It was a mixed bag of an area.
Grays: Not a bad High Street. Has a new-ish Mall, which considering Lakeside is just round the corner, is quite a brave thing for the council to have installed. There is a rather pleasant smell of fish and chips pervading the whole area. I know there are a lot of chippies around here, but why the whole area should resemble a seaside resort which has had its sea removed I don't quite know. You expect to hear caliope organs and people scoring heroin up side-alleys, the kind of thing British seaside resorts are best known for.
This should make the place appear jolly in a "we are at the seaside and so even though its freezing and my boxers are full of sand we WILL be jolly" sort of way. However, the area feels somehow incomplete. I can see why people might get depressed living there as it is so temptingly close to London and yet nothing like the big smoke. And despite its atempts to lie to you, the sea is another 15 miles further east at Leigh.
I am not saying that Grays is the grimmest area I've been to - far from it - but it does feel as if it was the centre of something great once - or perhaps something amazing was planned for it and never completed as it has an 'almost done but not quite' feel about it. Quite weird overall.
Tilbury. This really does feel like the last chance saloon of places in and around London. It has a totally dead atmosphere and even the laughably named 'Civic Square' whose name conjurs up images of office buildings, or at least a communist-style concrete shopping centre is nothing more than a parade of wanky, crap shops (not even a KFC, but Favorite Fried Chicken sort of parade). Maybe I missed the action: maybe nearby is a huge uber-mall which might explain the centre's complete deadness. When I say dead, I mean - where are the cars? Where are the passers--by? The words 'no hope' spring to mind. Its like a day when you wake up, scratch your arse then realise that the thumping of th dole cheque on the mat is the best thing that's going to happen to you this month. A truly dispiriting hole. Not grim in the same way that towns near nuclear reactors must be (they can at least be interestingly bleak, but just a dead, not-happening, hollow kinda town. I tell you, 20 minutes there and I was glad to be heading back on the C2C to Grays and on to Lakeside. And look, I'm from Dagenham and don't have much to write about favourably when it comes to associating 'interesting' and 'my own manor'. I'm just trying to put this review into context, yeah? I am not a fan of shopping centres as a whole for the reason most people who dislike them dislike them. When it comes to my reasons for disliking large shopping centres, I'm not an original thinker. However, arriving at Lakeside, I was truly RELIEVED to back out of the Twilight Zone that is Tilbury. You have been warned. You should only go to Tilbury if you're completely sure of your own sanity, because a few hours there will surely turn you into a paranoid depressive if you're nothing less than 70 percent normal in the first place.
And you call THIS a Civic Square?
No comments:
Post a Comment