Crap Towns

Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Something I was thinking about on a couple of train journeys this weeked...

I've spent most of my life in places that have either been generally quite interesting and had history or stuff going on or been a bit rough about the edges but had some sense of soul / vibrancy (sorry about all the cliches there). But there have been places where I've spent small amounts of time but which have just seemed crap - Dartford, Erith, Maidstone and Bexleyheath spring to my south-east based mind.

So has anyone here lived in a really crap town? And are they genuinely crap or does everywhere have some hidden depths, some sense of community, some identity, some 'culture'? Are there Ballardian subcultures of porn and violence in Luton or electro-improv nights in Slough?

I'm not thinking of places that are entirely depressed and downtrodden and boarded up here, so much as places that are reasonably comfortable but seem, on the surface, to be utterly devoid of life.
 
Z

zhao

there are no accidents
in my experience in america, and i'm sure true of ANYwhere else, there are no shortage of crap towns which are total crap, always crap, unexceptionally crap, nothing but crap. oh yes.
 
B

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Maidstone is truly crap, I agree. Though far from the worst town in Kent, terrifyingly enough.

Yes, there are many places in the UK which are irredeemably lifeless, on which seem to be committing identity fraud on one another ('chain towns'), but no-one seems to realise or care.
 
john eden

john eden

male pale and stale
You should read Beyond The Implode and History is Made At Night blogs on Luton...

I spent a year (my suburban experiment) in Leighton Buzzard and it was truly soul-destroying.

I didn't help myself much by working in London and trying to spend as much time here outside of work as possible tho. Perhaps you have to commit.
 
S

Shonx

Shallow House
25 years in Bognor Regis, grey Saturdays on London Road with everyone looking ugly and miserable. People leave or become alkies - featured in the Idlers crap town guide. It's actually managed to have at least one good club since I left, which now seems to play host to loads of garage and hardcore nights, featuring all the old names. Still got very little to recommend it apart from that though.
 
Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
baboon2004 said:
The Medway towns are foul, and make Maidstone look like a heterogeneous paradise.
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And then you discover places like Gravesend and Erith and Planet Thanet...

But when I was living in Nottingham, for instance, I thought of Long Eaton as being absolutely dismal - and I still think it's pretty grim - but after a while started to find out that there was some stuff going on there eg a really good old-style folk club in the back room of a generic looking pub.

So I guess what I'm getting at is whether even in utterly crap places, people have some drive to do stuff and create something - be it a band, a pub, a shop, or an experimental dance troupe - with individuality and personality or whether somewhere can really just be so soul destroying that beyond watching TV or going to spoons and drinking til you fall over, the only thing to do there is (in the words of Lou Reed) to hate it, and know you've got to leave...
 
E

Edward

+
I grew up in Bedford.

Mostly it is charity shops and pubs and boarded up shops. I visit my mum there most weeks and am always asked several times for money by alcoholics and heroin users on the 5 minute walk from the station to her house.

When I last lived there in the early 90s, height of the rave scene, the best night out you could have was a 60s disco, or an indie rock disco where they might play a Shamen record at the end if you were lucky.

They had the biggest cinema screen in the UK in a town-centre venue that had concerts from Hendrix, the Beatles, New Order etc, knocked it down and built a multiplex with 8 tiny screens that you need a car to get to, and left the original site derelict for 15 years. Now it has finally been built on - there is a Lidl and in a way that's good because it is the only place you can buy food in Bedford if you haven't got a car to drive to the mega-supermarkets out of town, or are unwilling to pay £1.20 for out-of-date baked beans from a dusty corner shop.

Nice to sit by the river in the summer but that's about it.... I noticed they do have the odd grime event these days so maybe it's getting better for the youngsters. I'm ot going to go back and find out though.


whether somewhere can really just be so soul destroying that beyond watching TV or going to spoons and drinking til you fall over, the only thing to do there is (in the words of Lou Reed) to hate it, and know you've got to leave...
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Everyone with a few brain cells leaves. There are very few interesting and pleasant people under 60 and over 19. I was lucky cos you could still get a student grant when I was 18 so I got to go to London and drop out of college there.
 
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U

U-Basstard

tragic mix
Middlesbrough - utterly grim and life numbingly boring. But... it has a long history as a dance music outpost in the North, and it's surrounding landscape was the inspiration for many panoramic shots in Bladerunner, because Ridley Scott used to take a train ride home every day past 100m high towers spewing jets of flames, oddly designed bridges and ultra complex chemical works. Ergo Phizmiz originates from the same area, which would explain a few things, or maybe confuse them...
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
A friend of mine comes from Kettering and, bizarrely, moved back there after studying for three years in London. I went with another friend to this guy's 21st birthday (held in a soulless booze-shed a.k.a. 'social club') and couldn't stop pronouncing the name of the place like a certain well-known veterinary anaesthetic.

Another friend of mine grew up in Reading and doesn't have much good say about it.

My mum was born in Didcot, which places quite highly in Crap Towns, with good reason.
 
D

DannyL

Wild Horses
Using this book as an excuse to rant about the "Crap Towns- Idler" books

Can I just say I hate 'em? Lazy, shitty, cynical ... they're only there on the counter in Boders because you'd never pick them up otherwise. Not even satire - which at least has something to say - they exist entirely to capitalise on the "buying a present for someone I neither know well or like much" market.

I hate them largely because they encourage us to look for the worst in everything. They sit very nicely alongside the tabloids. Pretty much everywhere in the UK has a rich and interesting history that you can find start finding out about in ten seconds digging and these books totally encourage a ahistorical mindset that nothing ever existed beyond urban blight. There's a lot wrong with suburban sprawl, lack of community and contact, boredom and so forth but I don't like it when this is tossed around as entertainment. I'd much rather read something that offers a bit of decent critque and even - shock horror - some kind of solution.
 
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D

DannyL

Wild Horses
To add to that - things may be crap in some towns, but there's normally reasons why, which I'd like to see articulated. I'm from Barking/Ilford and I find the history of these places fascinating - the way you had a mass working class disporia in the wake of second world war, the huge influence of Ford Plant on the local economy, the intersections of London and Essex culture and how those reflect Thatcherism, the current issues around immigration/BNP resurgence. Fascinating stuff all of it, if not always fun to live in the midst of. (Billy Bragg's book "The Progressive Patriot" gets into some of this local history).

The world is an interesting place and our cities and towns reflect this. Those books seem to me to fundamentally make the world less interesting and more miserable.
 
Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
DannyL said:
Can I just say I hate those fucking books? Lazy, shitty, cynical ... they're only there on the counter in Boders because you'd never pick them up otherwise. Not even satire - which at least has something to say - they exist entirely to capitalise on the "buying a present for someone I neither know well or like much" market.
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True, although I once bought a similar looking thing called "Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit" as a christmas present for a housemate (who was doing a left-leaning critical theory masters) which turned out to have a few rants about TV and fruit and then a fairly coherent (if not exactly revolutionary) critique of Blair's Britain (tm)...

I hate them largely because they encourage us to look for the worst in everything. They sit very nicely alongside the tabloids. Pretty much everywhere in the UK has a rich and interesting history that you can find start finding out about in ten seconds digging and these books totally encourage a ahistorical mindset that nothing ever existed beyond urban blight. There's a lot wrong with suburban sprawl, lack of community and contact, boredom and so forth but I don't like it when this is tossed around as entertainment. I'd much rather read something that offers a bit of decent critque and even - shock horror - some kind of solution.
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Well, yeah, I pretty much started this thread in the hopes of getting some sort of more interesting discussion alongside character assasinations of wherever you grew up.

DannyL said:
To add to that - things may be crap in some towns, but there's normally reasons why, which I'd like to see articulated. I'm from Barking/Ilford and I find the history of these places fascinating - the way you had a mass working class disporia in the wake of second world war, the huge influence of Ford Plant on the local economy, the intersections of London and Essex culture and how those reflect Thatcherism, the current issues around immigration/BNP resurgence. Fascinating stuff all of it, if not always fun to live in the midst of. (Billy Bragg's book "The Progressive Patriot" gets into some of this local history).
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I was about to suggest that there's a distinction between (primarily northen, I think) crap towns that were shat on by Thatcherism and the collapse of heavy industry but which retain some sort of identity if only in relation to being shat on, and the crap towns that seem almost like what Thatcherism was aiming for - places where "there's no such thing as community" is written above the door of the council house. I guess it's the latter that I had in mind when I started the thread, and it'd be interesting if people who've lived in these places have got a more nuanced view than "total shithole..."
 
john eden

john eden

male pale and stale
I remember talking to a friend of mine (who was studying urban planning) about Milton Keynes once. He was telling me how incredible it was, a great place to live.

I was a bit surprised about this and said "have you been there?" in a piss-taking way.

His response was "oh no, but I've seen the plans!"
 
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