This is the haunting beauty of a summer night out in Aberystwyth

Abandoned dance-floors, empty bars and silent locals

Summer is well underway in Aberystwyth and most of us have packed up and gone home for a few months.

What’s it like without us around? Would it be tragic? Or would night’s out with only the locals for company be unexpectedly brilliant? The results were shocking.

Hitting the streets on Vodka Tuesday we expected the town to be in full swing like usual. It couldn’t have been more different.

Nothing could prepare me for the sheer desolation and emptiness of the scenes that greeted us. It was like walking into a ghost town.

Popular student haunts such as The Cambrian, Rummer’s, Academy and Harleys’ were only populated with a few lonely locals and left behind students.

Only Inn On provided a livelier clientèle; and even that was scraping the barrel – in most of the places we visited you would have been able to hear a pin drop.

Even Yoko’s nightclub, notorious for its long queue and rowdy nights was utterly uninhabited, like the surface of the Moon. Meanwhile Pier Pressure hadn’t even bothered to open. The owners must have known that summer in Aberystwyth ain’t the time to party.

We couldn’t even go in and enjoy the shit music

The empty pubs and clubs had a haunting, lost quality like the shattered cityscapes of Chernobyl.

But there was also a strange beauty to the place: the soft clinking of old men rooting for change with which to play on the flashing gambling machines, the sight of a bar worker playing angry birds in the middle of their shift because there was no one to serve.

A scene of strange beauty

Maybe, just maybe there are positives to a summer night out in Aber. Yes, the town is basically shut. Nothing really happens. But this means you have a whole town to yourself and your mates.

You’ll need to gather a large group of friends if you are to have any chance of a big night out. Once that’s done, revel in the fact that you might now be the coolest people in the whole of Aber.