Chippenham is a small market town in Wiltshire, 15 miles East of Bath. I was living happily in Bath until my landlord decided to sell the house. My friends came to the rescue – or so I thought.
They had bought their 1st house 8 months previously in Chippenham (they couldn’t afford a house in Bath). They started to struggle with their mortgage so asked me to move in with them. I thought it would be better than being homeless and I’d been to Chippenham once before to visit them and it seemed a nice place. I was wrong!
My friends privately owned house was next to a council estate, in fact the adjoining house was a housing association house. It homed a single mother and her 3 chav kids and the loudest dog in Wiltshire. During the day they would get pissed, throw litter into our back garden and row. In the evening they would also fight. Most of the other families in the area were the same and would stock up on booze in the mini market directly opposite our house! From 4pm until 9pm the mini chavs (8 to 14 yrs old) would hang out in front of the shop using the shop front as a football goal and swearing at any one who walked past. From 9pm onwards the older chavs would take over and vomit everywhere.
I still worked in Bath and spent as much time as possible there; even at the weekends I would travel into Bath to go shopping and meet friends, because Chippenham is a dump, there is nothing to do there. The high street has a Wilkos, Woolworths, Argos, JJB sports, several mobile phone shops and a Greggs (yummy!) It is infested by the worst dressed mini chavs, teenage chavs, 20 yr old grandmother chavs (grow up) and the thuggish 40yr old male chavs covered in tattoos, cheap gold jewellery and pit bull terriers who parade up and down the high street or the road around the corner which we called kebab alley – a lovely road that consists of takeaways and charity shops.
Apparently there’s a night club in Chippenham but I never found it, although a friend from Melksham went there and said it was great if you like young girls! As for pubs there is the Four Seasons in the market square. It would be great if it wasn’t for the people who went there! There’s also the Old Road Tavern which I went to a lot. The pub has more than its fair share of locals including the fat, single mother parents
in the back room with their (I assume its theirs) kids suckling off
their breasts whilst they enjoy a nice pint of Tenants. In
the corner on Friday lunchtimes (Friday club) sit two young lovlies
with their slave. Friday and Saturday night is chav night – literally – with enough burberry and gold chains to make you laugh into your pint of Guiness!
Then there is the chav mode of transport in Chippenham – you get the usual mopeds and knobs in Novas and Clios who for some reason hang out on the bridge at the bottom of the high street. What’s worse though are the Subaru Imprezas. I used to love these cars but in Chippenham they have become the chavs favourite mode of transport. They’ve turned a decent car into a chav mobile. But because they are owned by chavs they are old Imprezas that have been reconditioned and probably only have a top speed of 80mph!
The highlight of the year in Chip’ numb is the annual folk festival. Morris dancers would dance in the high street and be heckled by the local chavs pissed on half a pint of Kronenburg. It would be a lovely little festival – if the locals didn’t turn up. I always thought it would be nice to live in a village or a little market town, but after 12 months in Sh@ttenham give me a big city any day. I do not wish to turn into a one eye chav. I want a life!
This article is a joke. Chippenham is a market town, with no jobs, opportunity or education for anybody. It is a place where people rot, and the fact that people who live there are so violent is testament to the fact that chippenham is not a nice place to live. The only activities available to the young members of society are drinking, and as such, they do it with vigour. Perhaps the local council should entertain the idea that more people need things to do, in order to end the anti-social behvaiour.
I have had the misfortune to live in this town for 13 years and have watched its transformation from a quiet little community (full, I must add of very friendly people) to a disturbing hotbed of violence, racism and fear. It honestly used to be a nice place but is getting worse and worse. Everything in the above comments (and especially the article) is true. Everything. Some things that were not mentioned are 1) that someone close to me was assaulted by 30 people (!) on that bridge 2) A Woman was severely beaten in the middle of town after having an epileptic fit 3) It is nigh-on impossible to drink at the Old Road without being spiked with MDMA or worse 4) A man was murdered at the cashpoint outside Tesco a couple months back and 5) Globalization has hit like a ton of bricks and so all we have are phone shops and coffee places in the town center. The place is also a breeding ground for racial hatred and political ignorance and home to some of the stupidest opinions you’re ever likely to encounter. To be honest, if I don’t have to, I rarely leave the house. I am planning to move just as soon as I have the money.
hahaha ive never seen the word ‘chav’ in one article more times in my life! get over the fact that chippenham is dominated by the lower class, maybe if they built some more shops or created some more jobs through entertainment such as bowling or ice skating instead of constantly increasing the number of council estates things might change, but in the mean time, stop complaining if your not doing anything to help, campaign to get the skate park back or something usful, instead of whinning about not being able to live in one of the most upper class small cities in england (bath incase your slow)
You get this kind of stuff in every single town and city in the country!
I’m not condoning it I think it’s pretty crass to behave in such ways but you can’t single places out, this behaviour is everywhere, it’s the sorry state of the U.K!!!!
Did you live in or near hill rise by any chance
Yeah, of all the towns in Wiltshire, Chippenham is probably the worst. In fact – I’m sticking my neck out here – it is the worst, then maybe Trowbridge or Calne, some parts of Swindon are pretty bad too, believe it or not. Club E11even is retard central, you are lucky to have missed that one – you can get into a fight there faster than any other place I’ve known, and I’m an Englishman who’s been to Wales many times. It’s funny that you mentioned the Old Road Tavern because that’s not even that bad if you can put up with a dirty glass and the occasional glassing – it’s one of the better ones, and at least it’s not a BNP pub (of which there are several in Chippenham). It is full of retards though, so your milage may vary.
You see, the problem with Chippenham is not that it’s a fighting town (it’s not, Westbury is a fighting town, for example), no, the inhabitants of Chippenham don’t like to fight, they like to beat people up. The fairest fight you will find in Chippenham is six on one, for they are cowards. My mate saw a gang of 20-odd people beat up a disabled guy once in Chippenham. Classy stuff. They like to stamp on heads in Chippenham, that is mostly what they seem to thrive on. Like you said, there is literally nothing to do in Chippenham, so it’s no surprise that stamping on people’s heads has become so popular there, though that’s obviously not a great excuse for that kind of behaviour.
I get started on every time I go to Chippenham past a certain time of day, the reasons for this are as follows: I have long hair and I am not from Chippenham. If you rise to it, which I always do for some stupid reason, five more of them will join the bloke that started on you. I get spat on all the time there, I’ve had my head kicked in a few times, I’ve had fireworks thrown in my general direction a couple of times, I’ve been mugged three times. Yeah, basically I hate the place, and am immediately suspicious of anyone who lives there, especially if they say they never get any trouble there, or claim that they like the place, even if they don’t look like a townie.
The thing is, during the day Chippenham is actually a pretty nice place, then at around five o’ clock the idiots start to come out, and by about nine it’s probably a good idea to go home, especially if you’re foreign, a man with long hair (a “gypsy” in Chippenham speak) or disabled in any kind of way (weakness will make you a target). “Pakis” are stealing your jobs (never mind the fact that every single person in Chippenham’s ‘get back to work’ centre is white and most of them do not look for work at all), and if you disagree with that then Chippenham is probably not the place for you, to put it mildly. Even though there is very little unemployment in Chippenham, everyone who has a job is immensely proud of that fact, so much so that you might get beaten up if you don’t have one, that’s if you’re white. If you’re not white you’ll probably get beaten up no matter what you do, though lately black people seem to be getting on a bit better there, Asians . . . not so much, sadly.
To be fair, though, anywhere is going to seem like a Chav town compared to Bath, so that’s probably not a fair comparison to make, and I don’t know where you got the burberry thing from – there isn’t a lot of that in Chippenham.
It should also be pointed out that not everyone is like that in Chippenham, just the vast majority of people.
I used to think Chippenham was OK, but there are a lot of chavs who hang around on the bridge near the High Street who shout abuse at people and some were spitting in the water so the ducks would try to eat it thinking it was bread.