"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Readers will therefore be interested to hear about a clutch of previously unpublished poems on various towns in the United Kingdom, which Betjeman intended to publish as a collection called "Crapholes I have visited", excerpts of which we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.
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