The Worst Things in Oxford, Oxfordshire*

The entirely missable and worth mentioning because of it

You can tell us more about Oxford.

The Worst Things

• Utterly inept town planning: chaotic traffic lights on the one way system is a joke. Allowing vehicles to park for loading and unloading on Hythe Bridge Street and Donnington Bridge during busy times is ridiculous. Half-hearted catering for cyclists: having bike lanes that end suddenly or start again in the middle of the road is more dangerous than not having them at all. While we're on the subject: cyclists who don't bother obeying the highway code and make motorists angry at those of us who do ride sensibly. The hordes of flabby-bellied, thick, breeding, smoking young women and spotty, moronic young men who clog up the city centre. Please, stick to your council estates. Facilities for drug addicts etc in St Ebbe's, which result in hordes of drunken, fighting, shouting human garbage wandering around at all hours - many businesses in Oxford rely on the tourist trade and this is not good for business. Surely such places can be moved out of the centre where people don't have to view them. Cost of living (whether renting or buying) in Oxford is ridiculous - it's easily as expensive as many areas of London.
• Being away for university.
• Japenese tourists. Trying to walk down cornmarket in summer can be a nightmare. Working in summetown and having to get up early to trek there.
• A lot of postings in this and demolish it now sections contravenes your code of: "PLEASE DON'T send us stuff which is defamatory, racist, malicious or otherwise unlawful - this isn't a soapbox for prejudice, personal abuse or private vendettas" As an Oxford graduate myself and the mother of an impecunious current student I find such remarks at best extremely offensive and at worst down-right inaccurate. Get them removed!
• Traffic is absurd, mixture of smelly old vans taking books everywhere, huge numbers of old buses clogging every artery, spoiled kids from colleges in parent-purchased merc convertibles and maniac boy racers. Basically avoid all contact with roads.
• The usual wankers that spoil every city, too many beggars, too many idiots fucking up the cowley road, endless roadworks, bloody foreigners getting in the way everywhere!
• I used to live near this town. Run. Don't stay, just run. Hostility is the by-word. It's not a place you'd want a child to grow up, unless you want them to grow up filled with hate and spite toward the rest of humanity.

• The bloody awful 60's buildings built by graduates from the Fuck You school of architecture. Also the pikey storage areas that are Cornmarket and George street, they should be bloody bulldozed, tramps on Cornmarket hassling you for money are a pain in the arse especially the one who's teeth I punched in when he told my girlfriend to "get cancer" when she refused to give him a fiver.
• student body almost all upper-middle class, white and over-privileged, drive rents out of local's reach and throw money about in insensitive fashion
• The fact that residents are third class citizens in their own town. The place is run firstly for the students, then for the tourists, and a long long way behind them is anyone who actually pays council tax.
• Expensive, dirty (due to litter and take-aways), difficult to find housing, big homeless problem, a few very mentally ill and unstable people, too much traffic, not enough parking.
• Cornmarket and the city council (£10, 000) on one granite bench, vandal proof of course (ye right). But by far the worst is the city postal services, sack the lot of them and transfer operations to Bombay, it would get to its destination far quicker.
• All of George Street, it should be fucking bulldozed. Also would someone please tell me how much longer they will be digging up Cornmarket Street?? I live in Hong Kong over the holidays and they have managed to build the worlds third biggest skyscraper there in less time than its taken the council to bloody re-pave Cornmarket Street! Tools. Typical crap Oxford Council they all need a good kick up the arse.
• F**king cold at night in the winter Delinquent kids from the shit-hole council estates dotted around Oxford who roam around in gangs and make as big a pain in the arse of themselves as possible.

• Mi enimies!!
• The bridge, overated and a complete rip off!
• Only one good restaurant per ethnicity. The expense of everything. How dirty everything is. The heroin use. The unhappy tension between the three factions: students, townspeople, and tourists. Just look at this page for evidence of that!
• Parking, or lack of it. Worse than just about any other city in the country. London is heaps easier as long as you're prepared to pay thru the nose. In Oxford there's not even the spaces to put a car in, no matter what you'd be able to pay! It always seems several degrees colder than the rest of the county. The tourists in summer and/or when the students are on hols. Hordes of backpacking twits blocking the pavements.
• The Council - making it as unpleasant as possible to visit Oxford by car. I mean, come on, what is the justification for continuing to charge xxx pounds for parking after 6pm, and employing traffic wardens all night to enforce it? The council just don't realise that cities compete with each other just individuals and seem to want to put the pubs/restaurants/clubs/theatres/cinemas at risk. It's just their greed, and its enough to make me always to choose to shop in Newbury instead, and park for free there.
• Bikes, toffs, prices, college scarves, tourists, Yanks, traffic, hustle and bustle.
• students
• jt no longer in residence
• The never ending traffic jams that start when parents drop their kids off at school at 8 AM and contine until 7 PM at night.
• It rains all the time. I live in Newcastle--I'd never have thought I'd move South and it'd still be just as rainy if not more so. It's nowhere near as COLD as Newcastle though--the person who said Oxford was the coldest they've known it must've come up from Penzance or something.
• The traffic and the closure of Morrell's Brewery.
• All the smack heads who hang round the monument near Westgate centre! it is minging!!!!!
• The "new"Saudi Busines Centre just opposite The Railway Station is the first attempt at a major donation in about 100 years.Its opened at an auspicious time-Afghan war an all. It looks more like a work of the egotism of its donator and a political and propaganda piece of architecture. It doesnt look to bad but Im dubious if "business" can be learned in a fancy place like this?Perhaps itwould have been better to open a hippie vegetable and bric a brac market with cheap lets? The Railway Station is pretty awful for the folowing reasons: 1)The male loos usually smell,are flooded,far too small,dirty and vadalised and often contain junkies and or other dubious types. 2)The main 2 and only platforms are positioned in such a way that the wind whistles along them into the ears of the awaiting passengers. 3)The seating area is uncomfortable with benches-no backs-and subject to frequent harrassing visits by beggars,idiots clutching cans of lager and the like. 4)The little kiosks sell very little of interest,very little of creative originality 5)Cancellations disruption and so on of train services are frequent eg the time the line was blocked by " a cow on the line at Cholsey"!
• I left because of the 1 way system decigned to segregate Oxford along class lines. Over all Oxford is: unnecessarily expensive; has an unfriendly city centre; ugly new buildings in the old station area; increasing drugs problems; and is overcrowded. The council don't spend enough money on much needed council accomodation and prefer people to rent dives privately for large amounts of money.
• Rent is *expensive* - actually its all expensive, but you'll pay London prices for everything if you can even find anything.
• Bums, gippos, pikeys and townies - thank god they don't congregate too much around Blackbird Leys (I think, my area's pretty mixed now)- apart from hanging around the top shops armed with a can of Super T without a care in the world, they (mostly gippos/townies/pikeys) tend to come from Rose Hill, Kiddy, Bicester, Abingdon(ugh). Bums belong to Cowley Road outside Tesco or the playground. The fact that Oxford becomes incredibly boring after five minutes. Oxford is a beautiful city, but we need more things to do that doesnt just involve getting searched by a bouncer, breaking the bank, and drinking large amounts of alcoholic fluid. How about a cinema multiplex, leisure complex, bowling alley etc? Definitely would increase the amount of things to do here.
• Central and West Oxford has degenerated into a commuter suburb for London; areas such as Jericho are no longer full of nice pubs and people, but rich commuters stuffed into tiny terraced houses costing 250K.
• Rich American students act like they own the place. House prices are now the same as London; a tiny studio flat can cost £70,000.
• Shopping isn't that great and both townies and gownies are too conscious of social class.
• Holidays, because the city is jam-packed with tourists that never get out of your way no matter how hard you smack them!
• The tourists, particularly Americans. The traffic system.
• People who slag Teddy hall - they don't know what they're on about most of the time, although we did have the motto 'Effortless Superiority' for a while - come and join in, you'll be welcomed with open arms.
• Ignorant know nothing students ranting on about Oxofrd been full of small minded rural types when they spend 90% of their time ponsing it about in their fortress like colleages. Don't start sounding off about 160,000 people when you darn't even venture into the city centre, Cowley Rd etc. Oxford is infact a cosmopolitan, outgoing city with pleanty of sound people kicking about and getting on with things. If the student population don't want to be part of this for whatever reason then OK but fuck off posting poxy messages on here slagging off our city when when you lot know absolutly fuck all about the place!
• The DJ in Bar Risa on a Saturday night (Hythe Bridge Street)
• Centrai Library closed for work throughout July 2000 Council is trying to reduce numbers of canal dwellers. Campsites make you move your tent every 3 days and wont allow people to work from there. Other accommodation headaches....few cheap modern places.
• The women.
• If you aint one of them-a Oxford student-you are definetly excluded. Its very us and them more so in the 1980s and 1990s,in fact you are not just excluded but thrown down into a cold facsist underbelly of dead end jobs no opportunities and really poor facilities experienced by the English underclass. Oxford is really-behind the University which totally dominates and is the reason detre for the town-a declining cold little agricultural city with backward rurals all around lack of trees make it a cold and windswept place uncomfortable within reach of Birmingham and Slough. The lower middle shop assistnt and petty clerk class and restaurant washer up types seem to be particularly unpleasant and nasty in this city as is the accommodation underbelly usually under heavy pressure and of often poor to appalling quality ie rented. A large number of alcoholic and ugly beggars are always sponging off people in the centre.
• dtms
• The traffic
• Too small to be a city, has all the inconveniences but non of the bonuses of city life
• Beware of the road system. Oxford city council hate cars, and have designed the centre of the city to be a torture for anyone bringing one of those dreaded machines into the city. The one way system and parking prices have to be experienced to be believed.
• If you've neevr lived in a small town, you're in for either a real treat or a scare. Within a month you'll know practically everybody by sight and they'll know you. It's nice...but a bit of a fishbowl after three years!

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