In 2003, a little black book was published that struck at the real core values of British life: bodged buildings, massive class anxiety and rampant self-loathing.
Crap Towns began as the daydream of Sam Jordison, then interning at The Idler magazine. Looking to build upon The Idler’s Crap Jobs column written by the book’s co-editor, Dan Kieran. Jordinson reflected upon his hometown of Morecambe (#3 in the list) and wondered, perhaps, if there was a way to rate and rank these unexamined and neglected places from which we all come: ‘I had this burning feeling that no one ever told the truth about places like that and the way they’d been run down.’
Kieran and Jordison set out on a national road trip in the spring of 2003, developing a highly unscientific system to collate the crappest of places, collecting real-life anecdotes from the residents they met on their way. Little did they know the project would become a bestselling toilet book in the humour market, shifting 120,000 copies and making a big splash in the media that spawned two sequels in 2004 and 2013, the second of which featured a right-to-reply people’s vote, and spawned various spin-off titles.
Crap Towns dives into Suede’s preoccupation with that very English conundrum of being ‘enslaved in a pebble-dash grave’ alongside the desire to be somewhere else; itching to escape small-town life for the capital or a dream life by the sea. Like the inertia of so many of The Smiths’ songs, it is easy to dream of a new life – anywhere but here.
The book displays the shallows and depths of the British psyche, oscillating wildly from self-deprecating humour to suppressed rage. Residents would submit stories flush with thwarted hometown affection that include stags-gone-wrong, seagull attacks or people shitting in bags and throwing it out of the window.
Hull was number one in the first book after the council spent £92 million refurbishing 500 council homes on the Orchard Park Estate, only to surrender them for immediate demolition. Hull would later become 2017’s UK City of Culture with Coventry (#7) following in 2021, only to parachute in London-based consultants and spiral into liquidation, leaving a legacy of scandal and incompetence.
For every Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty there exists its evil-twin ‘Cow Town’, such as Banbury (#16) or Bridgwater (#44). These extremes draw hard lines of social division as with Nuneaton (#8) in deprived north Warwickshire, contrasted with Royal Leamington Spa and Stratford-upon-Avon, in affluent south Warwickshire. Elsewhere, the extreme mediocrity of Alresford (#46), Skelmersdale (#44) and Hythe (#4) go head to head with distinguished cities of privilege and social division, Oxford (#31), Winchester (#5) and St Andrews (#7). Jordison notes how the rising tensions present in the book hint at early warning signs of the ‘fear and loathing of metropolitan elites’ that would, in his view, later fuel the Brexit debate(s).
Harking back to Philip Larkin’s I Remember, I forgot that I had submitted photos of my own hometown, Nuneaton (#8) for the inevitable sequel, Crap Towns Returns in 2013. I was disappointed to see Coventry (#7), featured in the Crap Towns top ten. Living on cheap rent for several years, it was the rough and ready phoenix city where I first made my way into writing and publishing through the grassroots arts scene before leaving for London myself.
London, and several of its most beloved boroughs, feature highly in the top ten of the three Crap Towns books. Despite its many flaws (stratospheric rents, a flattening curve of cultural innovation) the constant electrified struggle of London life can be as exhilarating as it is exhausting: one minute you’re waiting 40 minutes for a night bus, the next you’re eating dinner in a fancy Hoxton restaurant you cannot afford after your date stood you up (again) for a fresh hook-up.
But, people still flock to London from all over the world to start a new life and meet others chasing their own dreams. Jordison himself would leave the city in the mid-2000s for his own crap town of Norwich to co-found the award-winning literary fiction publisher, Galley Beggars Press. His decision was made after coming home one night and finding his front door covered in police tape after a shooting in the neighboring shop, just one week after a house party DJ down the road was shot by a bullet fired through the wall of the adjoining house. Tiring not of life, or the capital itself, Jordison was fed up with the multiple homicides happening on his doorstep.
For me, Crap Towns highlighted the symptoms of the state-led decline narrative, provoking a j’accuse against incompetent local authorities. By 2003, the Labour government had already abandoned their ‘red wall’ voter base to rot and ruin in working-class towns such as Airdrie (#27), Jarrow (#37) and Port Talbot (#22).
Jordison and Kieran wanted Crap Towns to be funny and provoke reactions leading to change, never expecting their prankster-ish humour would become a painfully real joke. In the years following the publication of Crap Towns Returns (2013) they saw the UK splinter into the factional extremes of a post-Brexit world.
An unfortunate incident would mark the final revenge of Crap Towns after the co-editors were sued following an undisclosed publishing incident, wiping out the royalties from sales of the bestselling book like the wages of sin. Though Kieran, who later went on to co-found the publishing company Unbound, admits that the book’s reputation gave him and Jordison a platform to become established authors.
In 2024, the UK still sits trapped under the monumental weight of a post-imperial hangover, as we spiral into a reactionary home front of beige food, feckless governance, and a deepening inferiority complex.
For now, we have to take the crap of dogshit, litter, and broken windows along with the hope of a renewed social consciousness, and remain unafraid to laugh at our worst selves – and the places we call home.
