I used to love the annual rundown of where the worst places to live in the UK were officially announced, but it’s lost some of the magic after Peterborough had won for something like the last five years in a row.

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However this year – or 2022 I guess more accurately – a new king has been crowned in the form of everyone’s least favourite commuter town around London and worst airport in the country Luton. The place that has been described as ‘making Slough look like Monaco’ received 105,598 votes in the iLiveHere survey to claim the title.

The Bedfordshire town still has a few high street brands in the coveted Luton Mall high street space like TKMaxx, JD Sports, Schuh and H & M but a lot of independent retailers have closed down thanks to the pandemic and there are a lot of boarded up spaces now with pound shops dominating the rest of the landscape. Most fast food outlets are Burger Kings and other nationals chains and the city has the highest percentage of people with no fixed accommodation in the country – 3443 people out of the 218,045 population.

Here’s what 50 year old shopkeeper Metin Bas said about the title. He’s lived in Luton for 21 years:

If you look in the evening, everyone shuts down. People are scared and I don’t feel safe.

Other people are scared to come to the town centre.

I wouldn’t let my daughter go out for a few hours at night time.

There are not enough places for young people like my daughter.

Yeah nothing about Luton sounds good there does it from that brief description? I’ve only ever been through there to go the airport – which is a really annoying experience like I said earlier – so I can’t really comment, but I do know that their football ground hardly has any seats for away fans and that you have to enter it through a housing estate too which sounds pretty tinpot. Not somewhere I want to visit any time soon. Doesn’t sound like anyone really wants to live there either.

For more of the same, check out five of the worst places in the world that you would never want to live. Worse than Luton that’s for sure.