Helping our son to buy an apartment!!

[servodude]

Quite surprised to see Malvern Hills in there at 17.

My perception is this is a posh and beautiful part of the country but, I admit I've not actually spent much time there. Just driven through many times.

Without the context behind why it was voted 17th worst place etc, Id agree with the surprise. We visited just a few weeks ago for a weekend. Very pleasant little town,

Certainly WAY better than my home town, which doesn't even feature in that list, which is just the proverbial sh1th0le.

One of the biggest whinges you hear in Embra is "there's too many tourists" - sounds like it might suffer similarly?

[ValentineBarnett]

I think the children themselves should earn and buy their own housing.

[CliffEdge]

I'm not surprised that Stevenage is on the list. We lived there for four years at a time when the town was growing rapidly and it was the pits! The town centre was depressing. What does surprise me is that Luton is not on the list! When we lived there, people called Stevenage and Luton the 'armpits of England'.

Had we not been in such a hurry, we would have discovered some of the much nicer places to live.

Steve

I'd guess people in Luton imagine Stevenage as the sunny uplands.

John

I went to Southend once.

[bungeejumper]

Quite surprised to see Malvern Hills in there at 17.

My perception is this is a posh and beautiful part of the country but, I admit I've not actually spent much time there. Just driven through many times.

I'm a bit late to this party, but we stayed in a village near Bromyard a few years ago while visiting the RHS Malvern show. All very pretty, but after a while you started to notice all the unemployed young people just hanging about in the small towns. And the graffiti and the litter, and the old wrecks that so many of them seemed to be driving. We had real difficulty in finding pubs that did food, and we didn't stay long at the first one in Bromyard because the clientele was getting decidedly iffy by 9 pm.

We drove down to Leominster, and TBH it didn't change all that much. The countryside's gorgeous, but as my old grandma used to say, you can't live on a view. On closer inspection, it turns out that the areas west of the Malvern Hills are a very long way from anywhere else, and the roads are slow and generally winding, and it doesn't surprise me very much that they're not exactly jumping with opportunities for the young people who'll be funding our state pensions. (Apart from picking apples in September, of course. ) I daresay it was those people that voted the area down?

BJ