A week out in “Btown”

A male perspective of the nightlife in Bournemouth, heaven or hell?

Lava/ignite

It’s three-thirty in the morning and I’m sat on a damp patch outside of Tesco’s. I’m clutching a half-eaten meatball marinara sub and the overwhelming stench of vomit has decided to burn itself into my nostrils. Bizarrely, I have feathers in my hair, down my pants and creeping up my ass. Drawing money out of the cash-point at the road opposite I can see my friend –Joe. Clinging to him is a girl he has just met, she’s wearing too much make-up, a ridiculously short skirt and her mouth is jammed open as if permanently posing a question – namely, “is this really a good night in Bournemouth?”

It’s a fair question.

It’s a cold December Thursday and I’m on my way home from a night on the town. I’m the Wingman of 22-year old Joe – schmoozer, pick-up artist, failed student…and window salesman. With bleach-blonde hair, twice-a-week sun bedded skin and a penchant for overly garish tracksuit tops and tight jeans (that really don’t compliment what may be a severely malnourished body) Joe has never been one to worry about committing to a stereotype (he’s from Essex). In fact the only reason he wanted to go by the alias was supposedly to not alert any potential targets whom may be reading.

So why am I in Bournemouth?

“A place where the young go to live and the old go to die” is one of the most poignant descriptions of this town that has ever been given to me. Though it does seem to be the consensus when you ask around, with “pensioners” and “students” being common responses, doing little to dissuade the formerly mentioned (if overly-bold) statement.

To those of us who hail from the West Country and speak like farmers, Bournemouth has another reputation, as a place to meet women. When I was considering the move to Bournemouth my male compatriots all spoke of it as if where the British equivalent of L.A. They would say that the nightlife was “well good” and that it highlighted how “crappy” the “talent” in our hometown of Swindon (twinned with Disneyworld) was. My friends, they spoke as if every girl in Bournemouth was Lucy Pinder (the “best rack in Britain”) and that every girl was willing to talk to a loser like me.

So naturally, I gave into peer pressure and decided to re-locate to the sunny southern town.

I quickly realised Bournemouth had a lot going for it, with arguably the best commercial beach in the UK, a thriving tourist economy and the award-winning Bournemouth Gardens some of its sophisticated features. I would spend that summer gawking from behind my shades at the bikini-clad beauties that littered the beach.

However, as the summer ends and winter begins, it simply became just another tacky student town, a compilation of dodgy kebab shops held together by a string of gimmicky nightclubs. Though when you’re a young, single and in dire need of losing some of those crippling inhibitions a “tacky student town” can become a land of opportunity.

Bournemouth at night

I went to Joe and asked him to be the one to introduce to the nightlife of Bournemouth, to experience what the town had to offer. Never one to turn down a night on the town and an ear to brag to he gleefully accepted. According to Joe if you wanted a good night out in “Btown” (as he would continually refer, much to my annoyance) you had to be picky about what days to go out, or rather what night not too. Despite being in full-time work Joe would warn against going out on Saturdays. Joe claimed that Saturdays belonged to the balding 30-something striped-shirt alpha males and their stag do’s. He would also explain that on weekdays, due to catering for the notoriously cash-strapped student community it’s significantly cheaper. We decided to go out every night from Monday-to-Thursday in order to trial when and where the best women of “Btown” congregated.

Monday: apparently the place to begin on a Monday night was Inferno; Inferno was the only pub in Bournemouth that did a pound-a-pint night. Inferno was also conveniently located next to the Old Firestation, Bournemouth Universities student nightclub and our destination. The Old Firestation would throw its “ultraviolet” event every Monday night. This is where what it is referred to by trendier people then me as a “UV rave theme”. Where the students of Bournemouth dress up in horrifically bright colours and splatter their face in luminous green and pink paint while emulating the movie Human Traffic to the best of their abilities. I would spend most of my night in the smoking area, according to Joe it would be worth my while taking up smoking as it meant there was an excuse to approach people (you got a light?). Considering my inability to dance without making complete tit of myself it seemed like the best place to be. Monday in Bournemouth: 4/10

Tuesday: of the weekdays Tuesday is undoubtedly the most uneventful night of the week. The Orange Rooms is the place that is worth going to. A little less chaotic then the other venues and providing a faster, cheaper service then the majority. The Orange Rooms strikes up a good balance of having quieter areas where you can hear people talk and having a half-decent soundtrack. I actually really enjoyed my night out as I didn’t feel obliged to hop around like an idiot. Joe pulled some broad from Norway. 6/10

Wednesday nights in Bournemouth are quite infamous. The “place to be” is apparently Lava/Ignite, to be honest I knew what to expect from “Lava”. Part of a seemingly endless chain of nightclubs owned by the Luminar Leisure club, the brand has become synonymous with the VK binge drinking elite. Joe warned me that the bar waiting was so bad it was best to do the majority of your drinking beforehand. He wasn’t wrong, at one point I was waiting at the bar for 40 minutes before anyone got round to serving me, it seemed the predominantly male bar staff preferred to serve someone with larger boobs and less facial hair then myself. I would spend the bulk of the night doing what Joe referred to as “Twat Laps”. A “Twat lap” is where one spends a considerable amount of time wandering around and around in circles, bumping into people while searching for somebody that you know and typically not finding them. A sweaty, heaving and badly themed disaster, with the campest music ever heard in a “straight” nightclub, Wednesday night in Bournemouth or rather Lava/Ignite: 1/10

Judging by the previous days efforts I held out little hope for Thursday night. Our destination was to be the nightclub “Dusk till Dawn” and I was exhausted. How Joe could work and go out every night was beyond me. To my surprise Dusk actually played some half-decent independent music, instead of the trashy disco rubbish of which I had grown accustomed to. With a reasonably quick service and bouncers who aren’t complete muscle-heads it turned to be a pretty good night. Gimmicky as it was the club also had some sort of massive pillow-fight theme going on with thousands of feathers falling from the ceiling. This would major upset my carefully groomed hair but on the plus side would obscure my vision as I “made out” with a girl I’m trying to tell myself didn’t look like Tim Curry from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Joe managed to simultaneously pull the fakest looking girl in the club while holding me down as his friends shoved what felt like an entire seagulls-worth of feathers down by trousers. Thursday night at Dusk: 8/10

I come to the conclusion that the night-life in Bournemouth is like that of any other student town, gimmicky and slightly desperate. Though for desperate people desperate measures have to be taken and I’ll be the first to admit that though I may have rated the town harshly it does have an undeniable if not classy charm.