Burnley

Burnley has it all.

Tolerance: race riots? check. The election of four (count ‘em) BNP councillors? check.

Peace: the “Burnley suicide squad” were feared hooligans in their day. Don’t look at anyone’s woman. Or pint.

Sobriety: has some claims to being the skag capital of Lancashire.

Balmy weather: the Pennines are immediately to the east. my educated layman’s guess at the meteorological effect is “huge geet clouds come in from the atlantic, hit the pennines, slosh back and empty all over burnley”. Living in leeds is substantially drier, despite the fact it’s only 45 minutes away.

Class: white trash to the max. and not as portrayed by John King, either – expect sickness. Thousands of teen mothers/kappa slappers. With gold sovereign rings (actually, this is a spot-on description of my little sister). Ratboys who’ll twock anything that’s not welded down. and make you buy it off them at knifepoint. So they can buy crack. or tentacle rape ‘anime’.

Achievment: traditionally always makes top ten in any list of suicides and divorces.

High spots include:

The Stoops Estate – I once waited for a bus coming out of stoops: it came past at 60mph, on fire. Then a car down the road exploded. I decided to walk.

The new bus station – architectural monstrosity

The red light district – scabby skaghead whore bonanza.

The Burnley Express – I can guarantee that I’ll be able to identify at least one of my old classmates in a fair-sized story. about drug dealing/ arson/ glassing someone for looking askance at their bird/pint/BNP tattoo.

The one redeeming feature of burnley is that it isn’t Nelson… no point nominating that, because your reviewers wouldn’t last ten minutes.

Anon