The richest person I know had an old Volvo estate. Properly rich people don't care as much about status symbols and trying to flex on others, although I do also know of someone who had a chauffeur for his Rolls Royce.

A collection of cars with a purpose-built garage to keep them in.

Basically buy the same car as the young guys, but stick the invoice in the window so everyone knows it's not in finance.

In terms of displays of wealth, any sort of supercar will do. Yes, you can buy a Gallardo for 40 grand used these days, but you still have to have deep pockets to run one.

The richest person I know drives a 2006 Range Rover. In fact a lot of rather wealthy people seem to drive the older shape Range, the Queen and Jeremy Clarkson included.

>>4741
>Lots of young guys own Mercs and BMWs

That's because they buy them on tick - Personal Contract Plans are all the rage - they don't actually own them. Prefer to own/hire purchase myself.

Just ask any British eskimo what they wish they could drive. I don't understand it at all, but whenever you ever see a really ridiculously flash car, it's always owned by a eskimo. The personalised number plate is always something like H4MID or R411EEM or M4MOUD, every single time. It must be some sort of cultural thing.

>>4741

A painstaking restomod of something classy.

>>4746

In my student days in Leeds I would often see those types of cars parked outside of kebab/fried chicken shops or Asian barber shops that never seemed to have any customers and had sketchy looking lads hanging around outside asking if you wanted any 'cheese" which I suspected wasn't of the dairy variety.

>>4748

Bring back Fab Cafe.

Fuck me. It's a travesty, it really is.

>>4749

Zulfi's in Hyde Park was my favourite, fond memories of their boxes of greasy chicken wings and chips for about £1.50 after staggering home from the Brudenell, apparently they were shut down years ago for having a 1 star hygiene rating and a rat problem.

>>4750 >>4749


We almost rented the flat above Zulfi's, but eventually declined on the grounds of the potential dangers to our health. Every single takeaway on Queens Road felt like a pretty obvious money laundering front, with maybe Pitza Cano being the exception, their pizzas were too good to be from career criminals.


My friends always dragged us to Mahmood's after a Fab Cafe night, I could never quite get over them having a burger called a Big Dripper, plus the fish tank in the corner, it always made for a surreal experience. I went to the Fab Cafe in Manchester recently, it's just not the same, though.

I didn't realise all three of us went to uni in Leeds, I wonder how often we bumped into each other without knowing.

>>4749
You could visit Fab Cafe in Manchester, unless that's closed down too. I've never been to the Leeds one but the Manchester one is all right. Critics might say it's a bit Reddit, but my experience of the Manchester nightlife tends to be a lot worse than Fab Cafe. It's about as good as the Gay Village, I'd say.

Alternatively, there are chains of themed nightclubs for past decades that you might enjoy, depending on where you live. I remember going to Flare('?)s and Reflex in Southampton around 2007, and those were 1970s-themed and 1980s-themed, respectively. There's probably a '90s one as well by now, and there might even be an early-2000s nightclub, grim though that sounds, if you go to a sufficiently studenty city like Bristol.

>>4752

I appreciate that you're only trying to help, but you might as well be suggesting to people lamenting the Haçienda's closure that they might try the Stone Roses Bar instead.

Fab Cafe Leeds was an experience more than the sum of its parts. You can't simply put a Darth Maul statue in any old room and expect it to feel the same, you need to recreate the entire "we're in a basement under the Merrion Centre" atmosphere, and you need to represent the way that Fab was massively, heavy handedly themed in a way that you basically end up ignoring after the first time you visit. You need to create an atmosphere that makes it entirely unsurprising that you can buy space raiders at the bar, and nobody knows how to design that feeling, it just happens.

>>4753
May I introduce you to Spiders nightclub in Hull; where the walls are all covered in spray-painted spiders, the booze is obscenely cheap, the dancefloors are surrounded by wrought iron cages, and you can indulge in two buttered crumpets for a quid from the tuck shop upstairs. It's themed, but the theme is so vague that you end up ignoring it.

>>4754

If the club is half as wonderful as their website, then I'm going to Hull this weekend.

>>4755
Go for it, it's a really unique and special night out. Try all their house cocktails, my personal go-to is the Sweet Death, £4.50 and must have 5 or 6 shots in it.

>>4754>>4755
I haven't been since the before times, but my issue is that they play an awful lot of bollocks like Good Charlotte which they never played when they were actually popular about 15/20 years ago on account of them being shite.

That said, I'd spend most of my time upstairs and mine's a Tyzer.

>>4755
Bugger me, that playlist is giving me whiplash. Also I might die if it lands on a Travis, Blur and Blink 182 in a row.

>>4755

Reading the "Fairytale" it sounds like the owners are a bit soft in the head but that makes sense to me as why someone would run such a place, in Hull, for decades.

>>4759
I think that page was written in the mid-noughties, when everything was a bit more lolrandum.

>>4760

A date on the music.html page suggests it was last updated in 2001.

>>4761

The site supports HTTPS, so someone is actively maintaining it.

>>4755

Nuisance 3.0?

I actually think this is a serious problem. Cars are becoming increasingly more powerful, heavier (see EVs) and way larger. This should be anathema to anyone who's in favour of safe, quiet streets.

The growth in SUV sales as a proportion of all car sales from 2010 to now has been insane. In addition, I believe something like 92% of all new cars are bought on some variation of 'finance'.

As a country we are simultaneously slowly trying to wise up and embrace the Dutch / Danish model of cycle lanes and walkable towns whilst also redefining middle-class success as having an SUV on finance to take your kids to football practice in (which is an 8 minute bike ride away).

Regrettably, I work in the motor trade. It is a complete racket. Sales executives are given commission to sell GAP insurance or "cosmetic repair" insurance, along with paint protection which is massively hiked up.

>>4781

> I believe something like 92% of all new cars are bought on some variation of 'finance'.

I've had people ever so slightly looking at me like I am a pauper for driving an older-model Audi A4 with quite little residual value compared to when it would have been brand new. But I paid for that car in cash with almost eight grand of my own money. And whilst most people with an S5 convertible on finance are just a lost job away from having to part with it again, my car is mine and I've got enough financial reserves that I would probably be able to keep it through more than two years of unemployment.

I guess by some people's standards, wealth is measured by how much you can afford to spend on a financed car per month. But that's far from real wealth. One of my former bosses was quite minted as the owner of the company, and for his 50th birthday, he bought himself a brand new Porsche Boxster without any financing at all. He just wanted to reward himself for 25 years of working his arse off, and didn't care that it was well over £60K. To me that's much closer to real wealth, where you can afford to just piss that kind of money up the wall and have it tied up in a car and watch it depreciate. While £60K still doesn't mean you're super rich, but it's probably not an amount of money somebody with a financed Land Rover in the driveway would have been able to spend in one sum.

>>4782

I'm sure I've banged on about this before, but most people I know quite simply can't comprehend why my car is 20 years old. I can't fathom buying a new car, cash or finance. It's the stupidest thing you could possibly do no matter how much money you have. Even setting aside my (very correct) opinion that modern cars are awful, complicated, ugly, cheaply made shite, just wait for a car to be a year old and buy it fully warrantied for a good third less than you would have if you'd driven it off the forecourt.

>>4782

Wealth and status are related but not quite the same. We've got a very particular kind of keeping up with the Jonses, I barely notice it myself because I'm not a Deano or Deano adjacent kind of person, but they're the ones perpetuating it.

It's not about actual cash wealth, because nobody has that any more. It's more about saying "look how stupidly deep in debt I can afford to get and not have the bailiffs turn up to reposes the pants off my arse."

I know a lass who inherited a quite decent sum of money, the kind of money you could have (and you or I probably would have) bought a modest little house outright with, and lived the rent/mortgage free high life. But instead no, she and her very much Deano boyfriend put it down as a deposit on a massive fuck off mansion that neither of them had any business living in, they were probably paying two thirds of their combined income on the mortgage even with putting a hundred grand down up front.

Just maddeningly reckless decisions, but it's all about the 'gram, innit. Nothing else matters but looking better than other people.

>>4784

I don't even know if it's about that, I think most people just see a badge and assume it's pricey.

I had a Range Rover I paid about 4 grand for, but I heard "they must be paying you too much" about fifty times a day at work. A lot of people have been in the three year PCP cycle since they passed their test, they simply have no concept of what a used car might sell for, plus everyone knows that Range Rover = expensive, because a huge amount of money has been spent marketing that idea.

>>4783

If you don't know how to work on cars yourself, then an old car can almost be a worse money pit than a new one. I do all my own repairs on my A4, which means that things like a complete control arms replacement on the front axle two years ago cost me £300 in parts off eBay instead of £1,500 that a shop quoted me.

What you do save on is depreciation and insurance, as a car that's worth £5K is close to bottomimg out in resale value, which also usually means lower insurance.


>>4784

>It's not about actual cash wealth, because nobody has that any more. It's more about saying "look how stupidly deep in debt I can afford to get and not have the bailiffs turn up to reposes the pants off my arse."

We've gone from the idea that you buy a really nice car with your own money once in your life to treating cars almost like a mortgaged house that you pay off. Which isn't necessarily healthy.

>>4786

My mum buys borderline bangers and treats them as disposable. You can spend £1500 on a car, run it for a couple of years and just weigh it in for scrap when something expensive breaks. If you don't care about driving a shed, it's the cheapest way of running a car.

>>4787

My brother had a friend who had a series of cars that he only paid 100 quid each for. This was in the early 90s when he was 18 or 20 and didn't have much money. In truth, one or two of those cars broke down to being a complete writeoff after about two to three months, at which point he'd take them to the breaker's for scraps. And he would always get roughly his 100 quid back.

It's motoring at the lowest possible denominator, but if you can live with the possibility that your car won't make it past the next corner, then why not.

I've got a weird urge to buy a Toyota Alphard.

>>4789
That car looks like when Batman has to make a helmet and suit of armour because he's fighting Superman or Predator or The Hulk or some other bollocks.

>>4789
It looks like a hearse an undertaker with a tiny cock would drive. If one of them pulls up in front of me I will look the driver in the eyes and laught at him.

>>4791

You're missing the point of the Alphard entirely by caring about what it looks like. It's all about the interior, the smooth V6 driving experience, and the practicality of having Basically A Van.

I've fought off the urge to buy one, or an Elgrand, for years. The nice man that supplies me MR2 parts uses an Alphard as a tow vehicle when he drives around collecting broken MR2s, which seems like a great use of one. I just want to sit in the back to eat mcdonalds occasionally. If I ever accidentally have a kid I'd buy one immediately.