Dudley itself was also last year ranked the unhappiest town in the West Midlands while Stourbridge, seven miles down the road and part of the same Metropolitan Borough, was ranked the happiest.
Locals say the downhill slide has been a steady one with most people pointing to the late 1980s and the development of the Merry Hill (aka Merry Hell) Shopping Centre in nearby Brierley Hill as the start.
Nearby Lye - a town in Dudley district - was recently dubbed a ghetto where sex is flogged openly from cars and yobs are fined for pooing in the street.
"Our museum and gallery went bankrupt, our football team has no ground, the main post office became a big Balti restaurant, there’s no trade at all and our politicians talk about city status or turning Dudley College into a University.
One shop owner, who asked not to be named, said they’d recently opened a "fancy bistro" in the Town Hall, only for it to make huge losses.
