Why Portsmouth Sucks: A List

Portsmouth, Hampshire, Property guide and review

You may think Portsmouth is a beautiful and historical port with lovely inhabitants. Well let me tell you, nothing could be further from the truth. So here is my definitive list of why Portsmouth sucks:

  • The feral packs of kids
  • the endless bass of the exhausts
  • the no go area that is Guildhall Walk
  • the eastern European thugs trading blows and insults and drug dealerships with the locals
  • the almost total absence of culture (Hornpipe Cinema, where are you when we need you)
  • the North End Wetherspoons
  • the asbos
  • the dilapidation of Fratton Park where millionaire footballers drive away from the gloom to their pads in the countryside with the last few hard-earned tenners of the locals burning holes in their Armani trousers
  • the fading splendour of the Southsea villas now carved up into bedsits for ‘transient gentlemen’ and behaviorally-challenged young people
  • the tiny numbers of beggars (like babies in an orphanage they soon learnt the futility of crying for help)
  • the sewage pumping station that is below sea level
  • the historic dockyard with its head stuck up its historic ****
  • Gunwharf Quays
  • the students who quickly learn the value of avoiding eye contact
  • the Somerstown skyline in the day’s dying light
  • the murders
  • the crammed urban streets packed with four-wheel drives
  • the hatchet-faced young women
  • the horrified old men working in the newsagents
  • the cheap housing being built on every square millimetre of greenery
  • the football club chairman who thinks he’s Caesar
  • Fred sodding Dineneage
  • the endless rows of terraced houses
  • the diet of lager and kebabs
  • the shaved heads
  • the baseball caps
  • the stripey tops
  • the beer bellies
  • the knuckles
  • the sovereign rings
  • the white trainers
  • Pompey dots
  • the fights over cabs
  • the nervous-looking coppers
  • the sense of dread on every street corner
  • the tense queues in the One Stops
  • the drives to the country to escape only to find Leigh Park and Wecock Farm
  • the pounding of the waves that will one day drown the place
  • the pleading hope inside that somewhere in the town there are people who don’t find mindless violence funny
  • Paulsgrove
  • the muggings
  • the vandalism
  • the bi-annual footie-related misplaced patriotism fest that always, always turns into riots
  • the hatred of Southampton
  • the hatred of everyone else
  • the bastardised cockney accent
  • the kids swigging from lager cans
  • the tracksuits
  • the red faces
  • the baffled old people thinking death might not be quite so bad after all
  • the smell of dogsh*t
  • the dogsh*t
  • the look you get when buying a broadsheet newspaper and a bottle of wine that doesn’t come in a two-litre bottle
  • the stabbings
  • the slashings
  • the shouting
  • the racism
  • the crappy jobs
  • the grey factories
  • the drizzle
  • that ******* pointless £20 million tower they built 100 yards away from one of the most-deprived wards in Britain
  • the traffic lights that favour a non-existent flow of traffic
  • the empty libraries
  • the jam-packed bookies
  • Fratton Wetherspoons
  • the tailgating
  • those poor, brave cyclists
  • the white vans
  • the tattoos
  • the sailors
  • the endless drivel about regeneration (note to council: a tower block with a few bits of plastic stuck on it is still a tower block)
  • the refusal to do any recycling
  • that strange orange glow you get in the evenings
  • the cctv
  • the concrete
  • the neighbours that won’t even make eye contact with you
  • the ordinary people looking to move to Fareham
  • Cosham Wetherspoons
  • Port Solent
  • Time and Envy
  • South Parade Pier
  • the sea
  • the sea…

How grim is your Postcode?