local tourist
1) Lower train fare
Who will go to some not so good seaside with a train ticket price that can fly to barcelona or italy
2) better food
let’s be real. UK is not good at food in general.
Though there’s one problem that can’t solve. Weather LOL
19 comments
I’m actually far more interested in the fact that the Mirror has a reporter named ‘Saffron Otter’ than the story itself. She sounds like an unsuccessful character from Metal Gear Solid or possibly a real ale.
But I was under the impression that Rhyl was “Better Than Life”.
It’s the seaside, you have a beach and sea. What more do you want. Imagine if they said the same about woodland areas. No arcades or bingo here… rubbish
It is an absolute shithole, especially when you consider they had massive opportunities to redevelop, missed their chance, and all the redevelopment money and big names went down the coast to Prestatyn where the town has seen a new lease of life, a massive new retail area, and a big influx of day trippers.
The front of Rhyl is a fucking disgrace, concrete blocks every view, straight out of the 70s. In the evening it’s full of chavs and shitfaced pricks.
The council were too busy trying to find ways to fill the town with more charity shops and pound shops, rather than figure out what the future is.
It’s a thoroughly awful place.
Just the tag line alone is enough to know that they half arsed this report. Rhyl whilst having issues of a more modern making does indeed have a history (it has the oldest miniature railways for example.) Like most of the North Wales coast it has been suffering from a decline in industry/jobs. It doesn’t help that the Government seems to be quite happy to let our waterways be polluted and uninvested in that people rather go abroad than our own seaside. Rhyl is also alot nicer now than it was 10-15 years ago though it’s quite a poor area due to employment issues.
I was in Sheerness recently and they had to build a four metre high wall across their entire sea front to stop the beach attacking the town, so that’s my new standard for bad seasides.
Rhyl is a fucking dive. The whole of the North West from Rhyl up to Scotland is a dive in all fairness. I mean don’t get me wrong there are some nice places but the coast is drab and sad looking.
Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down?
So, I’m moving to Rhyl.
I’m moving to Rhyl from Devon, from somewhere which appears on the list of best places to live in the uk / best seaside town etc.
And I fucking hate it here.
So, I’ve probably doxxed myself before, but I’m from a town called Exmouth. It has about a 2 mile long seafront with a sandy beach.
In the past few years, we were told we were getting a water sports center. They dug up an entire stretch of the seafront, put in an Edge watersports shop, and a restaurant run by Michael Caines (Along a stretch of water which is not advised to swim in) and some changing rooms.
(on a side note, they actually ripped out several business that didnt fit with the theme, evicted them from the ‘council land’ and replaced them with a carpark and a patch of wasteland. They filled in a boating lake with swan boats with sand and put benches on it. Honestly, I’m still mad.
The town center is full of charity shops, barbers and beauty salons, and kebab shops, and not much else.
Last year, the police station got graffitied on a spot which required a ladder to get to. Homeless people sleep in closed shop doorways, pubs are closing all over the place.
I really could go on for a while, but you get the idea.
Rhyl on the other hand, alright, it’s got concrete all along the front. But it has parking, it has a cinema, an aquarium, a leisure swimming pool. They’re investing in new shops, regeneration of the town, the housing is cheap.
(My car insurance is going to double, just for moving there though!)
In the times we’ve visited, walked around, people I’ve met have said hello, they stand and chat in their gardens. In Exmouth, we don’t even make eye contact. I got out of my car after a long journey and made a slightly groaning noise and a man walking past glared at me for it.
Maybe once I’ve moved there I’ll look back on this and think to myself “what the fuck were you thinking” but honestly, Exmouth is a dying town. Its population is ancient. Rent for a 3 bedroom house is 1800. None of my friends can afford that. Buying a house down here is just not viable, and there’s not much reason to come here other than “the sea” which, Rhyl also has.
TL;DR
Woman visits seaside town in off season, sees concrete, is angry.
Man from Devon sees it, thinks it’s nicer than his ‘nice’ town and moves there.
Rhyl is honestly the worst place I’ve ever been too in or out of the U.K. I hated every minute of it. Closely behind is Wick.
Rhyl was one of the places we holidayed when I was a teen. I still miss the Sun Centre swimming complex, one of the best pools I’ve visited.
I dunno about you, but I’d rather visit Rhyl over a place like Minehead, Weymouth, Brighton, Bognor Regis or Weston-super-Mud. Northern Wales seems like it actually has some personality compared to England’s seaside towns…
The main reason I haven’t gone to Northern Wales is because it’s so damn far for anybody living in Southern England. We’re talking 4+ hours by train from where I live.
Clearly they haven’t been to Jaywick. The beach at Jaywick is alright. Imagine if a few millionaires got together and bought up all the properties in Jaywick, then bulldozed them and built some contemporary homes. You would have Essex’s version of Sandbanks. And an hour from London.
I love how I knew the article would be about Rhyl before I even clicked on it
I inadvertently spent a night and a day in Rhyl in 2018, as Llandudno was full at the time. I found the place interesting, to say the least. But not as interesting as what Tom Moore wrote about it in his excellent book ‘*You Are Awful (But I Like You) – Travels Through Unloved Britain*’:
> From residents to erstwhile holidaymakers, it’s hard to find anyone with a good word to say about Rhyl. ‘My aunt is the Mayor of Rhyl,’ began my favourite onslaught, ‘but family loyalty aside, it’s the most awful place I know.’ The town was ‘an absolute scum-hole’, a place where ‘seagulls fly upside-down because there’s nothing worth shitting on’. The Times called it ‘Britain’s first shanty town’, and the Consumer Association took a break from testing dishwashers to slag off Rhyl as ‘depressing and down at heel’. The last time the place made the news was when John Prescott punched a man in the face there, and with the waning of Carol Vorderman’s celebrity the mantle of Rhyl’s most famous daughter has passed back to Ruth Ellis, the last British woman to be hanged. Then there’s the issue of nomenclature. Rhyl: it’s another of those stark and plug-ugly town-names, hanging over the place like an albatross, with a beakful of your chips.
The trouble with Rhyl is that its full of the work shy class from Liverpool and Manchester. It’s cheaper for their councils to send them to Rhyl than to build houses for them in the city.
Most towns are drab though, this is not exclusive to Rhyl or seaside towns in general. The only major difference is that places like Rhyl have no other industry besides tourism, which makes the place feel worse than it should do. That is what a lack of investment in a town does to it.
I don’t really get this at all. Sure, Rhyl may not be the Capital of Earth, but it has a handsome pleasure grounds, an ornamental boating lake, a miniature steam railway, a permanent funfair (three if you count the two over the River Clywd in Kimnel Bay and Towyn), an aquarium, a multiplex cinema, indoor and outdoor playgrounds/soft play centres, indoor and outdoor miniature golf, a seafront grand theatre, several golf clubs, plenty of sports grounds, and a pretty well equipped leisure centre.
If they want to put up £30K, they’ll also get back their promenade observation tower.
OK, so it’s not Vegas, but it’s a damn sight more exciting than every single faded glory seaside town in my neck of the woods.
One former resort near me’s only current claim to fame it that it occasionally has black swans on its town centre park pond, but the vast majority of the time the black swans are paddling around in the reeds of a river estuary ten miles up the road.
They really did Rhyl a big unkindness by declaring it to be devoid of entertainment, culture, or history.
UK seaside can pick up with local tourist
1) Lower train fare
Who will go to some not so good seaside with a train ticket price that can fly to barcelona or italy
2) better food
let’s be real. UK is not good at food in general.
Though there’s one problem that can’t solve. Weather LOL