Book description
On the way to a show in Skipton, in North Yorkshire, I noticed a road
sign to a town called Keighley. So later, during the show, I mentioned
this, asking the audience 'Is that your rival town?' And the room went
chillingly quiet, until one woman called out with understated menace,
'Keighley is a sink of evil.'
Based on his award-winning BBC Radio 4 series, Mark Steel's 'In Town',
is a celebration of the quirks of small town life in a country of
increasingly homogenized high streets. Steel's bespoke observations on
the small, sometimes forgotten, towns of Britain goes right to the heart
of British culture today, championing the very people who shape the
places we live in now.
'As everywhere hurtles along a route towards being identical to
everywhere else, it seems any expression of local interest or
eccentricity is becoming a yell of defiance. Scrape away the veneer of
Wetherspoons and Pizza Hut-inspired uniformity, and the march of Tesco's
towards being reclassified as a continent, and Britain is as
magnificently diverse as ever, and ready to celebrate each distinct
community. The elements of a town that make it unique are what make it
worth visiting; they change a journey from being functional to being an
experience. For example, one drizzly dark February afternoon as I came
out of the station at Scunthorpe, I got in a minicab, and the driver
didn't even look at me, but kept staring straight ahead as he said, 'I
don't know what you've come here for, it's a fucking shit-hole.''
Unearthing some of Britain's most unusual tourist attractions, and
noting local quirks and habits, Steel's journey takes him through the
backwaters of England, up to Scotland and across to Ireland, where he
encounters a country united by a peculiar ingrained sense of pride, no
matter which village, town or city, to give a refreshing take on
Britain, its people and its places.
