The Knowhere Guide

Best and Worst in Colchester, Essex*

Colchester, Essex Triumphs and Tragedies

Favourite Building

• The water tower, the castle, Leisure World, plenty of things to do for the young ones
• the castle of course!
• Colchester Royal Grammar School buildings.
• Jumbo has to be the most impressive building in town. Unused, and still no long-term plans as to what the heck to do with it. It's a huge victorian water tower on great big chunky legs (Hence 'Jumbo').
• Jumbo is threatened by an oh-so-clever promotion which pretends to be a leisure attraction but is 90% private penthouse. The owner has spent a fortune persuading people that replacing the tank with a glass box for him to live in is a wonderful idea. If you have any feeling about this see www.aw00.dial.pipex.com and lobby your councillor from the site. Save Jumbo for Colchester!
• Jumbo the water tower
• The 6th form
• The boys' Grammar School.
• Siege House, The Mill, The Castle, Jumbo, The Town Hall, the list goes on.
• Old bits of the 6th Form College, if you look out on the train in from London you can spot it and Jumbo and the town hall up on the hill.
• The Town Hall is a magnificent looking building, or some of the tudor-esque houses in the old Dutch Quarter are great and Jumbo is brilliant
• Its not a building, but I recall the ancient Dykes out Stanway way, at least they were there when I lived in Colchester in 70-72 as a young Australian visiting and suffering at Stanway Secondary School.
• Playhouse- If only for the cardboard cut-out klingon in the upper circle, and the table alcoves you and your SO can disappear into for a quiet dinner.
• Jumbo the water tower.

Demolish It Now Building

• The Garrison simply HAS TO GO! Along with all of them down queen street, BT building, North Station could do with a spruce up - starting to show its age, Town station needs to be demolished & rebuilt, as does Hythe station. The council offices with the useless plebs inside!
• the playhouse !!! please !!! , burn it , bury it..
• charlie browns eyesore
• university tower blocks that always remind me of a view of post apocalypse london in a film i once saw as they rise out of the greenery surrounding the university
• To be honest, they're replanning the road scheme so often, it's hard to know what should be demolished and what should stay. St Marys Hospital (long time favourite if you're sleeping rough) is now due to be flattened and replaced with yet another retail outlet. St Marys used to be the Workhouse at one time and is rumoured to sit on top of a roman temple (no doubt they'll dig it up and find out). In general, the whole town is a bit messy - too many plans laid one on top of another and none making any real difference. They've speeded up bus access in some areas, but by and large it's a congested mess most of the day.
• Essex University. A prime example of everything bad about 60's architecture!
• Is the bus station car park still there?
• The Girls' Grammar School
• The shoe shop in Queens Street, used to be Keddies, looked out of place since the seventies taste for blandness and the use of cheap materials passed.
• Watched with glee as they demolished the old bus station car park from my bedroom window when I was revising my A Levels 4 years ago-ish. So, since that's gone - how about Burnabrette (spelt?) It's the place where the council house all the poor kids who've got nowhere else to go. I had mates who had to stay there and they say it should be blown into orbit.
• Essex Uni Towers.
• the new Asda supermarket (it looks like an aircraft hanger) and the old shoe shop on Queen Street looks dreadful (square 60s building in a primarily narrow 1900s street)
• Main Campus buildings of the University- apparently modeled on an Italian hill village, but actually looks like the god of Readymix vomited sometime in the sixties.
• BT building West Stockwell Street
• Queen street is a dump and a tourist funnel to the park, a great shame cause the park is great
• The Garrison
• anything with a NCP badge on it
• Telecom Offices and old exchange on West Stockwell Street - tower of greyness. Absolutely abominable, spoils the skyline when viewing Colchester from the North.

The Best Things

• Castje Park int the summer, the waterfights, and highstreet at night.
• Col U look as if they're going to get a better ground, division 1 next year lads?
• mixture of people, plenty of places to go.And it isn't Basingstoke.
• Best things about Colchester? If you're into Roman stuff it's a veritable alladin's cave, but it's not exactly an inspiring town.
• Very good schools. Grammar schools that top the league tables, and comps. that follow hot behind.
• The pubs.
• The A12 South - Having spent all of my teenage and early 20's there it was nice to find an escape route.
• It's not Adelaide S.A. The walk across the pedestrian bridge through the Balkerne Gate past the Mercury and the Jumbo Water Tower and along High Street or Eld Lane. Two little boys two and four (now sixteen and eighteen) would say the Toy Department in W and G and the Brio trainset in particular.
• Bob Russell, he cares about stomping out animal cruelty/hunting, even if he should have got the high street renovation done quicker (and right first time), he still gets my vote. The history, it is Britain's oldest recorded town afterall.
• Going home to see my mum, and being able to leave. Having a chance to like the buildings etc. because I'm not stomping around angry at being made to live there anymore. The U's - doing well under new management boys! The castle and the park are the best bits by far. New Town is a nice area because my grandad lived there when I was a kid and it's all the older houses - makes you think what the place must have been like in the old days.
• RAPTURE at the UNI Underground in October. Every year this has always been the best night out in Colchester.
• A bit of culture, tons of pubs in the town centre, lively nightlife compared to other towns of similar size (Chelmsford, Norwich and Ipswich to name a few), lovely old areas like parts of Newtown and Lexden and the council is quite eco friendly AND we still have a proper High Street
• Castle park. Train to London when its working
• Colchester Castle has the best museum I've seen in a long time - a complete history of the town.
• The countryside surrounding Colchester; Constable country and being an hour (Or less) away from London
• Laughing at the kids racing hot-hatches on a Friday nights while their girlfriends turn blue in the station car park.
• A pint of foaming ale in the Odd One Out in Mersea Road by the open fire on a cold winters night.
• The best thing about Colchester is definitely a portion of chips, from Hicks chip shop in the High Street after a night at the Hippodrome.
• Only a stones throw away from Clacton-on-Sea and, especially, Kirby Cross.

The Worst Things

• everyone wants a fight. People stop you on the street to ask you. Squaddies are always on the look out, many people have died recently due to fighting in town so its well advised to stay in the pubs & clubs, not like the old days of getting wrecked in town and wandering about on the pull (what i did when i was 13-15, then got into pubs)
• Squadies, need I say more. Allso, Queen Street, the tackiest place on Earth that isnt by the sea.
• The traffic, caused by those bloody bus lanes that need to be got rid of. Suspicious smells near the Hythe. All the buildings responsible should be in the Demolish-it section.
• To many Big issue sellers.
• Worst thing about Colchester is traffic. If you do drive, avoid it in rush hour as you just won't move. Cycle paths aren't too bad (they did make some progress here), but it's a nightmare to drive through, and no real shopping focus - too many satelite shopping areas out of town.
• The Greenstead Estate is grim grim grim. And there's a shocking amount of drugs going around - maybe due to Colchester's proximity to an international port.
• The squaddies
• Oh pretty much all of it unless you're a tourist. Worth a day trip if nothing else.
• The traffic and totally useless Bus Lanes that only the local council seem to think are of any use and arrogantly refuse to remove!
• There are some really ugly women in Colchester, I think some of them live behind the ATS Tyre place on East Hill and date coppers....it's like a scene from Deliverence. Colchester Zoo, should be called the animal prison. How can people leave with a clear conscience.
• Narrow-minded attitudes. Rascism to the 1% ethnic minority population. Bob Russell and his sicophantic twat councillors - we don't want the New Town news Bob! It's a bunch of moaning crap. All it ever says is, "Naughty Labour have said this or that." I don't like any of you, but you're the worst. The council pulling down the playground in Attlee Gardens/Golden Noble Hill to build a car park and then referring to council house kids as 'that sort of child' when my mum complained. The lack of nightlife. Greenstead/White City/Highwoods...
• HSBC bank in the High Street. Every lunch time it is full of foreign students annoying all the staff because they can't use the cash machines!
• too many squaddies fighting (although it can be entertaining to watch), too many students moaning about the squaddies and having nothing to do (I don't know what they expect, I have lived in towns all over the country and once you go outside London and other big cities Colchester is about as lively as it gets)
• St Johns Street at any time is a nightmare for mothers who care about their childrens health; all due to that enviromentally freindly body called Colchester Borough Transport. ANYTHING with BOB RUSSEL on it!!
• The lack of decent night spots and clothes shops
• Squadies & Students in the same town, how unlucky!
• The worst thing about Colchester has to be the 5,000 squaddies based there, who make half the pubs unusable at the weekends (especially the Wagon and Horses and the Castle).
• The insane amount of cars jamming up the town centre at all hours of the day and night.
• Hordes of students who moan about there being nothing to do because of the squaddies despite the fact that they never stray further than campus and wouldn't know a squaddie if it came up and bit them.
• The extremely bad attitude of the bouncers and the barstaff in The Playhouse pub.

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Last updated: 2007-09-19