If you want to nominate, the simplest and quickest thing is just to post a comment at the bottom of this page. You don’t even have to read anything else here, if you don’t want to. Just jump right down and get typing…
If you do want more info, here’s the blurb:
Crap Towns is back. By unpopular demand. If you have a nomination, we’d love to hear from you.
Once again, we’re eager to hear your stories of woe, misery and despair. We want to know all about your unhappy hometowns and we want more mad poetry of wreck, ruin, dissolution – and also the strange joy and beauty that can make a Crap Town.
Delightfully, people have already deluged us with emails in about Chipping Norton, Wrexham, Watford, Tilston and similar. (Had you even heard of Tilston? Us neither. Apparently, it’s pretty crap.) We’re putting up our favourite nominations as fast as we can. Currently they’re appearing in the sidebar to the right of this page under “recent posts”.
More will be arriving soon. In the meantime, we’ve also received nominations for Winsford, Bridlington, Sunderland, Cambourne, Crawley, Weston-Super-Mare, Fraserborough, Redruth, St Austell, Witney, Watford, Dursley, Worthing, Herne Bay and Swindon, to name just a few. If anyone’s got further information on any of those, it would be much appreciated… They’re on the radar…
You can leave a nomination, or post an entry by commenting anywhere on this site. Or by emailing in to: CrapTownsSam-2013@yahoo.co.uk
We’re also going to be keen to hear from you if you disagree with anything on the site. We’re always eager to correct inaccuracies and we’d also love to include eloquent defences as well as attacks on towns.
Excitingly, we’re also going to include a list of the Top Ten improved towns in the new book. Come in Hull – your time could be up. If anyone from a town that appeared in the Crap Towns books one and two wants to make a case for their exclusion this time around, do get in touch.
Here’s the small print: By sending in an entry to CrapTownsSam-2013@yahoo.co.uk or posting on this site, you acknowledge that we may use your words in any forthcoming publications about Crap Towns – and we may also edit and alter those words. Also bear in mind that we will use the name with which you sign your entries – so if you wish to maintain anonymity or hide behind a pseudonym, please let us know.
Oh and comments are moderated… Mainly so we don’t get our bottoms sued from us. Sorry if your nomination doesn’t appear. Don’t worry! We will have received it and will have counted it in the great race to find the worst town…
… So please, stay in touch!
Crap Towns 
This comment is notification that a very funny nomination has been received about Bingley and will be posted soon.
(We don’t publish comments right away since we have to check through entries for legal problems, grammar, insane delusions about concreting architects into their own buildings… You get the picture. Rest assured that if you do nominate in the comments, we’re grateful and we will give your words our full attention!)
Glossop has to feature – it would be the perfect setting for another remake of The Hills Have Eyes – an ugly town populated by part-humans!
Oldham – it’s as though the ghetto from every Northern city has been removed and rebuilt into the same town. Fortunately it’s positioned at the foot of the Pennines, so here’s hoping there is a major avalanche some day soon…..
Well, I have this American infatuation with all things British, so trashing British towns makes me sad! LOL. Anyway, for crappy urban environments, I suspect the USA can at least match and probably surpass the UK!
I’ll nominate Sheerness in Kent – a small town with more than its fair share of boarded up shops and depressing streets of run-down terraces – but what really sets Sheerness apart is the ‘natives’ – you’ll never see such a sorry collection of long term unemployed and other no-hopers – even driving through the High St sends a shudder through my soul….
This comment has been posted up on the site here.
Chipping Norton. Or wherever that cheese botherer from Blur lives.
In 2009, the Government advised Swale Borough Council to find a way to re-design Sittingbourne, “Make it more modern, more eye catching” they said. They were given some funding to help.
It’s now 2012, and we have a half finished “Country Park”. Half of which is quite pleasant and the other half has bits of pipe, chicken wire and all other sorts of Building Materials sticking out everywhere. The Council says it’s finished and you would believe them (due to there being no work being done), aside from the Building Materials and the dirty great Iron Gate,Padlock and chain on the main entrance.
Sittingbourne has applied twice to the Mary Portas Project, but has lost out twice in a row to Ashford (which is actually doing OK for itself now). A quarter of it’s High Street is boarded up, and when not shouting fragrant language at each other and fighting, the locals shuffle along like extras from Night of the Living Dead, it seems even the local Chav’s and Pikeys have given up.
If you encounter Sittingbourne during the Summer, The beguiling scent of Human Feces (from the Water Treatment Plant) will seductively waft over the town and make you feel a bit sick. Why not visit the worryingly rushed Morrisons being built by the railway station? or the site where the 12 screen cinema was supposed to be built on when the the old 2 screen one was ripped down in 2007. Visit one of our many (two) Dogshit filled parks and get physically and verbally abused by the locals.
COME TO SITTINGBOURNE!!!!(and then very quickly turn around and leave).
I’ve heard it said that the River Medway is the a**e-hole of England, and Sittingbourne is half-way up it!
Axminster, it’s like a rash, only less fun.
Trowbridge is supposed to be the county town of Wiltshire, though few actually know as to whether this is true or not, since most who try and visit end up lost forever on the most godawful one way system known to man. The few who are able to successfully navigate the chaos though, find themselves exploring a town centre that is not only crumbling and dirty, but there’s also the numerous areas of desolate wasteland where factories have been demolished or left to rot, and the joy of not only witnessing someone being sick across the pavement, but the added bonus of seeing a pigeon swoop down from a nearby rooftop so he can start pecking at the chunks.
Ipswich
Town planners rarely fuck up this bad.
The town centre road system is so fragmented and impossible to park its like being in that film Blair Witch you always end up back at the same place and completely baffled.
.After WW2 London had less boarded up shops and the amount of tarpaulin covered new/old developments makes the town look like a bizarre ghost pirate .
Even Ipswich Town fc cant muster a win they are so depressed.
The market has a very good sausage stall though.
Southampton has to take the prize as the epitome of British crapness. A coastal town without a beach, a historic town that fails to consider its history, a university town that seems to have willingly performed a cultural lobotomy on itself.
On the upside, the city planners seem to have cottoned on to its awfulness, by making it spectacularly easy to escape from using one of the myriad motorways that seem to be audible from every spot in the city. Perhaps they are trying to tell the residents something? “Leave. At once. Right now. Here, let us help you.”
For non-residents, visit once. Just to help you appreciate the dizzying heights of culture, art and sophistication to be found in Crawley, Basingstoke, Watford and Crewe.
I once heard someone call Eastleigh the ‘Crewe of the south’!
Also, Southampton was described as ‘the world’s biggest small town’, which is an almost perfect description.
Kirkby-in-Ashfield is a former mining town in West Nottinghamshire, just outside Mansfield. Kirkby has fallen on hard times over the past 20 years or so. Council ineptitude and the violent, destructive nihilism of the townsfolk has conspired to turn Kirkby into something resembling the seventh circle of hell. The sky above is a perpetual grey.
Favourite past times in the town include – but are not limited to – fist fights, fear of outsiders and the unknown, and ultra-violence in the Nag’s Head pub.
A new Morrison’s supermarket recently opened to great wonder, as it brought in people from out of town. Apparently, the locals had a habit of staring at the newcomers in baffled amazement. Kirkby is the town Deliverance built.
Most people have never heard of it, you’d be best advised to keep it that way.
I’d like to nominate Weston Super Mare, Birminghams grave yard, closed down shops, drug rehabbers everywhere, tacky Welsh Stag and Hen nights who didn’t have the sense to go elsewhere. No jobs, no decent road infrastructure, litter strewn, stinks of chip shops and the worst selection of 1950’s B&Bs you have ever seen.
Hatfield, Hertfordshire
I really don’t know where to start with Hatfield, known locally as Shatfield. It is so completely devoid of any culture, identity and fun that students seldom stay after finishing University. Fortunately, most people who have neither lived nor studied there have never heard of it, which is one of the few things in its favour.
Every other house looks like a German war bunker, except less clean and spacious on the inside. The majority of these are rented to students, since nobody would want to live there long-term. Rubbish does not make it to the dump between tenants; dirty bedding, beer cans and planks of wood are left on the street or in front gardens. Mould spores have also been fashionable in Hatfield bathrooms for many years now. But if student homes aren’t your thing, it gets worse: the two high-rise monstrosities of apartments erupting out of the already ugly town centre like the heads of a hydra, providing homes for druggies and illegal immigrants.
Like virtually all other activities, shopping in Hatfield is no fun, as every shop other than Asda is like Poundland in terms of product type and quality, except the ‘goods’ cost over £1. If you do go to Asda, it is advisable to beware of gormless shoppers, whose brains become so exhausted at reading long words (like “ham”) that they need to stop suddenly every few minutes to gawp into space. Also, walking in Hatfield is generally frowned upon, due to the recent popularity of mugging, rapes and bottling people outside the Town Inn.
Furthermore, the only nightclub is closed throughout most of the Summer, the only building of historical interest closed throughout the Winter, yet an ice-cream van is available all year round, playing its nails-on-blackboard chime late into the night.
Future developments include an incinerator on the outskirts of town, to drown out the smell of piss with the smell of burning rubbish.
I would like to nominate Middlesbrough as it is the biggest sh**hole I have ever come across
I`ll nominate Portsmout, Hampshire, when I was *, my stupid parents thought that it would be a good idea to move there, & from the first day I hated it. The people there are crude, violent & thick as bricks, They think it`s a virtue to be stupid, & not to wash from one day to the next. Their idea of a good night out is to get totally plastered puke all over the place, & then get into a fight. The men are only interested in getting into as many girl`s pants as they can, & the girls just want to get pregnant so they can get a council flat & live off benefits for the rest of their lives, & they start working on this at the age of 13 or 14. The experts say that due to global warming, all coastal town will be underwater in about 100 years time, well, I wish that I could travel forwards in time to see it happen to portsmouth!
Try visiting Southampton, it’s even shitter than Portsmouth.
I think someone is a little bitter about their parents moving them :-(. Some of your statements can be said about 90% of the cities in the UK, Plus you are talking about a sub set of people and not the place it self. I think Portsmouth is a beautiful and historic city and love visiting, I wish I could live there. Plus Portsmouth is Flat and even with the worst flooding seen in the past couple of years it did not flood I would turn the 100 into many thousands of years.
I think you should consider Portsmouth for the improved category. In the last ten years it has significantly improved in many ways, even the Tour de France came here. It is true that there is still plenty to do but it’s a nice place to live and the only city or big town on the South coast that has a huge green space (the common) right next to the sea front (which is Ideal for the international kite festival that takes place every August bank holiday weekend, see: http://www.flickr.com/groups/southseakites/pool/?view=sq). There are many music venues several theatres, cinemas, some really excellent pubs and tea/coffee places and as it is an island, it can’t get any bigger, unlike the urban sprawl that characterises many large towns and cities. I have lived in London, in the Midlands, in the country and in various towns and this is the best of them all, not perfect, by any means, but much better than most.
Brighouse West Yorkshire,another forgotten area since the local councils were reorganised
Try Swindon town what a shit hole nearly as bad as Croydon
Leigh-on-Sea springs to mind: Inundated with cocks, aloof, passive-aggressive and very dull.
Plymouth; it’s ugly, grey, lifeless, dity, dangerous, has no jobs and has to name everything after Francis Drake because he was and still is the only exciting thing to happen to the place despite the passage of nearly 5 centuries since.
I live in a pretty crap town ‘Stevenage’ which would likely feature as many peoples crap town if it were near them. However luckily we have two nearby VERY crap towns, Luton and Hatfield. It is a difficult choice to name one of them as the worst so I will have to chose both Hatfield and Luton.
And Harpenden is just as crap and is wedged somewhere in the Luton-Hatfield-Stevenage triangle.
Fort William, a one street shit hole full of charity shops and outdoor clothing emporiums. Of a weekend the inbred locals congregate for a spot of fighting and plate glass window smashing. On a Sunday morning one can tip toe through the piles of curried vomit on the pavement thoughtfully deposited after pub chucking out time.
Haste ye back! I think not.
Harpenden…..now there’s a bland, soul-less place where the people who can’t afford London have congregated since the 1990s and put on pseudo posh accents but they’re just chavs with no breeding and no class and no equity in their houses since they’ve mortgaged themselves up to the hilt to try and make out they’re successful. It’s really just Stevenage with BMW 3-series that aren’t quite so old.
Redditch, or ‘the Ditch’ as it is more accurately known, is generally despised by all its inhabitants, most of whom were moved there from the slums they previously enjoyed in Birmingham. As a new town in the 60’s, it was designed with the car in mind, not the people in the cars. It’s impossible to find your way around Redditch, even if you have lived here all your life, and it isn’t worth learning. The large verges and islands created by the sweeping dual-carriageway network present an ideal no-mans land for dumping corpses. There are plenty of structures to jump off, should you read a copy of the Redditch Standard, and not realise that hope does exist, just not in the Ditch. Two friends from Scotland, one from Glasgow, the other from Aberdeen, after unsticking their shoes from the carpet in Fever, were shocked when the queue in the chip shop curled tighter to the walls, as two girls fought on the tiled floor in the middle. They’d never anything like it before.
Didcot.
The best thing about it is the road leading out. I speak from experience as I’ve lived there my entire life.
Andover. A dead town that regarded Greggs arriving as an event. A town that thought a cinema was mythical creature for a decade. A town that named it’s only nightspot ‘Life’ without the slightest hint of irony. A town that is relatively safe because every potential criminal has already bored themselves into a coma. A town that looks up to Basingstoke. Let me repeat that – a town that looks up to Basingstoke.
Send help.
I’m really starting to think is there anywhere in Hampshire that isn’t crap?!
Bedford – awful place, crack dealing in town centre. Bus Station probably the worst in the country, IMO even worse than Northampton’s Greyfriars Bus Station, of which is actually getting demolished soon, so at least they’re making progress. Most trade lost to Milton Keynes now, and, if the Grosvenor Centre in Northampton gets extended then we will lose even more trade to them too. Bedford Borough Council really need to pull their finger out and get on with some development and redevlopment, or else Bedford will just become a second Luton.
I literally can’t believe that Basildon has not been number 1 every year since this was made. All you have to do is drive through the town to realise you need to lock your doors and not stop!. Chav mum’s with their 17 kids all in shell suits all of which have a different dad (Incidentally the children will be named after “Bling” cars like mercedes or bentley, sometimes they’ll stretch to using names like Demi-Rea or my favourite Chelsey.. But thats only because the parents can’t spell Chelsea), crack addicts asking you for money so they can buy more crack. The eastgate shopping centre which should be condemned.. Or possibly used as bait to round up as many chavs as possible into one place and then let them fight to the death in a hunger games style tournament with the winner being given a double gyro that week… Go there, see for yourself.. Don’t forget to pack a stab vest!
Morden-in German means murder,this i assure you is apt as i have been threatened with such fate twice now by a neighbor.A chav infested hell hole with NO redeeming features WHATSOEVER-far right band Screwdriver used to play a pub near here which tells you plenty : (
An Ode to Sunderland
Sunderland that lost place in both time and space, geographers worldwide will say they’ve either never heard of it or ‘it’s that place next to Newcastle. The city where everyone has an inferiority complex despite the majority of its denizens being tall and wide. We always hear the city of the damned phrase bandied about liberally but Sunderland can be proud to hold bragging rights to being the picture always associated with it. Sunderland is a place so far back in time that during the great recession of the 2000’s the place was still trying to get over the great depression of the 30’s. Ask anyone there the old days were the best in fact compared to Sunderland these days people would rather live back in the 1950’s- 1980’s when there was a town hall, swimming baths, ice rink and jovial racism against ‘Pakis’ was the cities past time. Look to modern Sunderland an empty city 1 in 5 stores are left to rot and the main retail influence is dominated by the Mackem big 3; Pound shops, charity shops and bookies. You can spit anywhere in the city centre and it would land on one of these low-quality bargain basement atrocities. The unemployed youth of the city given little choice in the future as they are thrown into these retail hells for slave wages or those who have the sense run as soon as they get the chance because anywhere in the world the grass is greener. This has left a city cram packed with the misery of those who weren’t smart enough to live life away from the black hole of doom and the rest are just old people who love to be surrounded by misery and despair in an attempt to make themselves feel better about a life wasted. Take a tour around the city on an evening and it’s dire, the place is like a ghost town that even the ghosts got sick of and everyone living walks around with faces as if they have fought in a horrific war despite none of them actually travelling out of the region. Yes, Sunderland the depressing cesspool of human waste and shattered dreams there is little to be proud of. The council are corrupt and incompetent yet no one seems to mind after decades of stagnated rot and wasted funds the people see these people as gods. There’s an old saying that you can stick a pig with a red ribbon on to run for election in the city and people will flock in their hundreds for it. It’s a simple place where voting is swayed by a colour or the candidate or how racist they can be. Yes despite racism having no place in the modern world Sunderland residents hold onto their past times. Just look at Brexit the city saw a low percent of immigration in the past with 2.5% of UK moving into the city bearing in mind 12% is the national average. Yet Sunderland wasn’t having any of it as the masses lined up to not only ruin their noses to spite their faces but take a whole shotgun point blank. The results rolled in as the scenes of middle-aged white folk rang out at the Silksworth sports centre as the rest of the UK sat back and watched the death of the pound horrified that the nation was filled with closet racists and idiots and there was Sunderland proud as punch holding itself aloft on a podium of the destroyed futures of the next generation. Locals banded together with the old community spirit to stand outside of schools and cobble together some fancy nazi bed sheet banners telling Polish children it was time to go home. Yes be proud Sunderland, they even had a visit from hated old bloke and the ghost of communism Jeremy Corbyn as he spoke to the city. He was met with an angry bloke in his 50’s telling him to fuck off back to London and booing the lady begging for the food banks. But that is what we are here in Sunderland, angry. We’re angry that the coal mines closed, angry that the ships stopped and angry that after so long all we have for industrial progress is dead end call centres. The rest of the world doesn’t care for the city and nor do we who live in it. Sure you have the militant tribal locals who will lie to themselves that the city is an amazing oasis in the barren wasteland of the north despite barren wasteland being the sound of a nail being hit square on the head.
Have mercy for Sunderland, those who have a dead existence before it even began. We sit here in 2017 a city trapped in a towns body yearning for the 30’s despite being stuck in the 70’s decaying and slipping into 3rd world status. This is no joke we are crying out for help forsaken by gods and pitied by demons. The height of our culture has moved to Newcastle and what’s left is the fact we’re home of Frankie and Heartstrings (They had a hit cover that one time over a decade ago) and so we believe our own self-deception to the point we’re willing to support throwing thousands of pounds at a city of culture 2021 bid. That’s right City of Culture 2021! Our city centre library has shut down, the beach front is a building site and the only thing going for the city is we’re a well know relegation-threatened football team. City of Culture my arse other cities are pulling out all the stops to impress with proper culture and a level of sophistication what we have in Sunderland is a glass centre and an airshow/ army recruitment weekend once a year. There’s no hope for anyone here just let it be recorded that we in Sunderland existed (Barely) #CityofCultcher2021
“You live in Reigate? That’s a nice town!”. Not anymore, it isn’t, unless your idea of a nice place is to pay £500k plus for a 2 bedroom home near the station surrounded by HMOs filled with the dregs from far and wide who, of course, don’t need to worry about things like a mortgage – or even a job – as they amble around with their Charlie Chaplin style walks wafting cannabis fumes everywhere and exposing their pale and ugly flesh to the world.
The day was when you could walk around Reigate and never see a tracksuit or tattoos, but now they’re everywhere, adorning the shapely figures of the UK’s best and brightest as they go about their daily business of doing sweet fa and using your taxes to do it. And why wouldn’t they live here? After all, they have everything needed to sustain them and nothing to deter them.
There’s a Morrisons supermarket, which provides all the bargain basement cholesterol laden fare your average chav needs, in addition to various takeaways. There’s even a nightclub for these miscreants to meet up and no doubt add to the UK’s burgeoning national debt by producing the next generation of wasters from their alcohol sodden nights of rutting.
So, come to Reigate, but don’t be surprised when you realise it’s no better than the rest of this s*****e of a country.