"Oh come friendly bombs," wrote Sir John Betjeman, "fall on Slough, it isn't fit for humans now."The late poet's words on the fourth best town in Berkshire have caused controversy down the years, and if published today would probably have the Boys in Blue hammering at his door over an allegation of incitement to terrorism.
Readers will therefore be interested to hear about a clutch of previously unpublished poems on various towns in the United Kingdom, which Betjeman intended to publish as a collection called "Crapholes I have visited", excerpts of which we reproduce here for the first time:
Extra points if you can fill the comments with a few lines on your local area.
Basingstoke
Oh Basingstoke
You're like a bloke
with new trousers
but no belt to hold them up
I wouldn't pass water on you
If you were on fire.
Southampton
Oh, stinking jewel of the south coast!
Dog crap capital of the world
Let us bomb the place with gas ovens full of turds
It being the only language these curs understand
Wigan
Damn you British Rail and all you stand for!
For the night you left me here
I got food poisoning off accurs'd pie
Up to my neck in brown bottom soup;
If I ever come back here
I shall be armed with an axe
Southend-on-Sea
I would rather kill myself than visit this toilet again
And like most toilets, it's full of shit
Clacton, alas, is not much better
Bins full of buggered watermelons
Brighton
Sodom and Gomorrah were once known
For their exquisite murals and the potter's art
Before their fall from grace and the wrath of the Lord
Sent firey death to all that liv'd
Sparing no-one from his Divine curse;
And the nudist beach is shit, too.
20 comments:
OMG you really hate my beloved home, don't you? Poor Southampton. :-(
Sahara Desert
Huzza for mentioning my home town of Wigan!
I have an axe you can borrow if you like, save you carrying one all the way up here.
Something something Swindon
something fetid stinking sh**hole
burn it to the ground
and plough the earth with salt
Fully agree with Betjeman's poem on Southampton. I would have taken it further and made reference to the shite hole called st mary's and that it resides in an area that makes beriut look like a great family holiday destination.
Basingstoke is pretty much spot on.
Portsmouth
All roadsigns lead to Hell
And to Hayling Island
Which is pretty much
The same thing
I would also add that Hayling Island is land of the peado! That is a full on, nailed on, stone walled FACT.
Solihull
Pretentious tossers gather
From miles around
To queue for hours
To stand in bars
To criticise those
Who are not like them
Weymuff, Weymuff my hearts desire
though thou should be afire.
To love thee as I used to
is to love the village bike
the one with 'flat tyre
Bantama
Where muscled wankers never sleep
And every street corner's a bar
Veneral whores wanting it balls-deep
While stopping bus and car.
Commercial drivers all on drugs
Keeping road-kill scores
Street-side vendors serving bugs
Most likely from the whores.
Wow, my town seems very sterile after reading these...or maybe I'm just not trying.
Oakville, oh Oakville
Filled with money old and new
With Porsche, Maserati and a Lexus or two
But don't forget the grow-ops everywhere
Like flies upon your stew
Wow, my town seems very sterile after reading these...or maybe I'm just not trying.
Oakville, oh Oakville
Filled with money old and new
With Porsche, Maserati and a Lexus or two
But don't forget the grow-ops everywhere
Like flies upon your stew
Oh Swansea
You smell of pee
It is with glee
I would leave thee
They drive like fools
In Indiana
Where they worship traffic cones.
T'is always Road Construction
In Indiana
Slow to a crawl and genuflect
to the traffic cones.
And we shan't go there, but
there is no "e" in Potato.
'Basildon' doesn't scan, so:
O Laindon! Laindon, past thy prime
Your dusty streets, riddl'd with crime
Your shopping centre, brick-strewn waste
Your hoodie harlots, none too chaste
O Laindon, once a prime retreat
The folk with sense vote with their feet
Oh, St. John's. St. John's.
You're not the end of the world.
But we can see it from here.
SOUTHAMPTON: "Dog crap capital of the world" - what town was the runner-up?
Plumstead.
From where the Roman hoarde
First espied Londinium
And that was the last
Interesting thing that happened
In Plumstead.
A haiku to Widnes.
Factory gases
Permeate fast-food outlets
And there's not much else
Earl Shilton was once a boomtown
Now it's a bit of a comedown.
The town is just a load of crap
And traffic makes it a bloody deathtrap.
Sorry, that's all I could come up with on the spur of the moment
To the tune of "Head like a hole" by Nine Inch Nails:
Hetton-le-Hole
We used to mine coal
But not any more
We're all on the dole
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