The Idler

Yeovil

Yeovil might well have been a fairly nice town at some point – but I’m only basing this on the fact that its got a church. The rest has been decimated by a red brick shopping centre and various out-of-town superstores.

James Garland

Yatton

Yatton is near Bristol, off the A370 on the way to Weston-Super-Mare (which is itself bound to feature on the crapmap sooner or later).

In Yatton, the bones of children do not grow properly. A typical teenager will appear to have rickets and something odd about the skull. Often the dome of the head will appear to be missing completely, and the jaw is extended toward the ground. I am no scientist, but there must be something lacking in their diets – perhaps food.

In Yatton, the elderly are like dirty, damaged vultures. They converge at awful jumble sales. They rummage and fight for socks and underpants that have been torn from the stiff corpses of their previous ancient occupiers.

The newly-clad wizeners parade, in purple Sta-Prest flares and grimy beige duffel coats, worn with ancient carpet slippers, toothless to Somerfield to buy Tizer and Superkings. If they speak to each other, nobody knows what they say.

In Yatton, I have seen a woman die in the doctor’s surgery.

In Yatton it is always cold and dark.

Ben Woodcock

YATTON’S HAIRDRESSERS ATTACKED!

‘Manukenkun’ writes:

I used to have my hair cut there as a child. They refused to dye it black as they said it wasn’t natural, this is from people who willing dye old ladies hair blue…

Yarm

Highlight: The Flighty Cod chip shop
Lowlight: Waiting to get served in the Black Bull and then tasting the beer afterwards.

Yarm is the worst sort of town: a whited sepulchre.

Superficially, it appears an attractive market town in the industrial wasteland of Teesside. However, spending any amount of time there one will discover that no resident has any taste or cultural discernment, the pubs attract a crowd similar to that found in the Costa del Sol, complete with fake tans and skimpy clothes.

Weekends and Tuesdays (singles night) are even worse with fighting yobs and divorcees on the hunt from out of town to pull the perceived better class, and hence (they assume) richer, resident of Yarm. . After 11 the only place to go is upstairs above a pub for a disco where the once-tasted, never-forgotten Tetley Imperial is served. Taxis will then charge a minimum of �5 to take you half a mile out of the place.

Nowhere is the famed northern friendliness on show.

Wrexham

Alumni: Tim Vincent, Half of Mansun.
Amenities: Football club, pound shops.

Wrexham is the proud owner of a football club, and nothing else whatsoever, since the brewery closed- it produced Wrexham Lager, “The ONLY Welsh lager”, which, unsurprisingly, was not popular in the country of Cery’s Matthew’s birth because it was only about 3% ABV.

The people there generally have children by the age of 18. It is at this age that they usually get a job in the Numark Pharmacy packing plant or one of the many sports shops (which are there to satisfy the demand for Kappa tracksuits), and by the age of 50 they’ve often grown as wide as they are tall, and waddle about the town centre looking for cheap clothes they can actually squeeze into.

Elisa Parish

Wolverhampton

The most attractive thing about Wolverhampton was the multi-story car park on School Street, the roof level of which used to offer attractive rural vistas of Staffordshire, Shropshire and the Wrekin. However, the council knocked it down in the 90s. Now its most attractive feature is an orbital dual carriageway so impossibly difficult to negotiate (unless you’re a local) that it actually performs a service to the community by keeping curious outsiders away from this gutter belch of the West Midlands.

Wolverhampton was made a city in 2001, and as the nation shrugged, TV pictures were beamed into every home by way of the 6 o’clock news, showing Wolverhampton’s town crier (who reasoned that a testimony to 60s concrete renewal required a town crier?) announcing this momentous event to at least 6 interested residents gathered on Dudley Street in the pissing rain.

According to some, the night life in Wolverhampton has improved in the last few years. Yeah, it’s great if you’re a suede-headed moron who diligently phones each of your mates in turn before a night out to make sure you aren’t all going to be wearing the same colour YSL shirt, before heading down to Yates’s to pull a 40 year-old mother-of-5 and punch someone in the face for having a different skin tone to yourself.

Unemployment in Wolverhampton is, of course staggeringly high and the city is so divided along class and racial lines that it is hardly a city at all but a collection of tribal groupings. Some of its outlying suburbs (such as Heathtown) are terrifying concrete wastelands too terrible to describe (Heathtown is where the people of Wolverhampton go to die).

The town has given birth to such talent as Slade and Eric Idle. It’s local politicos, whisky-supping sham socialists to the core, have the ruddy faced corpulence of the undeniably corrupt about them.

In the evenings, the smell of hops from Banks’s Brewery permeates the town like the stench of a trapped animal slowly decaying in a drain pipe.

Michael Thompson

Woking

Famous residents: Shakin’ Stevens
Everybody says: “I ain’t being funny or nuffin’”
Amenities: A pond
Entertainment: An old man with Alien Hand Syndrome

The first thing you will notice when you leave Woking train station is a sign which reads – ‘Welcome to Woking, Home to All-Weather Shopping’.

You will then confronted by an underground thoroughfare which you must go thorugh to get into the town proper. This being part of the main route for a legion of WKD swilling, acned, YSL-shirted young Herberts, the passage is permeated by the stench of piss, puke and rotting kebabs.

Thus you will be initiated into Woking culture with a game played by all of its inhabitants – trying to hold your breath long enough to make it out onto the steps at the other side.

On these steps on the other side there is usually a paralytic tramp, peeting three litres of White Lightening, contentedly pissing himself and creating a quite beautiful stepped waterfall effect, the like of which you might see in say the Brecon Beacons for example.

So perhaps it is that – the noxious cocktail, the Eau de Gutter, that causes the synapses in your brain to click and shudder or perhaps more simply the other end of the tunnel really does open out upon some whole new dimension. A new dimension where morality and intelligent thought become redundant (or are “fucked off out the window” in Woking-speak). Whatever it is, when in Woking you are subject to some terrible evil force.

So you are alone, alone to shop, whatever the weather. Unless there’s a very heavy downpour, in which case the public conveniences tend to flood. You wander around the Peacock Centre aimlessly, you find yourself being hypnotized by pan-piped Roxette. Your eyes glaze.

Before you know it you’ll be “sporting and cavorting”, attending stripper’s nights and dry-humping oiled-up Tom Selleck lookalikes with the best of them. There wi’ll be no stopping you.

A month or so later and you’re out of control. You’ve taken one alcoholic Irn Brew too far and you may have forgotten that there is indeed a world beyond the Peacock Centre, which you will now refer to affectionately as ‘Peacocks’ . To slowly reintegrate yourself into society, you start going away for the odd weekend, to Calais, to Brugges or Charing Cross police station where you manage to land yourself after a particularly tremendous day at Notting Hill carnival.

When you return to Woking, everyone will of been extremely worried about you because they “don’t venture out much and it’s dangerous up in that thar smoke” and they say they heard about a girl who got gang-raped by ten men and you say, some girls get all the luck but you don’t mean it.

So the rain beats down rhythmically on the Peacocks roof and the toilets slowly overflow and Roxette is ‘Dressed for Success’, in some kind of Bolivian poncho by the sounds of it, and you know, you may never leave again.

Sarah Janes

Witney

Witney is supposedly famous for its manufacture of blankets, which may still go on, and Douglas Hurd was and may still be the local MP. You can imagine for yourself how exciting it is to spend time there.

I fucking hate the place.

Tim Wild

Withernsea

It started off as a spar town in the turn of the century, but the demolition of the railway service has left it a shabby deprived shell.

If you have seventeen screaming kids, tattoos on your face and neck, a slot machine addiction and love crap food, come to Withernsea, you’ll love it!

Lisa

THEY SELL CRAP TO PEOPLE FROM HULL

Withernsea’s primary industry seems to be selling seaside touristy crap to daytrippers from Hull. The sea wall is made up of cement blocks that look like somthing built to protect a WWII battlefield from a tank invasion – which maybe is the only thing that would make Withernsea more pleasant. When I was there a crowd had gathered peering into the depths of these blocks, so we wandered over to see what the attraction was. They were watching a group of rats, frolicking around in the litter.

Richard Taylor

Winchester

Sure it’s pretty and historic, but it’s hardly the bastion of civility many would have you believe.

Any character disappeared from the town centre when the high street received the chain store make-over, house-prices are exorbitant and cater exclusively for well-heeled London-employed family-builders seeking old England, and the countryside has been hewn by Maggie’s M3 legacy. And that isn’t the half of it. It’s the middle-class complacency, nay arrogance that defines the place.

This reactionary character is personfied by the town’s most odious insititution, Winchester College, and its inmates. Young public school boys stride the historic streets, comfortable and sublimely superior in the knowledge that daddy’s considerable land-ownership and board-room interests will see them through to their positions as Tory MPs
and beyond.

John Mitchell

Wigan

It’s a great place if you have a penchant for baby’s head and peas (meat pudding and peas), barm cakes (bread rolls) and rugby league (similar to football but not as good).

The nightlife is great; both cabaret AND bingo all on the same night, but only in the classier social clubs.

Russ

Wick

There is nothing in Wick except sullen faced youths hanging around chip shops and denim clad drunken tinkers who talk to cider bottles.

There is nothing to do except drive cars for no reason other than to make their tyres squeak with handbrake turns.

Everybody in the entire town has snot hanging from their noses.

It has a river full of shopping trolleys.

The best thing about Wick is the lighthouse built by Robert Louis Stevenson’s uncle. Aged 17, RLS was in Wick and hated it. He ended up living in Western Samoa because geographically it was the furthest point from Wick on any atlas.

They have an amusement park in Wick. It is called a field. Their only export is Caithness Glass – most of which the factory buys from Accident and Emergency on a Friday night.

Whitby

Highlight: Bagdale Hall Hotel & Bottle of 1989 Ch�teau Lafit Rothschild I drank there. Dracula.

Lowlight: Watching some local yobs kick a dog to death.

One of the settings for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this small town appears quaint on first laying eyes on it. After driving down through the beautiful North Yorkshire Moors and through the village of Sleights one could initially be forgiven for thinking that we’d arrived in a pleasant Spanish fishing town; the small of the sea and the beautiful architecture are a treat for the senses.

It is only on leaving one’s hotel, or for that matter, the car, that you actually realise where you are. No longer do the views of the Abbey matter, or the cry of the gulls in this rustic Algarve, what matters is that you’ve landed in the middle of commoner land and are surrounded by people whom you wouldn’t let lick the crap of your shoes.

Wednesday and Saturdays see the local ‘club’ and pubs heaving at the seams with slappers and slags who have nothing else better to do than get pregnant, being let into pubs after giving the doorman/fisherman a blow job. The place is also apparently famous for being THE place to buy dirty heroin, on the outskirts of the town you can see all of the council and Barrett houses which are the homes of the local smack heads, I advise not staying around and to leave to Robin Hood’s Bay (Seven miles south and full of upper middle class whom I can tolerate quite happily).

Anon

Is this ironic?

Welwyn Garden City

I defy you to find one person smiling, or even anyone who isn’t thinking “Why am I here? Why am I here? Why am I here? Please someone kill me,” over and over again, then holding their breath until they pass out.

That really is it.

It sucks the daylight out of the day and the happiness out of anyone who goes near it.

Jon Humphreys

Wellingborough

I have been there, and never will go again. I can not say any more. You will just have to take this one on trust.

Dr Bad

This town which, during the ’80s, dreamt of housing the disaffected of London never quite managed it and consequently became a haven of mediocrity with hundreds of identikit suburban housing estates filled with middle managers. Their hateful offspring fill the town centre at weekends whilst queuing to gain entry to the growing number of revolting chain pubs. They smoke Marlborough Lights and sport a profusion of cheap gold jewellery and Ben Sherman shirts.

All the old shops have closed and those not replaced with O’Neills (a hyper-real simulacrum of an Irish pub) have turned into “Everything’s a Pound”.

Andrew

Watford

Any historical elements have been gutted and replaced with the usual nightmare shit scenario:

Theme pubs – full of angry young fools who can’t take their (overpriced/watered down)drink.
Retail Parks – where you can’t ever park.
A’fortress’ style shopping centre.
A ring road with three manic one-way lanes which reveal prime Watford architecture along the way, including a really vile 1960s Social Security building, a Derby & Joan Club concrete hut, a YMCA tower block which monopolises the skyline and a car park that puts Mr Whippy to shame!

Having spent my youth in Royal Tunbridge Wells – where life is one great big ‘Mr Darcy’ Regency trip, it comes as an extremely hard ‘cross to bear’ to end up in such a place so totally devoid of culture.

Is there some conspiracy to homogenise the country (whole of the ‘western’ world) so that in the end we haven’t got a fucking clue where we are?

I am saving up to move back to Tunbridge Wells

Nikki Steele

Waterford

Anyone who has had the misfortune to be domiciled here deserves sympathetic counselling.

Its windswept, rain sodden location is erroneously referred to by the tourist board as the ‘Sunny South East’.

A quick sojourn by the grim river, vainly attempting to stop your umbrella from inverting, soon puts paid to this idea.

I can only assume that it is due to the unending sore throats brought on by the inclement conditions that the natives, male and female, speak alike in unfathomable, gravel-like tones.

The ‘Crystal City’ is noted for little save its overpriced cut glass. Restaurants are noticeable only by their absence and the city’s Hells Angels chapter is just waiting in the window of the pub for you to rub against, or horror, overturn their chrome wife.

‘work-shy’

Warrington

A town with pretensions of being a city. It suffers from being between Manchester and Liverpool and as a consequence has developed a kind hybrid noise of an accent.

Warrington is characterised by lots of angry men all produced from the same mould. Think of the thick-set, no necked, plodding Neanderthal type being from all those ‘development of early man’ charts you used to see on biology/history class walls. Then add a Warrington Wolves rugby league shirt, a couple of tattoos, and a shaved head.

Packs of these early men roam the streets at night after the traditional 10 pints, looking for a fight. The Sunday morning streets look like Belfast after a riot.

The Warrington female is usually in a boob tube/black mini-skirt combo three sizes too small and will wear this right up until she reaches 60.

Outsiders attain a kind of novelty status. They get the same kind of reception Western explorers received when they first encountered tribes in Africa and the Amazon. Here, Cosmopolitan is just a magazine.

The major landmark of the area is the Lever brothers factory right in the centre of town. This giant ugly monolith makes the whole place smell of washing powder… insert your own hygeine/ irony joke – and be assured that it’s probably true.

Gary Dutton

Walsall

The filthy streets, the unwashed masses, the charming local accent that makes us sound as though we were born retarded and have been drinking turpentine every day since then… These are the best aspects of Walsall.

There’s a new art gallery, grey and shaped like a box. Clearly a great deal of thought went into making it look as appealing from the outside as it is enjoyable inside.

And a new bus station. Cost a small fortune to build, looks absolutely revolting, has slowed down traffic for miles around because the entrance is tiny and buses have to queue past the exit to get into the entrance — so a traffic jam can last theoretically until the end of time. Best of all, they didn’t realise until after it was built that it wasn’t big enough for all the buses.

The crowning glory of Walsall, though, is its people. They will happily kill you with an axe while you wait outside the local chippie for a deep-friend Mars bar. (This actually happened. An axe.)

Matt Harvey

Wakefield

Famous residents: The pop group “Black Lace”, responsible for such timeless gems as “We’re having a gang bang” and “Aggadoo”

Squashed like a Lamb’s testicles into the kebab of West Yorkshire is the city of Wakefield. Known locally (and somewhat confusingly) as the “Merry City”, this depressing abyss now passes its days as a staging post for the freshly paroled.

For the casual shoplifter, the city centre is an opportunity not to be missed, but If it’s bargains you’re after, why not try the “Ridings Shopping Centre”, the local containment unit for farting pensioners and pregnant toddlers. If that’s not your cup of tea you could always do battle with 2000 other nicotine stained fingers in the broken biscuit section of the “Food Weighouse”.

Street entertainment is varied yet painful, as the Bolivian foot-tappers are coined by pre-pubescent skiprats, abusive old women in Dunlop Green Flash hurl insults and beg for shrapnel from passers by… their cause usually aided by a broken Bontempi or keyless accordion.

The infamous “Westgate Run”, a crawl of over 20 pubs, takes in a number of semi-night clubs, including the exclusively titled: “Bitz”, “Toffs” and “Rumours”, all of which can be relied upon as a ticket to a quick knee trembler with Leanne or Donna and a certain dose of Yorkshire cock-rot!

Jonny M

Venlo

Pubs: Hundreds of 80s throwback bars, “Rock” cafes and alcohol selling Turkish cafes. In fact pretty much every building in the city sells alcohol.
Amenities: Pot selling coffeeshops – hundreds, mostly illegal. People in the street selling pot – hundreds, all illegal, many very annoying.
The “mountain” – a slope by UK standards.

Venlo might sound like paradise to a lot of people with pretty much every building selling alcohol and every other person selling pot. Don’t be fooled.
There are reasons for this:
1. It’s the only way they can get anyone to live in this dull dreary 1950s prefab city.
2. You need to be out your head constantly to handle this travesty of civilisation.

I’ve heard Venlo described by a local as the crossroads of Europe. If this is true then it’s probably the crossroads where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the Devil. Arse end of Europe is a more fitting description.

Venlo is the seediest part of Holland often making Amsterdam seem like a family picnic. The Dutch that live there however, are generally quiet family people and enjoy nothing better than dancing in a circle to “Brown girl in the ring” in a mock 1950s America bar. Many local men resemble Ned Flanders of the Simpsons and their wives often sport huge 1980s swept back hairstyles. The youth of Venlo express there rebellious nature by growing huge mullets and hanging out in “Rock” cafes or slicking back there hair with a ton of grease and riding round on scooters.

Bizzare place.
Name witheld