in the process of redevelopment so it might be good one day . . . . . .
Disadvantages:
well its just so ugly !
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
Everyone has heard the phrase "like a rainy day in Basingstoke", but if you havent been there you really won't understand quite how apt this is. I lived in Basingstoke my entire life, and I am one of the unfortunate thousands who know what a rainy day in this blessed town is really like!
******Entertainment****** There really is quite a lot you can do with yourself in Basingstoke. The main place to go is the leisure park, situated next to the towns Fire Station. This is quite a good observation point, as the fire men are often working out topless with the doors open. If you like that kind of thing of course!!! In the Leisure Park, you can find: a 24 lane 10 pin bowling alley complete with bar, small eating area and games room; an ice rink, home to the Wella Bison Ice Hokey team, and if you remember the Robbie Williams video for "She's the one" the man who did the ice skating coreography is homed here; a 10 screen Warner Village Cinema- I am afraid one of the only ones in the country without a bar; bingo 2000 club and an indoor bowls club. At the moment they are rebuilding the swimming pool there, which also has a gym and sauna. The new improved swimming pool will be opening soon as they are just putting up the new flumes! Basingstoke has never before seen flumes! If you want to go swimming and can't wait for the new one to open, there is another pool in the town centre, which even has a childrens pool, which is a lot warmer than the adult pool! There are a few slides here but nothing special. Sometimes they put on a special thing for children where they have an iflatable obstacle course on the pool taking up half of it, but never fear there is still always half the pool for lane swimming! There are also numerous tennis courts, gyms, athletics tracks, football pitches etc... Not forgetting the Academy SnookerClub!
******Evening entertainment****** It is true, you can do things in the evening too! Although I will admit it is all the same and not a lot of it. There are a few bars in the town centre, in no particular order they are: Yates, The Littern Tree, The Hogs Head, Rhu Bar, Drakes, The George and Chicago Rock Cafe. YOu may also find the one and only nightclub- Zero's. Out of the town, in the moniton Trading Estate there is Buds Bar, but this really is tripe as it is just the bar for the snooker club, no one goes there and it costs a bomb to go in! YOu are permitted to play pool, but not snooker unless you pay a membership fee. I guess this is standard for this kind of place. If you are wanting somewhere to send your younger child for an evening, once a month there is a snap disco for children of secondary school age. These happen once a month and are run by the police as an anti-drugs promotion. Although if I tell you the truth, and I think I am meant to in my opinions, a few years ago the head bouncer was fired for dealing drugs at this event. Not a very good thing there, but they still carry on and seem to be very popular. I can boast that I went to the very first one!! It was at the Ice Rink and we were promised the spice Girls. Instead we got A1 before anyone knew of them! I think these days it is more of a DJ type of set up. They are now permanatly at the Basingstoke Sports Centre, which is right in the centre of the shopping centre so easy to find! There are numerous resteraunts of all kinds scattered about the town, but I am not in a position to tell you about any of them! The Spice indian Resteraunt is very good indeed and they give the ladies roses! Because the range is so limited in Basingstoke, most people travel to Reading or Southampton to get a good night out. If you fancy going to the theatre, there is a major concert hall, The Anvil, which has played host to a number of stars, including Eddie Izzard, Leslie Garrett, Maxim Vengarov, Simon Rattle and has even hosted Classic FM Broadcasts! Which I have been in 3 of! We also have the Haymarket Theatre which is slightly further up the town. This is a lot smaller, but shows a great number of plays. Everyone I have seen has been super! They bring a nice mix of the famous and unkown actors making each performance a delight! We also have Fairfields Art Centre which is at the back of the town, and in Fairfields School car park. This holds gigs most nights, of every kind of music you can think of! Grunge, Irish Folk, Classical, pop...... It is a tiny venue, so if something looks good you have to snap up your tickets fast! The Arts Centre is also home to a wide range of evening courses from photography to dance, and meditation to martial arts. If you have a look in one of the local papers (the Gazette or the Observer) there will be a list of what is on in other places, as well as in the main ones I have outlined here. You could always try kareoke!! I know that it is Monday night in Chicago Rock Cafe!
******Shopping****** I will warn you, that if you are planning on going shopping in Basingstoke in the near future, that they are building us an up to the date shopping centre. Why is this a warning? This is a warning because it has left us with a too small car park, bad traffic and hardly any shops. We, of course, have: Boots, W.H.Smith, Virgin, HMV, MVC, New Look, Dorothy Perkins, Etam, Alders, Evans, Wilkinson’s, Clintons Cards, Argos, Index, Superdrug, Burtons, the Pier, the suit Company, Top Shop/Top Man, River Island… So we do have a lot of shops, but there is nothing individual. Everything we have you can find somewhere else. I am led to believe that this is because there is some form of clause that prevents individual shops from opening.
I suppose it is not such a bad little place. The parking in the multi-storey car park costs 60p for an hour, £1.20 for two hours and so on. I think the most they charge is £3.50, and that is the standard charge if you lose your ticket. It is quite a nice pay system: you get a ticket when you enter, and then you pay the man in the booth when you leave. The men in the booths are very amusing!! There is the one who always calls my dad “squire”, there is the one who is, sorry to be rude, sixpence short of a shilling and manages to make “that’s sixty please” seem the longest phrase in the world, and by the time he has finished saying it, the price will have gone up to £1.20 anyway!
We were promised our new car park for Christmas just gone. This never happened. But when it did open, in March, we were horrified to discover that they had not built an entirely new car park. Half of it was the old car park just painted! I am not a driver myself, but my mother moans that the road surface in the car park in awful. If that is going to put you off, you can park in another multi storey car park that belongs to the concert hall. This is, in fact, attached to the new car park, and has a lift that takes you directly to the shoe department in Alders. There is also some free parking spread about the place. This requires walking a little way into town, but then you don’t have to pay for your parking. This is the option my step father takes, but he drops us in first and then picks up the car afterwards so we don’t have to walk. If you have a willing walker, this may be the thing to do! You are more likely to get a space on a road than you are in the car park! I know there is free parking on Chequers Road, and somewhere around the Fairfield’s art centre. Sorry I can’t be more help there, but I’m not a driver so directions are not my strong point! Anyway, you can park behind MacDonald’s (which is on the one way system) for half an hour and this costs 20p. The only problem is that you cannot keep putting on a new ticket; you can only be there once. I can tell you from experience that they do check around there quite often- my boyfriend has had a ticket once when he was unloading some things for a UKIP rally my mum was doing around election time, so he wasn’t very much over. He also got one in the same car park when he had a ticket! So I think that you can say that they are parking fine mad in the pay and display car parks. Keep well away!
Anyway enough about car parks! The eating places in the town centre are as follows: MacDonald’s, Burger King, Morelli’s (Italian café), Chick Mex, Kebab Shop, Woolworth’s Restaurant, Littlewood’s café, The Littern Tree, The Hogs Head, Chicago Rock Café, Indian Restaurant, and numerous little pubs scattered about the place. A little way out of the town centre, there is also a MacDonald’s drive-thru, which is good if you are passing through.
Supermarkets in the town centre are Iceland and Sainsburys. If you go out of the town centre, there is also a Tesco, Safeway’s, another Sainsburys, Somerfield, another Iceland, and hopefully soon we will have an Asda as well.
In the town, there are a number of shopping areas. The biggest of these is Brighton Hill. This is off the main Basingstoke Roundabout. There we have, Toys ‘r’ us, JJB Sports, PC World (nearly), Curry’s, a sofa shop, ad carpet shop, the MacDonald’s drive-thru and a pizza hut. Just down the road from there, there is Comet, Staples, Hanford’s (my favourite shop, I don’t think), Allied Carpets, Harvester, and Homebase. At the moment, Homebase is useless, as it is currently under reconstruction. We are promised a rather large one for Christmas, but for now, you have to make do with B&Q, which is down the road in the other direction. On the edge of Basingstoke, there is a large shopping parade, with Pets at home, Blockbuster Video, Tempo, and yet more furniture shops. Just opposite there is a large Sainsburys, with a Lloyds chemist, Mothercare World, Tiles ‘r’ us, Going Places and a dry cleaners.
There is no shortage of shopping parades with Indian take-aways and off licences, along with your trusty corner shop.
I don’t think there is much else to say about the shopping in Basingstoke, apart from that it is worth travelling the extra 15 miles or so to Reading, where it is much bigger and better, or even 25 to Southampton where it has the biggest indoor shopping centre in europe!! If you want my true advice, I would say to Wait the extra two years and visit Basingstoke when the works on the town centre are all complete. Hopefully then, it will be a town worth visiting!!
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