Desolate Urban Wasteland (Yeovil in General)

Member Name: orchid1988

Product:	Yeovil in General
Date:	30/06/08 (86 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cinema, shops

Disadvantages: Ugly, town past its prime

Being a town of over 40,000 inhabitants I was rather surprised to be the first to write a review on Yeovil but then again it is possibly the most down trodden town in England which I have set foot in and has very few things to boast about. Yeovil in located just of the A30 in South Somerset and provides the perfect contrast to the surrounding countryside with an ugly metropolis filled with mortgage brokers and pawn shops (no wonder T.S Eliot is buried in nearby East Coker - for those who have not had the delight of encountering his work, he wrote frequently on the subject of urban waste lands).

In its favour, it is one of the few towns in the Dorset/ Somerset area which has a great variety of clothes shops, in Yeovil you can find Topshop/ Topman, New Look, Riverisland, Debenhams, Dorothy Perkins and many others. Unfortunately it lacks any more upmarket shops, such as Zara, Jane Norman, Karen Millen or All Saints.

Yeovil does have one of the best Cinema/ leisure complexes in the area, with a ten-screen cinema and 18-pin bowling alley, which is fairly cheap and fairly standard but yet there is nothing else like it within a 30 mile plus radius.

Yeovil also hosts Nine Springs, a waterside park walk centred around nine natural springs which would really be quite enchanting if you were not quite so scared of coming across hypodermic needles or teenagers fondling each other.

As for historical sites, Yeovil was mentioned in the Doomsday book as the town of Gilve (forked river / river noble - a hybrid of Old English and Anglo Saxon), however Yeovil does not really contain anything of any remarkable historical interest. With Westlands (helicopter manufacturing) as the main employer and before that the glove making industry, Yeovil has mainly developed as an industrial town and thus land has been used to maximise profit rather than for aesthetics. The Church of St John the Baptist in the town centre is perhaps quite pretty, although if it is churches you wish to see, I would recommend visiting the surrounding villages or the neighbouring village of Sherborne which is a historical town which even Shakespeare frequented which grew around the Sherborne Abbey.

One cannot help but conclude that Yeovil is to be avoided unless i) you have too due to some form of work reasons ii) you live in South Somerset / North Dorset (I fall into this category) - so there really is nowhere else to go on weekends!

Summary: Don't go to Yeovil unless you have to