It has a very proud history, notably with the chair industry and the amazing music scene of the 70s and 80s, great links to London but thankfully left in the mid 90s, the place is sadly now a mecca for pound shops and junkies...
There seems to we a ring of towns around the north of London that share similar features. I grew up in Hemel Hempstead and what I see in this video and in the comments could easily be describing that town as well. Mundane and uninspiring, no real spirit in the community, most people describing it as having gone “downhill” and either glad to have left, or frustrated because they can’t, and feel trapped there. I think it’s because those communities haven’t evolved naturally, those towns suddenly exploded to take the overspill from London’s inner city slums, and since then have been bombarded with waves of immigrants, so there is no strong identity that bonds the people together and gives them something they can all relate to. When I left Hemel at 16 we moved north to Macclesfield, and on the one hand it was like stepping back in time, and hard to adjust to the strong northern accents and mannerisms etc, but on the other hand everyone was somehow more connected with each other and understood each other, and so also more friendly. I was just nicknamed “the cockney” and was a bit of a novelty for them, they accepted me because there was only one of me. If there had been 1000 of us moving there from Hemel that might have been a different story.
