I have been in Dalkeith for 2 years. It’s quite an interesting town with a lot of history – a traditional Scottish small town – but it’s also an unquestionable **** town.
If you spend any time in Dalkeith, you’ll see there is no sense of style or refinement here. The **** way of dressing is absolutely the norm here. The place is packed with fat women wearing leggings and short jeans, which are unflattering for them.
Dalkeith seems a not bad shopping town, but most of this is charity shops and classic **** stores such as SemiChem, Savers, Woolworths and Farmfoods. The only supermarket in the town centre is Lidl, only opening till 5pm. (Tesco is out of town, 24 hours and is at least balanced out with some non-*****.) Check out the Continental Cafe, the hangout for the older **** generation. Dalkeith is very close to the shopping centre at Cameron Toll, in Edinburgh, and the retail parks at Fort Kinnaird and Straiton, both on the Edinburgh City Bypass. Because of this Dalkeith has suffered, and I fear this will help it continue to be a **** centre.
Dalkeith has pockets of affluence – the suburbs of Eskbank and Newbattle, which have been responsible for Dalkeith having the 3rd most expensive house prices in Scotland. The rest of Dalkeith isn’t very prosperous, and most of the town’s population lives on the Woodburn estate which is thronged with gangs of teens every evening. It’s one of those estates with a 20mph speed limit and speed bumps throughout the whole estate, I’m sure that’s for a reason.
This is of course where Luke Mitchell comes from, although his murder of Jodi Jones wasn’t strictly a **** thing. We had another murder about a year ago, where a guy was kicked to death in the town centre on a Saturday night.
And we’ve had the ingenious experiment of moving a non-denominational school (Dalkeith High) and a Catholic school (St. David’s High) to the same out-of-town campus. Everyone should love each other as themselves, but sadly bigotry is alive and well here. Bigotry has brought about a lot of violence, gang fights between the schools, smashed school buses, and the like. Dalkeith seems to have a thing for violence. There is a lot of truancy from the schools. The skivers hang around Dalkeith town centre, Eskbank and Cameron Toll.
Dalkeith has had a lot of bad luck in the last couple of years especially, because of violent incidents and bad publicity. But it all adds up to a definite **** town.
There is also an article about Mayfield on **** Towns. Mayfield is a neighbouring town, but in fact it’s nothing more than a huge estate, and it’s considered by many to be simply a suburb of Dalkeith. It’s pure chavness, too. It has a population of 12,000 (about equal to Dalkeith proper) but has NO town centre to speak of, or anything remotely like one. For supermarkets, it has only Scotmid, not even anything like Lidl, let alone Tesco.
The village of Danderhall, opposite the Edinburgh bypass from Dalkeith, is also reasonably ****.
