Drunks on St. Mary Street, Cardiff, Wales

April 5th, 2009

First of all, I’m no stranger to the bottle. Second of all, I’m not interested in any sort of moral judgment with this.

I’ve seen a fair amount of public drunkenness in different parts of the world, but I haven’t seen anything like this. Even in some of the pissups around Dublin, I never saw drunks crawling through pools of urine and vomit… Passed out in piles of trash from the chip shops… I have no idea what to make of the guy in the purple negligee and fishnet stockings, but I admire his determination.

The pictures are from Wales, but is this type of scene repeated in other parts of the UK? What I’m getting at is, how common is it to see this type of debauched squalor?

Is this a “new” phenomenon?

I’ve put this in the Collapse category. Maybe it’s just another night out???

Definitely Not Safe for Work: St. Mary Street, Cardiff, Wales

Posted in Collapse | Top Of Page

7 Responses to “Drunks on St. Mary Street, Cardiff, Wales”

  1. ltcolonelnemo says:

    You weren’t looking closely enough. This is as old as history. From my own experience, I saw stuff like this all the time in college, and after last call at any bar scene in any major metropolitan area.

  2. Kevin says:

    after last call at any bar scene in any major metropolitan area.

    Bullshit.

  3. simontzu says:

    I agree with Kevin. This is something else. Incredible…Horrifying.

    Truly profoundly shocking and illustrative of the threads unravelling in a way that somehow seems closer to home than tales of Wall street’s financial excesses.

    I was in London this last new years eve and saw 2 fights on the way home…nothing like this though.

  4. ltcolonelnemo says:

    Why would I lie about what I witnessed? I saw stuff like this all the time in college because, being a perpetually-intoxicated degenerate, I was living it. Additionally, I found out that things were much crazier in the 1980’s when I spoke with alumni. They made my cohort look like a bunch of cub scouts, mostly because were all paranoid about AIDS and the increasing risk of arrest that resulted from a beefed up police department.

    A significant percentage of the “students” would go out to the bars and get drunk at least four nights a week; Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday usually. Alcohol was cheap and there were always drink specials being offered on off nights like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.

    After the bars closed, I frequently witnessed fights, public urination, vomiting, public sex acts, and rampant littering surrounding street vendors of food. The police usually intervened relatively quickly. In non-college-town bar areas, there was less police intervention because presumably they were busy doing other things. I’ve seen stuff like this in NYC, Chicago, New Orleans, LA, Iowa City, etc. etc. etc. It can get worse in Europe because the laws and the culture are more permissive.

    Accounts of mass debauchery frequently pop up in the historical record and in literature.

    But don’t take my word for it, do your own research.

  5. williamspd says:

    Have to say that these images are pretty tame compared to what really goes on. We used to see drunken behaviour back in my day and my parents’ day, that is only going back half a century though and alcoholism is as old as time itself, but it was never as bad as this or as widespread. British inner cities have become particularly bad in the last fifteen years or so, there are so many teens and twentysomethings and older, out there doing this. There are police reality TV shows on almost every night showing this kind of stuff. At first everyone was shocked by it but these days we have come to realise that it is considered ‘normal’ by a significant slice of the population. For some odd reason the youth of Britain are particularly prone to serious binge drinking. Far more than any other place or culture that I have experienced or heard of. If you don’t quite believe it, wel, neither do we, and we live here and have to live with it.

    I think the thing that grabs me about these images is the sheer volume of litter, and mainly fast food litter. The shots of people eating their food apparently oblivious to the guy uriniating or vomiting next to them.

    Oh the irony too, as my Media students have just been shooting anti-binge-drinking films for their public exams. I’ll show them these photos and most of them will say ‘Yeah, but that’s nothing, you should see what it’s like in Newport / Swansea / Liverpool / Wrexham’ etc. The sad truth is that my 17 year old students could so accurately and truthfully portray the extremes of binge drinking as they see it around them all the time, and several of them don’t think twice about doing it themselves.

    Alcohol is relatively cheap here though, so you can easily drink yourself to death in a few hours and have change to spare from a twenty. Especially if you’re female (ladies often get free admission and half price drinks), take advantage of happy hour (triple measures for half the price of a single) and partake in a drinks promotion or two.

    The saddest part about all of this is that even though I like a drink or two and even to sometimes drink to excess, the way these youngsters drink to oblivion as regularly as clocks tick just makes me feel like an old fart tsking at the youth of today. But dang it, it is true.

  6. Kevin says:

    @ltcolonelnemo

    You wrote:

    From my own experience, I saw stuff like this all the time in college, and after last call at any bar scene in any major metropolitan area.

    I’ve done far more “research” on this than I’d care to admit and what you’re saying is, without a doubt, nonsense. Scenes like that situation in Cardiff are not routine after last call, “in any major metropolitan area.” I don’t know why you’re trying to say that this is routine, but you’re finished making that absurd point. Thank you.

    @ williamspd

    …but it was never as bad as this or as widespread. British inner cities have become particularly bad in the last fifteen years or so, there are so many teens and twentysomethings and older, out there doing this. There are police reality TV shows on almost every night showing this kind of stuff. At first everyone was shocked by it but these days we have come to realise that it is considered ‘normal’ by a significant slice of the population. For some odd reason the youth of Britain are particularly prone to serious binge drinking. Far more than any other place or culture that I have experienced or heard of. If you don’t quite believe it, wel, neither do we, and we live here and have to live with it.

    Wow. Thanks for supplying some context for this. The part about it being increasingly accepted as the new “normal” is chilling.

    The closest approximation I’ve seen to that Cardiff show was Dublin, but even that was nothing by comparison.

    The aspects of this that stand out here (to me anyway) are:

    1. The age of the people. These seem older, in general.

    2. The apparently large number of them in a total, pants shitting, state of oblivion.

    3. The mountains of rubbish.

  7. FRLVX says:

    I dunno man…if I had to envision images of the end of the world that didn’t involve a mushroom cloud…this is pretty close.

    These images have the theme of some pics I saw from Katrina and New Orleans…not the drunken disorder, but the same chaos flavor, fresh remains of the carcass of what was once ‘civilization’.

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