Shit Towns

This week I asked the good people of Facebook to tell me which town in England they considered to be the shittest.

The idea was that everybody got three votes each and I would keep score and name an eventual winner.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

It wasn’t really.

I struggled to get down to three from a mental list (one in my head rather than a crazy one) of about 200.

My first choice was Doncaster. It is the only place I’ve ever been where I didn’t feel safe in the town centre during the day. The streets are full of hoodie-wearers and people who look like they’re on drugs. I once stayed at a hotel there and the police were called after there was a disturbance caused by a stag party. How shit is the place you’re from if you want to have your stag do in Donny? I at least got to witness a pissed-up buffoon dancing on the roof of a police car at 3 am. Doncaster also gets bonus shit-points for being the hometown of bigot, sexist, colossal twunt and professional gobshite, Jeremy Clarkson.

My second nomination was Derby. If you arrive there by rail, the first things you’ll notice are an off licence with the imaginative name Mr Booze express and a “massage parlour” with visible leopard-print wallpaper. It’s pretty much all downhill from there. I’ve been to Derby a fair few times and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody smile. There’s a pub there that has had its lounge converted into a massive indoor rabbit hutch. Need I say more?

For my third choice I plumped for Leeds and was promptly told “Leeds doesn’t qualify as it’s not shit”. This comment was amended to an “actually I’ve just been there and it is” within 24 hours. Leeds is most definitely shit, due to it being a hipster haven and the most un-Northern of Northern towns.

I then remembered Bishop Auckland, a grim town where the sun never shines, but saved only by the memory that they once had a very good record shop; Ipswich – great architecture, but suspiciously like a ghost-town on a Saturday;  Peterborough, which is surely the railway-suicide capital of Britain because people saw the Lego-like shopping centre and decided to cash in their chips immediately; and Carlisle, a city where they hate everybody and say “eh?” at the end of every sentence.

And so to the vote.

Lewisham may well “look shit” and be “full to the brim with cunts”, but one person’s attempt to cast three votes for it unfortunately led to disqualification.

There will be no bronze medal and there are no fewer than five places which share silver.

Middlesbrough is so depressing that James Cook decided to become an explorer and travel to the other side of the globe to escape it. He then allowed Hawaiians to kill him to avoid returning home. And that was before it became a toxic waste dumping ground.

Skelmersdale lies within the Shit Triangle of Liverpool, Wigan and Preston. The origins of the town are disputed, mostly because the Vikings and the Celts tried to distance themselves from the creation of such colossal shitness.

Basingstoke was described by one voter as “soul death”. The Germans recognised its shitness during the war and dropped very few bombs on the place, just to avoid making millions of pounds’ worth of improvements.

Derby and Leeds also share silver.

The winner, with a colossal three votes, is Hull.

Despite its City of Culture status and the fact that it doesn’t actually smell of fish, the people have spoken. I was once approached by a beggar there who looked better-off than me and I’ve only ever seen one person urinating in a shop doorway and it wasn’t even during the day. Even this didn’t help:

Demand a recount all you want, but this isn’t Florida in 2000, so the result will stand.