My home town is shitter than yours

Maidstone, Kent

Population:  113,000

Claim to fame: Barry from Eastenders, sod all else.

Ugly rating: 7/10

Deprivation Rating: 4/10

Tedium rating: 8/10

Why is it shit?

My own hellhole. This safe Tory seat hardly fits the shit town demographic, but a look under the surface reveals urban decay, 3 thriving legal high shops, an estate possessing Britain’s highest rate of teenage pregnancy and multi-story car parks so ugly they’d make Josef Stalin say: ‘ooh, bit tasteless’. To see Maidstone as anything but crap is like saying ‘Phil Neville was the more talented brother’ or ‘I love flavour, give me a korma’.

Wigan, Greater Manchester

Jen Grimshaw – Law with Politics 3rd Year

Population: 81,000

Claim to fame: Shit football, good rugby, great pies.

Ugly rating: 5/10

Deprivation rating: 6/10

Tedium rating: 8/10

Why is it shit?

The only landlocked town dumb enough to build a fully functioning pier, Wigan truly is a spectacle to behold. Wiganers think it’s acceptable to go clubbing wearing a sausage skin well into their 50s, but if you really want to sample mutton dressed as lamb, one of Wigan’s many bakeries will oblige with pastry caked treats for a worrying small fee.  Just don’t go to the best one, Edwards’- It got arson attacked.

Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire

Robert Dixon – Physics 1st year

Population: 73,000

Claim to fame: Having a name with a rude word in it.

Ugly rating: 5/10

Deprivation rating: 7/10

Tedium rating: 9/10

Why is it shit?

You’ve got to feel sorry for this hard working, steel producing metropolis. Scunthorpe is so down on its luck that even McDonalds decided to pull the plug on its High Street branch and Channel 4 recently chose it as a filming location for ‘Skint’, one of those ‘if we use a soft voiced narrator, we can’t be accused of mocking the poor’ kind of documentaries. Nice.

Burgess Hill, West Sussex

Riana Goldman – Law with Politics 1^st Year.

Population: 29,000

Claim to fame: Holly Willobooby went to school here. There’s a bandstand.

Ugly rating: 2/10

Deprivation rating: 3/10

Tedium rating: 10/10

‘The Bandstand is the main feature’ says Riana of this beige Mecca, known affectionately as ‘Bugger’s Hell’. ‘You’ve got the park, which is good when you’re 13 and you’ve just discovered kissing behind the bushes, but the main entertainment is climbing on the bandstand’. ‘You can’t walk down the street without seeing a sea of blue rinsed pensioners – Burgess Hill is where people go to die’.

Fontaine-le-Port, Ile de France

Thomas Lalaurie – European Studies and French (yes, FRENCH) 4^th year.

Population: 800

Claim to fame: Some old house (above)

Ugly rating: 0/10

Deprivation rating: -1/10

Tedium rating: 0/10

‘It’s a total dump’ says Thomas. ‘Often, when I’m sailing on the Seine in my boat, which is pathetically small, I think about how my town has gone to the dogs. Some people earn less than double the average salary and there’s only one Bang and Olufsen shop. People can’t afford Jaguars any more, they have to drive Land Rovers. The other week, my Mum bought supermarket own brand brie. Peasant!’