u/GlitteringBryony

This is possibly a stupid question, but this is something I am now looking back on as an adult and feel like my perception of the time must be being skewed by me having been a teenager. Also - CONTENT WARNING for fairly frank discussions of violence below!

So in the late 90s and early 00s I was a teenage goth, in a fairly rough area of County Durham, and I remember at the time feeling like we were seriously under siege from roaming gangs of charvers who would constantly be yelling abuse, throwing stones and trying to start physical (often armed!) fights with us (That, crucially, we didn't start, and we had no interest in starting.) There was a local goth lad who was attacked by a group aged between 12 and 16 who locked him in a commercial bin full of cardboard waste and set it on fire (he survived, just, with severe burns and lung damage) and then obviously a few years later the murder of Sophie Lancaster and the assault on Robert Maltby (who are almost bang on the same age as me), and I remember at the time the general reaction from the whole goth scene (teenagers and adults!) was one of being unsurprised, because we'd been experiencing this exact kind of violence, getting worse and worse for years.

But as an adult, that sounds insane and like it can't be real, like it must have really just been a couple of isolated incidents, or a few local "bad kids" who made our lives a misery for their own reasons, and then the tabloid ecosystem just whipped it up into a "thing", which never really happened.

Again, as an adult looking back, I immediately grab onto other casus belli, like was this just homophobic violence that I didn't have the words to describe yet? Was this class anxiety manifesting? (the "chavs" were often marginally richer than the local goth kids, at least in my corner of the world, but saw the goths as effete and bookish, like we were maybe a symbol of "social climbing", when really we just were interested in stuff like gothic novels and romantic poetry which meant a lot of reading) Was it maybe even an ableism thing, as so many of the goths were very openly mentally ill? (The only thing I can guarantee it wasn't was racism, as beautifully multi-ethnic gangs of charvers tried equally to knife Black, white and Asian goths alike.)

Does anyone remember what it looked like from the perspective of someone who was a grown adult for the whole time period? Or other people in other cities who were on either side of the "war" who remembers it happening locally to them too? Because it really felt like we were in serious danger, and like nobody with any kind of power "cared".

As it sounds - I stayed in a hotel in England last month for 2 nights (Originally booked to stay on Saturday night with a group booking, and then booked Friday night for myself alone) - Both bookings made about a week before the stay, and the hotel receptionist assured me that I would be staying in the same room for both nights.

Arrived on the Friday night, settled in, everything seemed totally normal - then on Saturday morning I was kicked out of my room by bailiffs who were repossessing the whole hotel and kicking everyone out. I grabbed most of my bags, but not everything, and went outside. We were told it would be "Ten minutes until you're let back in" then "a couple of hours" - By the time I eventually got back in, it was early Saturday evening, and I was put in a different room - When I asked to be let back to my original room to get my stuff back, I was let into the room and found that someone else had moved in with all of their stuff- so any of my stuff that had been left in that room was just "gone". In the new room, everything of value had been removed (Curtains, bedding, TV, etc)

I slept there on the Saturday night, then went home. Discovered online that the hotel had been told that they were forfeiting the building about ten days before they accepted my booking.

I emailed them asking for some kind of compensation, or at least for my money back, but have had no reply.

What rights do I have? They "honoured my booking" but I didn't have access to the room at all on Saturday daytime, and was harassed by bailiffs, which was terrifying and meant that I couldn't do any of the stuff I had planned to do.

I can share the local news story about the hotel, if that helps with the details, but I think that's everything that matters to the issue.

Edit: Paid on debit card, so presumably don't have a recourse of a chargeback unless the bank are feeling magnanimous. My lost possessions don't really matter (It was underpants, a phone charger, electric toothbrush - I tried to take all my stuff since I have had dealings with bailiffs before, but being hassled whilst just wearing a towel and being only half-awake I wasn't at my best.) It's more the cost of the room that I want back, but presumably that won't happen.

Thanks all!