How Durham is your hometown?

During Christmas vacation it is inevitable that your beating heart will be fluttering with the prospect of returning to Durham. But step outside of your family’s semi, and you might just find that your home town will be forever Durham. 

South London

Rampant with rich kids and shit clubs playing Ke$ha, South London is a breeding ground for prospectus Durham students. Boasting some of the best (and poshest) private schools in the country – it may be the only place where you can expect to see more signet rings and red chinos. Henley is a yearly tradition, Wholefoods is the only place to buy your groceries and anyone north of the river is scum.

Kent

Kent is the shit Essex. Sick to the back teeth of explaining the difference between the two schools with Tunbridge in the name, you walk around pretending that you’re actually from East London. No one buys that Bromley is actually “a really nice part of Greater London.” Chill, next to the Odeon, is Canterbury’s answer to Shack, the only thing worse is you have to go to locals night. Fake tan and bleach blonde hair brings out your inner Kent – despite insisting how much classier it is than Durham. Annoyingly all the th-fronting won’t make up the fact your private school has prepared you for a life time of being perfectly Durham.

Guildford

“Oh you’re from Guildford! Let me introduce myself”. This is of course a phrase which has never been spoken, as we have all know each other since first day of prep school. The last day of summer holidays is a special day for the town, as all the students gather in town centre, as we make the procession up to the Surrey of the north all in a big bus, hockey sticks and Conservative party rosettes all in tow. Fun fact for all you non-Guildfordites out there, we don’t actually need to apply to the university, we merely present our school tie on the first day and are admitted free of charge, as well as provided with our complementary orange chinos and bigoted world view.

Cheshire

With its cobbled streets and fancy cathedral, Chester is like a less-Northern Durham. We cut our teeth on Rosie’s and Crusie, so Durham’s nightlife seems pretty bloody civilised. The Cheshire set are as much about their pearls and Barbours as the DU stereotype demands, making it the perfect place to breed and raise future Dunelms. We’re delivered in Range Rovers at the start of term, necessary, of course, to transport our wide range of black tie outfits, which we own pre-Durham, because of all the Young Farmers Balls we have to go to. Home to footballers, racehorse trainers (and owners) and our homie, the Duke of Westminster, Cheshire catz aren’t going to be worrying about the ever rising tuition fees. We are a little bit concerned, that no one here seems to know where Aber is, and that there’s no where to park your Fiat 500 in Duzza.

Wiltshire

You probably chose Durham because you couldn’t stand the idea of being in a city that didn’t have historical landmarks or, God forbid, a Cathedral like the one at home. We all know you miss Stonehenge because of the amount you harp on about it – we get it, we’ve all driven past them on the way to Devon. Nobody has ever heard of your teeny town so you spend half your life explaining how it’s kind of near Winchester and Southampton, but nobody really knows where Hampshire cities are either. You rarely see your prep school pals because everyone outgrew your town and became edgy –  they’ve all buggered off to Manchester or Bristol. You, on the other hand, feel more at home wearing your dog-walking Barbour and wellies, and so you ventured up here.

Oxford

Oxford out-Durhams Durham at every turn. It’s older, more prestigious and more of Harry Potter was filmed there. The clubbing is equally as shit and the students have even less of a sense of what a ‘good night out’ actually entails. There’s less of a stark divide between town and gown – being the most unaffordable city in the country means the locals tend to be more forgiving of arrogant drunken displays of over privilege; there’s very little poverty in the Cotswolds. Everywhere you look there’s tourists or stash – sometimes tourists in stash – clearly the North East is a little too cold and a little too far away to make up a day trip. There’s even a poly to take care of the ever important poly-posh rivalry. Whereas we have to borrow Newcastle’s. The whole place feels like it’s doing Durham better than Durham does, nothing feels like real life. Though the pint prices will bring you back down to earth. £3.50 a pint? Fuck off.

Cambridge

Welcome to the place you got rejected from. Every day is agony. Cycling to your shitty job at the Lion Yard, you have to pass the college that told you “Catz is too academic for someone with your attitude to work.” You’ll meet up with your friends from Hills and head to Mill Road because they went to Leeds and insist that they can’t even begin to speak to you until they have a shisha pipe in their mouth. Cambridge is filled with annoying locals from Arbury, has shitty music at Lola Lo’s and the students are all a load of wankers. Basically Cambridge is a more expensive Durham.

Manchester 

With not a public school in sight and an obsession with shit drugs, big city Manchester is surprisingly similar to small-town Durham. Wetherspoons is the obvious Friday night pres choice before hitting Locks and you definitely felt the motherland calling you home when you realised Durham had a Lloyds. The privately educated lax girls who spend their weekends at Hale Country Club with Mummy make up the pre-fresh Durham quota and together with the pill popping 14 year olds that hangout outside Morrisons they represent the student-local divide. Choosing universities was made simple, you’re classier than your Liverpudlian neighbours but you saw straight through the faux-edginess of Bristol. Durham encapsulates the northern drinking culture with that added touch of rah.

Birmingham

Home. A city full of policemen, Middle Eastern markets, diversity and Primark. You have friends who went to state schools and a wide range of universities. You even have friends who didn’t go to university, who you meet up with at McDonalds for lunch. The nights here are big, with potential for decent music, expensive cocktails and violence. The accent is powerful and heading south to London is a major family holiday. Birmingham does not die in the holidays. Most Brummies have never heard of Durham, and most Durham students have never been.

Devon

After a painful 11 hour Megabus journey sat next to a sweaty bald man you’ll wish you forked out the close-to-£200 train fare to cross the country. Finally making it to Durham you’ll realise that you’ve travelled 350 miles to the North just to land yourself in a city full of southerners. You’ll spend the first week of the Christmas holidays trying to explain the collegiate system, then give up and agree to meet up with your edgy friends from Bristol (or worse, UWE) to discuss how many people they’ve slept with or how much time they spent smoking weed in the corner of the SU. Not a word will be spoken about how you spent your first term at Durham drinking quaddies in a club that prides itself on being the worst in Europe… On the plus side, you have the joy of telling practically every student north of Birmingham that you live in “that little bit that pokes out at the bottom of England” because frankly, you might as well be an international.

County Durham

Despite the proximity in name, Country Durham is probably the least ‘Durham’ hometown ever. It turns out Durham isn’t as far north as civilisation goes. There’s Newcastle for starters, and everyone dresses like in Geordie Shore. We all try and look as tangoed as possible, just for fun. We’re a lot closer to Durham than Surrey or Sussex or whatever, so getting home is easy. We’re much more stereotypically northern than the people in Durham city centre.  We go around wearing miners caps everyday and singing ‘Fog on the Tyne’. Pretty much everyone wishes we’d go back to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and turn Northumbria into a little enclave of safety from the south.

Hull

When the only siggy you’ve heard of is a cigarette; you drink Red Stripe because it’s cheap not trendy, then you know you’re not Durham. Your wellies might be Hunters, but our’s are as filthy as Klute. Hull has good music and £2 for a double vodka, which is still 37 per cent. We’re about the only people in this city not exclaiming at how cheap everything is, because unlike the Southern contingent, we’re not used to paying a tenner for a Jagerbomb. While most the Durham crew get here in Audis and BMs, we were lucky not to have to get a croggy from someone who may or may not have been to prison. In Durham we’re getting pretty down with Paddy’s parmos, but there’s still that yearning for a good old patty and chips, which never seems to go away (not pate and chips you posh nob). At the end of the day, to be fair, ‘ull kids aren’t that Durham, but we are from the City of Culture 2017!