Shropshire fails to make quality of life top 50
Saturday 24th December 2011, 7:00PM GMT.
The Hampshire district of Hart has been named as the UK’s most desirable location to live, but nowhere in Shropshire made the top 50.
Shropshire has been snubbed in the 2011 Quality of Life Survey by Halifax, which lists the places with the highest quality of life.
The list is dominated by towns and villages in the south and east of England. The district of Hart, which includes the towns of Fleet and Yardley, has taken top spot off Elmbridge in Surrey.
The only place in the West Midlands to figure is the district of Wychavon in east Worcestershire which comes in at number six.
The district of Hart boasts more than 1,000 buildings listed as being of architectural or historical significance.
Wokingham, East Cambridgeshire, Brentwood, St Albans, Maidstone, south Cambridgeshire and Epsom and Ewell all made the top 10.
The news that Shropshire has not figured in the ratings has been greeted with shock by civic leaders and tourism bosses around the county.
They have insisted that towns such as Shrewsbury and Ludlow are extremely good places to live and continue to attract new residents every year.
Rankings are based on aspects such as jobs, the housing market, education, health and crime, as well as factors like the weather, traffic flows and broadband access.
Councillor Peter Nutting, leader of Shrewsbury Town Council, said: “I am surprised Shrewsbury doesn’t figure,
“The standard of living and quality life here is excellent and the town has everything people could want.
“We are a forgotten county but sometimes that is a good thing as it means we can keep all the benefits of living here for ourselves.
“I think people in the south-east of England think they are the only place that matters, but we know differently,” added the councillor.
John Aitken, Mayor of Ludlow, said: “I am amazed. There has been immense interest in Ludlow ever since the town featured on Town with Nicholas Crane on BBC2 in October.
“People really enjoy their visits to the town and they look on our residents with a real degree of envy when they look at our town.”
Graham Hickman, a photographer and historian who has lived in historic Ironbridge for more than 60 years, said: “I think sometimes it is best to keep places we love to ourselves.”
By Peter Kitchen
UK News
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Sh!!!!,don’t complain about it, keep those easily pleased Southerners down where they belong, our county is better without them !.
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worked down south for 10 years,my home was always Shropshire.I was always glad to return to my home county to the beauty and peace which i never found down south.It’s a county that is full of history and my own family have lived here along long time!!!
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I moved from the south east a decade ago and have never felt the urge to return. In every way, be it less congestion, better value housing, lower council tax and a generally more tranquil environment plus lower crime rates, friendly folk and good ale houses, towns like Ludlow and Shrewsbury which are easily accesible and beautiful.
The south east has water shortage,chronic congestion,noise from traffic and airports, air pollution, stupidly expensive property and pressured public services.
I have no doubt that the quality of life is far higher in Shropshire and other parts of the UK than in the overdeveloped south east. The trick is to keep it that way and resist the economic pressures which have done so much to ruin the home counties.
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G Hickman has a good point. Additionally, if the survey included household refuse collection (cardboard) and general street rubbish it is no wonder that nowhere in the county featured. Tongue in cheek we should await the top 50 list of the worst places to live (based upon jobs, public transport, council tax rates, car park charges, charity shops – the list is endless).
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The Halifax obviously has a strange view of what makes for quality of life. All the towns listed are within spitting distance of the M25, London, and the overpriced and congested lifestyle that goes with it. As a southerner who long since escaped from all that, I agree with Graham Hickman – anonymity is not a bad thing and it’s better that we keep our beautiful, spacious and uncluttered county to ourselves.
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What Graham Hickman says, says it all.
Keep it to ourselves.
That attitude is Shrewsbury’s problem through and through.
It is the citizens and their view of the rest of the world that make a place great to live. Parochialism, mental stasis and suspicion of change lead to corruption amongst the long standing people in control,lack of enterprise and culture and a failure by those who lead to lead by example.
It is not down to an inheritance of ancient buildings but how those buildings contribute to modern life. Are they integrated with later additions of great contemporary architecture? Are they looked after. Are they reinvented for use in the 21st century? Are their assets shared by a wider audience.
Is progress encouraged?
Is a multi ethnic society accepted, or even welcoming to those not born in Shropshire?
This statement ‘keep it to ourselves’ is poisonous and reflects the views of those who have lived here for many years who do not even intend to share with fellow Salopians if it can be helped.
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Eva, well said. Such parochialism exists in my adopted home in the West of Ireland and it does nothing but strangle and suffocates sustainable development and the development of the society that everyone thinks is so great.
It is of no big surprise to me that so many foreigners, including English people, move over here and then within a few years, move away again. No doubt the same can be said for Shrewsbury and many parts of beautiful and yet jealously guarded Shropshire.
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I love Shrewsbury but live in other places too… It has little in the way of employment opportunity, night life or good places to eat.
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Reading postings it’s clear that many southerners have made Shrewsbury their home and rightly so. It has amazing architecture, dog walking (the Quarry)and is so, so friendly. You don’t get that in the home counties.
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The statistics were based on the heatlh and wealth of the population.
Needless to say, the better paid jobs are largely nearer the capital and no surprises that the younger and hence often healthier members of society follow in that direction.
Ergo, the Halifax report tells us nothing we didn’t already know.
That said, I wouldn’t like to live in the South; I find young, healthy, well paid people unbearable.
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[That said, I wouldn’t like to live in the South; I find young, healthy, well paid people unbearable.]
You say that Nistagmus but it is so easy if you are fortunate enough to have work maybe even interesting work or even better, reasonably, decently paid work. The problem is however that it is easy to forget what enterprise or vitality is in the rather suppressed and suffocating but easy to live with ambiance of Shropshire.
You can find that you like it but are unaware of what you are missing or what is being decided for you.
There can be be very few who have much ancestry in Shropshire, it having such a minute population little over a century ago yet the attitude of ownership is used to exclude people and so called protect it’s unchangedness which isn’t remotely unchanged in reality.
Films like Chocolat, Hot Fuzz, Truman’s World and even maybe even Wicker Man, come to mind!
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At least Hot Fuzz made us laugh:)
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I live near Geneva at the foot of the Jura mountains after 32 years of employment in Switzerland, but was brought up in Shropshire. Every year I visit the UK and always try to include Shropshire in my itinerary which enjoys, for the most part, the space and tranquility that is difficult to find in the south-east regions of the UK. The so-called experts of Halifax who reached their subjective conclusions must be a group of Suburbanites!
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the key here is jobs and incomes, you need a good wage to live in shropshire due to dire public transport, lack of mains gas which drive up the cost of energy and thus the cost of living, however the average salary here is much lower than average and this is due to lack of skilled work, particularly we need more high tech, it and engineering jobs, skilled manufacturing, banking, private health care, public sector, managerial, accountancy and legal type jobs, milking cows and making yoghurt may seem idealic to some but it dont pay the bills and so its hard to have a quality of life when you in fuel poverty or freezing each night
i do think that part of the problem could be part of the solution here because if we need high tech engineering jobs to create wealth and we need cheap energy to reduce living costs well we have the win, win of wind power in a windy county, so lets get shropshire on the map as the capital of green energy and green engineering jobs, we have ample resource here of biomass in particular and wind but we have a real prospect of growing a green industrial economy here, linked to the land, linked to the heritage of ironbridge, we led the world to industrialising now lets lead the world in decarbonising, we can do it, lets make shropshire rich and create well paid jobs, lets build some energy infrastructure in this county
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Charles,
It’s a shame we don’t have a local university – think of the employment,the input a few thousand students would have into the local economy and the cultural events open to all. Further,now fees are rising to £9,000 a year studebts are increasingly living at home. We are going to have so many bright young people in Shropshire who won’t have access to higher education
As well, campuses often attract high tech industry. I don’t know if this is true but I have been told that we could have had one in the late 60s or early 70s but the Town Centre Residents’ Association blocked plans
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the problem with shrewsbury and ludlow is the chavs, little pockets of council estates on the edge like harlescott and sandpits which undermine the tranquility and aesthetics of the town. Had this housing been provided by the private sector it would have made sure a better quality of structure and a better quality of tenant would be there, now the whole town is dragged down by yet another public sector failure.
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