'I've lived all my life in the West Midlands' most miserable town. Here's why we're so grumpy'

I'm unhappy. Very unhappy. A new survey has found Dudley to be the grumpiest town in the West Midlands, and the fourth unhappiest place in the UK. 

I'm disappointed. Surely we could have done better than that? Fair enough, we've been beaten by Slough, the town which John Betjeman thought should be bombed for its own good, and which is also home to David Brent, and I suppose Dagenham and Redbridge is not noted for its cheerfulness, at least not if the musical Made In Dagenham is anything to go by. But surely we could have come higher than fourth? We only just about scrape into the Champions' League of pessimism.

Of course, part of the reason we are so miserable is just down to the self-deprecating demeanour of Dudley folk. I remember how, eight years or so years ago, Dudley traders clubbed together to install a giant wheel in Stone Square. Surely that could only be a positive thing, right? Piers Morgan sneered at it, obviously, but in most towns you might have expected locals to have sprung to its defence. In Dudley they all said Piers was right, that it really was the worst tourist attraction in the country.

On the other hand, it's hard to argue that over the past 35 years, the residents of Dudley have a lot to be grumpy about. Since the mid-1980s, the town has seen nothing but decline. We took the closure of Debenhams in our stride, at the time it was just one of three large department stores in the town. And when McDonalds and the Cordon Bleu freezer centre opened in their place, it just seemed like the natural turnover of retailers, with the old ones going, and the new ones coming in. The loss of Cook's department store in 1988 was much harder to take, though - it had been in the town since 1819, and had become a part of so many people's lives. 

The real blow, though, came in 1989, with the opening of the final phase of the Merry Hill centre. Lured by the promise of 10 years' free rates, most of the big-name stores decamped overnight: Marks & Spencer,  Next, BHS, Littlewoods, C & A, Currys, Sainsbury's. The joke at the time was that even the branch of Oxfam was considering a move. It was followed by a 70 per cent loss in trade, from which the town has never recovered. The closure of Beatties in 2010 was the final straw, and marked Dudley's transformation from a 'failing' to 'failed' town.