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