Meeting for Coffee 2025

June 2025 coffee morning at the garden centre. Time to recall the never forgotten days of the Shrewsbury Technical High School, English Bridge. And try not to mention the BREXIT.

IS SHREWSBURY A TOURIST CITY?

Shrewsbury, to the STHS57 originals still living nearby, might appear to moving with the times but returning after many years away; it appears to be suffering on multiple fronts.

FILTHY PAVEMENTS

Spending 4 June 2025 days in town, the striking impression was of a once beautiful jewel clinging onto its historic reputation. Rarely swept, dirty pavements, broken restaurant windows, street-featured dead plants in a dying town-centre once called the town of flowers.

NOT A PLACE TO SIT

A 2km walk looking for a paper shop and somewhere to sit down failed to provide either. In the Old Market Square a local lady, who once attended the Wakeman school, explained that all the seats in town had been removed because of rough sleepers. She let me share the edge of her bench whilst an ambulance crew tended to an elderly lady not coping with the heatwave. Pride Hill was more of an ash-tray than a prime tourist attraction.

DINGLE A DELIGHT BUT

The well-kept Quarry and Dingle were a delight but the minority fashion of pedestrians to broadcast painfully loud music all day, or fall to the ground paralytically intoxicated awaiting paramedics or arrest was not something Shrewsbury deserves.

PUBLIC TRANSPORT COULD DO BETTER

If anyone knows how to decode the public transport system, please let me know. If you don’t know where a spot called Lidl is featured in the bus timetable, there is little chance of knowing where the bus 1 (had to guess it used to be S1) runs.

Chris Davison. 6363, Austria.