Crap Town UK

Many will feel that Britain is a relaxed society but they have not read the Idlers “Crap Town UK” which lists, with convincing evidence, the 50 crappiest towns in Britain. But even amongst this underbelly there exists a sense of belonging for as soon as the list was published the outrage began “Why were we left out” shouted the denizens of excluded Crap Town’s. But even within this underclass there is a further unfathomable state of outcastery. There lives in the UK a deprived minority who suffer terrible discrimination, whose food is Pork Scratchings, the only snack food outside of Papua New Guinea with hairs, their beer is Banks (yes it rhymes) and their trough which they inhabit fitfully is the rust bowl of Wolverhampton and these benighted peoples with the UK’s worst accents and attitudes are know collectively as Wolvies.



Objective evidence of Wolvies crap credentials and the vicious circle of crappiness its inhabitants cannot escape has been piling up for nigh on 37 years. In 2009 Wolverhampton was listed as one of the worst cities in the world on a travellers' website. The West Midlands city was number five on a list compiled by Lonely Planet, based on feedback from its website users. Detroit in the US was voted the worst city, followed by Accra in Ghana, Seoul in South Korea and Los Angeles, US. Lonely Planet said Wolverhampton was so bad it had not even made it on to the reviews of cities on its site, as it would crap it up. One correspondent compared it with the devastation of Ground Zero in New York.


The Man on a Horse which provides a focus for public unrination. The Wolvies blame it on the horse, such scallies!

Sathnam Sanghera says;

“Wolverhampton, my home town, where I spent the first 18 years of my life, was the crappest town in Britain. Wolverhampton’s grimness is legendary. My memories of growing up there almost entirely consist of running away – either from people trying to mug me, people trying to glass me, or from rabid dogs trying to savage me.

Crap Towns does do Wolverhampton justice. One entry says “the city is so divided along class and racial lines that it is hardly a city at all but a collection of tribal groupings”.


Award-winning journalist and author Sathnam Sanghera receiving an honorary award from the University of Wolverhampton. He actually went to Christ’s College, Cambridge and Wolverhampton is probably UK’s worst university but we can’t be sure as it has taken itself out of the rankings! Some students even do their own dissertations.

Michael Thompson in the idler http://idler.co.uk/crap-towns/wolverhampton/ describes it thus;

“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.


Pork Scratchings - the culinary delicacy of Wolverhampton

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.




Beautiful Wolvie

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. Its 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.”

Don’t take my word for it, drive into Wolverhampton on the A41 from the M6 Motorway and enjoy the wonderful approach of a town surrounded by derelict steel works and old slag heaps inhabited by …. Well you tell me! Yes, there are famous people who come from Wolverhampton but they have one thing in common, they now live somewhere else! Why for holidays and high days the inhabitants who can escape to Coventry and Manchester as better alternatives! Q.E.D.




Look out! Wolvies about!

So there is the phenomenon of the Wolvie Diaspora where the natives escape the rust bowl of Wolvie; some to vice or call centres, some go across the border to Codsall or points west in Staffs, others further south to Watford, Camden Town or The French Riviera, to Calgary or indeed anywhere which is not the City of Pork Scratchings. Ossie Osborne escapes to Beverly Hills (not to be confused with Beverley Knight) but when in the UK is careful to stay in his mansion in leafy Buckinghamshire. But wherever in the world these unfortunates end up they cannot escape the “First Law of Wolvie” – You can take the person out of Wolvie but you can’t take Wolvie out of the person!

AND LONELY PLANET'S NINE MOST HATED CITIES ARE....

Detroit, Michigan
Accra, Ghana
Seoul, South Korea
Los Angeles, USA
Wolverhampton, England
San Salvador, El Salvador
Chennai, India
Arusha, Tanzania
Chetumal, Mexico

Crap Towns: The 50 Worst Places to Live in the UK, edited by Sam Jordison and Dan Kieran, is published by Boxtree Books, price £10

Sathnam Sanghera is a British journalist and author of The Boy With The Topknot: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton. Published by Penguin, shortlisted for the 2008 Costa Biography Award, the 2009 PEN/Ackerley Prize and named 2009 Mind Book of the Year.

Wolverhampton is Shit website;

http://www.wolverhamptonisshit.co.uk/index.html

Wolverhampton on the Chav Towns website;

http://www.chavtowns.co.uk/?s=wolverhampton


Billy Wright - the most famous person in Wolvie