Aylesbury.
I grew up in Aylesbury, & remember dancing round the clock tower in the market square wiith a few friends & a few hundred strangers at midnight on New Years Eve on a few years & getting let back into the pub afterwards, & many other pleasant experiences. What is so unrelentingly bad about it that it qualifies as a crap town?
That was then, this is now. I've lived close top Aylesbury for the last 13 years. Yes, when you were growing up they had the "hobble on the cobbles" with John Otway, a decent club scene where the Clash played, etc. etc. But now, despite the new Waterside Theatre (which seems to show mostly tribute bands and dance shows (ok I may exaggerate bit it's not generally very cultured, and it's a bit of a depressing experience to visit IMO) it's a traffic choked London dormitory dump, with it's lovely old centre gutted in favour of '60's, then 70's then 90's shopping experiences. The stench of fried food from the "food court" in Friars Square "mall" is nauseating. It's gfrubby and litter strewn especially around the fast food places on Cambrige street, and what they've done to Kingsbury is a disgrace - the chance to create a tree-shaded central piazza with outdoor cafe areas realised as a wasteland of concrete slabs and a so-called water clock and the removal of the public toilets. They try and tart it up - boxes of bedding plants on central reservation railings, but they regularly get trashed. And of course there is the usual post-recession blight of older empty offices and factories. It is not a attractive place to visit. We live maybe 4 miles away, and almost always prefer to go the Tring, unless we need "big town" availability. We probably visit less than once a month, and for the majority of day to day stuff prefer Tring (though I do the weekly shop in Hemel, where I work - another not terribly attractive dormitory town).
On the plus side the Aylesbury Vale has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country - but I suspect the vast majority of those will be in Aylesbury itself.
So, the perception of what makes a "crap" town is a personal one, and one that IMO Aylesbury fully deserves today. Some peolple love living in the "village" of Fairford Leys. I loathe that featureless 90's housing estate with it's faux village centre. Others love living in Watermead (a construct of a housing estate around a pond - the pond to prevent flooding). We walked around it, and although built in the late 80's as a sort of Georgian pastiche, it has single glazed windows and peeling paint on cracking facades with the adjacent dry ski slope unused for several years. And this isn't a sink estate - for that we have "California", better know as Southcourt.
So, the perception of what makes a "crap" town is a personal one, and one that IMO Aylesbury fully deserves today. YMMV
