What your Aber road says about you

Aberystwyth, our beloved seaside town with rolling hills, idyllic beaches and many, many pubs. There’s no where else quite like it.

But although we love every bit of town, the different areas are diverse and distinct. This becomes especially clear when students frantically choose where to live for the next year of their lives – and what road they live on says a lot more than you might think about their personality.

Just don’t even look at Llanbadarn or Penparcau unless you want to live a life of regret.

The city centre

If you live on the bloodlines of town, you have one priority: boozing hard with a short crawl back from Yokos. We’re talking about the hardy souls on Great Darkgate Street, the people of Portland Road, those up Corporation Street, Union street down the side of Cambrian and those up the end of town on Mill street and Williams Street.

Your house is most likely a flat, probably only three or four of you live together and you are all massive legends of the third floor.

It’s quite likely that you all play rugby, hockey or netball, but aside from all the partying and  sports training you also care about your studies and the location shows this – it’s a good distance between campus and Yokos for a balanced schedule.

The free city of seafront

You’re a studious creature who sits in their seafront flat looking out over Cardigan Bay with a cup of tea writing your essays up a good two weeks in advance. It’s super relaxing and you all cook flat meals together and are maybe one of the few houses in town that frequently go out as a house and stick together all night, a real close knit group of solid lads or lasses.

Then for about a month every year you become more hardcore than Bear Grills, braving the elements and battering sea to get a gas card top up so you can heat the house just to survive another week of winter misery. But the summer is pretty good seeing as the beach is literally on your doorstep.

The northern borough

The long-stretching arm of Aber neighbourhoods, spanning from the sea front up by Aber Yankee restaurant, past the clap clinic, down to Coopers and across to the School of Art this is to those living it large on North Road, Stanley Road, Trinity Road or at the top of the unforgiving Edge Hill.

Essentially the people living on these streets can be spilt in to two core groups.

Group one are full out nerds, they know how to get shit done when it comes to uni whether it’s burning endless midnight oil to make sure that reading on Edgar Allan Poe is analysed to the individual letter for a 9am seminar, or spending more than five days continuously drafting and re-drafting the same essay just to squeeze those extra three marks out of paragraph nine. They go on the occasional social but you can be sure Yokos is an unfamiliar location to them. They prefer to bail after Harleys or Downies so they can still be in the library bright and fresh in the morning.

Group two on the other hand are the most chilled and fun people in the entire town. If you have one of these friends in the Northern Borough then you will know exactly what we mean, they average probably 60 per cent of their lectures, somehow never get a lower mark than 55 in an essay and are the life and soul of ever night out regardless of whether it’s Blackhouse, Bierkellar or just a spontaneous night on the town.

Hell, these are the guys that pulled you on that spontaneous night in January the week before exams. They make you’re uni experience what it is and secretly, everyone want’s to live on North Road bossing life 24/7.

Llanbadarn

If you live here you had to make a tough call regarding money. It was basically live slightly out of town and manage to afford more than Super-noodles and pasta for the year all because a night out in town has to be planned well in advance with a full transport plan to and from the town.

Halls yeah, you had to save a quid on a night out to split an Ow’s Taxi up the hill, for Llanbadarn its pushing 10 quid if you’re all alone. It’s a life of smoking weed in the living and town maybe every third day if the weather allows it.

The harbour borough

This area is spanning Rheidol Terrace, Custom House Street, High Street and South Road and for some reason when the Victorians first built this stretch of town they decided that every house on every road absolutely needed a basement. And by god these house know how to host the most memorable pre drinks and even basement parties. Their basements represent the house personality be it decked out with bean bags and a really broken excuse for a table, or with a built in bar and a poker table.

These are not basements, these are rooms with personality and the USP is definitely the sub-terrain shelter. Water sports people dominate this area, and if you don’t Surf, Sail or Kayak, you definitely live with or are good friends with the neighbour who does and their house will be prone to having a surfboard in the hallway, a cupboard full of sailing wellies or even a coat rack just to have kayaking paddles to lean upon.

The borough of Trefechan

You’re the biggest stoners in Aber. You live over the Rummers bridge where the Hed-Hed will scarcely venture unless old lady Doris three doors down catches them on a super slow day. As well as that it’s basically the sleepy hollow of Aberystwyth anyway, the atmosphere is too chilled to avoid the occasional “doob” and that’s the sad fact of life.

The houses here as well for some reason are huge, just a quick visit to a house in Green Gardens, Pen-Yr-Angor or Dinas Terrace will leave you in awe of just how much space the houses have, surprisingly though house parties in these mansions are rare and this is saddening.

A great potential wasted – sort it out Trefechan crew, yeah?

Penparcau exile camp

The dark, evil and ominous step brother of Aberystwyth. If you live in Penparcau as a student you spend four days of your week questioning just how you got talked into living here by one of your house mates. Honestly, even Llanbadarn is preferable to here. Home to drug dealers and weird and creepy locals that stare at you when you go into their pubs as if you don’t belong, Penparcau is like a village that Aber is desperately trying to isolate itself from to save it’s image.

As well as this, living here means walking up more hills than when you lived on campus in first year, and yes, that is actually possible. General prognosis: grim.