Time Out: The 33 Coolest Streets in the world
 

The 33 coolest streets in the world according to Time Out magazine:

1. Rue Wellington, Montreal
2. Gertrude Street, Melbourne
3. Great Western Road, Glasgow
4. Yongkang Street, Taipei
5. Værnedamsvej, Copenhagen
6. Karangahape Road, Auckland
7. Tai Ping Shan Street, Hong Kong
8. Yaowarat Road, Bangkok
9. Oranienstrasse, Berlin
10. Hayes Street, San Francisco
11. Avenida Ámsterdam, Mexico City
12. Kolokotroni, Athens
13. Virgil Avenue, Los Angeles
14. Ossington Avenue, Toronto
15. Via Provenza, Medellín
16. Calle Ocho, Miami
17. Deptford High Street, London
18. Praça das Flores, Lisbon
19. Oxford Street, Accra
20. Wentworth Avenue, Chicago
21. Cutting Room Square, Manchester
22. Capel Street, Dublin
23. Jumeirah Beach Road, Dubai
24. Enmore Road, Sydney
25. Kagurazaka, Tokyo
26. Kloof Street, Cape Town
27. Süleyman Seba Caddesi, Istanbul
28. Calle Echegaray, Madrid
29. MacDougal Street, New York
30. Carrer del Comte Borrell, Barcelona
31. Newbury Street, Boston
32. Colaba Causeway, Mumbai
33. Everton Road, Singapore

Source: https://www.timeout.com/things-to-do...s-in-the-world

Not the list I would have come up with... MacDougal Street? Entertaining? Yes. Busy? Yes. Crowded? Yes. Cool? No, lol.

Not sure why the Time Out lists are titled "Coolest" - they actually are pretty good if viewed in the light of "cool streets to visit you may not have thought about". If it was absolute the list would be dominated by the same places year over year.

another anglo saxoner biased listicle brought to you by:

© 2022 Time Out England Limited and affiliated companies owned by Time Out Group Plc.

so … :shrug:

Not a bad list. I agree with most of these. Not sure about Virgil Avenue for LA though. I would've figured something like Abbot Kinney would be cooler.

I've got to believe that the use of the word "coolest" for all of these time out listicles is ENTIRELY intentional on the part of the editors.

Few words can spawn more instant controversy and dissention than "cool".

Ask 10 different people what "cool" means and get 10 different answers.

Throw red meat like this at the internet wolves and watch the clicks/eyeballs/shares grow as everyone and their brother tear it apart.

It's a stupidly easy formula.

^ yep for sure.

yep and here we go down that path, which will never end.

but yeah otherwise it good list of places to visit. so that nice to have and keep in mind if you dont know a place. time out has always been good for that, although since online rose its kind of an outdated institution these days. like lets go or frommers guides.

Yeah, it's a fine list of random streets from cities around the world that travellers might find interesting.

But can you imagine how much less interest these kinds of listicles from time out would generate if they gave it some boring generic title like "33 interesting streets from cities around the world that are worth checking out".

Nobody would care because nobody would disagree.

But because the extremely subjective superlative of "coolest" is thrown in there, BAM! everyone suddenly has an opinion about it.

I’m kinda used to showing North American stuff to visiting European relatives, and laughing at the idea I’ll show them Wellington St in Verdun (Montreal), then we’ll head to Boston to check out Newbury St, after which we’ll loop through NYC so they can see MacDougal St, and then head back so they can catch their plane and go back across the Atlantic with the satisfaction of knowing they’ve experienced the best of the best :haha:

yep they are definitely fishing for page views.

forbes used to be notorious for these kinds of lists. fwiw years ago i met a bunch of them out after work for happy hour and once we realized who they were we asked them about the lists and they laughed and outright said they used some pretext and made it all up. :yes:

Oh dear, not Ossington. Good if you want to be trampled by influencers paying three times what is reasonable for aesthetically pleasing but substandard food.

Reposting this for posterity:

These stupid lists are all the same. Some navel-gazing intern wants to get clicks for their assignment so they choose some random (but safe) "off the beaten track" places to stir-up controversy and discussion comments. Usually ends up with a list of Second Cities and "up-and-coming-formerly-down-on-their-luck-now-gentrifying" locales.

(In this case they ignored the second cities criterion and skipped right to the tired and true)

I wouldn't consider 8th St to be close to the top coolest streets in Miami much less the world. I mean there's not a lot to it. I guess you could take it from Downtown Miami to Naples, so there's that. Even the part through Little Havana is not what is once was. Too many vacant lots as developers try to piece together properties to build large donut apartment buildings.

It's a fine list if viewed in the context of "33 interesting streets from cities around the world that are worth checking out". Among those I'm familiar with, a few like MacDougal in NYC and Ossington in Toronto are certainly vibrant, atmospheric urban streets even if not necessarily "cool" anymore; while others like Wellington in Montreal are a bit more genuinely avante garde. Many of the others I've never even heard of, but look like they'd be worth a visit if I were ever in any of those places.

If nothing else, there's some cool pics in the article. I mean who here wouldn't want to check out some streets like these?

https://i.imgur.com/mZO9gTI.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/ZWuicVs.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/ID0QxdI.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/9hsn1qa.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/VvDFY0n.jpg

When I first saw this about Wellington street, I thought they were talking about the near eastern end if it, in the recently upscaled Griffintown part of it. It’s a strange street, it starts in Old Montreal and ends up turning at a near right angle when it hits Verdun. That is the liveliest stretch of it by far. The eastern part of it has become pretty busy with pleasure seeking local residents, but it still needs time to establish some interesting spots to generate landmarks, like nearby Notre-Dame street West in Little Burgundy/ St-Henri or Wellington in Verdun. Both of the latter, would have been laughed off if mentioned as a go to, 40, and maybe even 25 years ago. They were interesting streets, but rough; and businesses like fancy bars and restaurants would have been squished under the thumbs of the protection racketeers like the Dubois clan; the 9 brothers and two hundred associates had no time for hipster driven aesthetics.

So Wellington, and other streets on the list I gather have improved a lot in quality, and added interest beyond the mom and pop proximity of more mundane businesses. It’s worth celebrating the work that locals did in order to turn the tables IMO.

At the end of a long exhausting day though, these things are clickbait, but what do you expect?

Hayes for SF :???:

Deptford High St (London) is a shithole. It does have a bric-a-brac market on weekends which is cool, but outside that it's a poverty safari. They likely listed it as it's the last working class district not colonised by hipsters.

https://res.cloudinary.com/commonpla...feb89578c5.jpg

Dare I say it, it's actually pretty quiet and boring on weekdays, in one of the ugliest areas of the city. Pandemic hit many small businesses hard.

https://i2-prod.mylondon.news/incomi...rom-iOS-37.jpg

Methinks Time Out doth protest too much in an attempt to be iconoclastic and edgy. It does keep running stories on the place and tooting it's the coolest place in the universe, but tbh it's been doing that for near 20 years with little to show -does the editor have land there or summat?

If I were to nominate somewhere in my city it would be Harringey Green Lanes, the roaring nexus where Turks, Greeks and Kurds meet in one street and get it on, packed with independent businesses and it's fair share of 'edge'. Architecturally it's a dreamboat, but it's vibe on the street is completely different, very vibrant and mixed:

https://i.postimg.cc/SNRwqdn2/s.jpg

https://gmcdn-sxcqif3sepi.netdna-ssl...7237.03160.jpg

https://c8.alamy.com/comp/P2T32F/gre...dom-P2T32F.jpg

Wellington Street in Montreal is fine and dandy (major gentrification occurring), but probably off the itinerary of most tourists.

As montrealiste pointed out, there’s several distinct segments; they probably mean the Verdun section south of the expressway, but by not mentioning it, show they’re pretty clueless.

My sis lives in Verdun, couple blocks off Wellington. My best friend when he moved to MTL ended up in Verdun too; my memories of these days was cheap junk food places serving hot dogs and fries at the lowest possible prices.

If you want to talk about that street, you say “Wellington in Verdun”, not “Wellington in Montreal”. That’s if, of course, you know what you’re talking about - which the intern who put that list together clearly does not :haha:

Wentworth Ave. in Chicago is a pretty long street... I'm assuming they're referring to the section of it that weaves through Chinatown? While interesting, I'm not sure I'd call it "cool" by any means, although that word is obviously a very subjective one. I don't know. Chinatown has just always been there... always a mainstay... a place I have been going to for decades now and feel very comfortable, so maybe that's why I don't see it as "cool." :shrug: