THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY OF 'CRAP TOWNS'
How two writers created a Noughties series of books that take a tongue-in-cheek look at British decline
Crap Towns is a series of mini humour books first released in 2003 with a follow-up title Crap Towns Returns released in 2013, celebrating and deriding the very essence of British crap-ness.
I spoke to the co-editors of the Crap Towns, Sam Jordison and Dan Kieran, for an article with The Fence – READ HERE – about how the projects came together and the meaning of a ‘Crap Town’ in 2025 – here follows an extended interview with the author’s of Britain’s own demise…
ADAM STEINER: What was the key inspiration/pitch behind the first Crap Towns book? Was it the sketch on the back of a fag packet chat; a chat in the pub; or more of a ‘let's argue out the sociological state of the nation’ i.e. which shit place is shitter?!
SAM JORDISON: None of these things, I'm afraid - although I think some papers at the time said it was a pub conversation. It was just me alone in front of the computer and the memory of growing up near Morecambe... Not very glamorous or interesting, I'm afraid. Except for the fact that I had this burning feeling that no one ever told the truth about places like that and the way they'd been run down - even though there was this really potent mix of tragedy and comedy about them. And even though there was an urgent need to do something about it all and no one was addressing that need...
Also, I had always been haunted by the idea that Morecambe had to be the place in the Morrissey song ‘Every Day Is Like Sunday’... but I'd also come to realise that the song could have been about hundreds of places...and the fact that there were so many towns in a similar state seemed fascinating to me. It was such a shared experience. But no one had written about it much. So I tried to get something down that was also inspired by the Morrissey lyrics. (Which shows how long ago it was. Not as much fun quoting Morrissey, any more...)
Anyway, I set to and brought the piece into the Idler where I was working as an intern...and then it all happened.
AS: Dan, you were Deputy Editor of The Idler magazine, the first platform for Crap Towns, and then later more mainstream publishers Boxtree and Quercus. How did this get started?
DAN KIERAN: I started building The Idler website in the late-Nineties, early 2000s. I’d never done a website before, and initially it was going to be archive for existing material, but the point of it became a way to provide entertainment so you could bunk off work. So you’d be at your office; you bored; you go to The Idler and get entertained. The readership was smart,not that many people read The Idler, but many of them were writers and so the people that did were working across journalism, music, advertising etc. We had a really interesting niche.
I was a double-university drop-out, so one of the first things we published on there was Crap Jobs, inspired by the fact that I’d done so many of them. People would just write in and the plan was to get the submissions, edit them and post them up within a day.
So, me and Sam sat down together and were just rolling ideas around thinking ’so what else is crap?’ Sam suggested towns, so he wrote about Morecambe and I wrote about Alresford, where I grew up. And then we just started to get an insane amount of submissions, people just wrote in ‘so you think that’s bad, listen to this!’ People weren’t angry about Crap Towns, they were angry that their town wasn’t in it! We just kept getting loads of really funny things, like the producer of Blackadder writing about Didcot—there was a sense of pride behind it.
One day, I just looked at the stats for the website, and normally we’d get a few hundred visits a day, and then we got 130,000 in a single day, we got a good publishing deal which was very generous for two aspiring authors in their mid-twenties with no track record. This was in 2002, so the book had ‘gone viral’ before that was really a thing. We were approached by a friend who was an agent who tried to sell the idea as a book—everyone turned it down. No one could see the value of a viral idea; the biggest Christmas book seller at that time was Schotts Miscellany.
AS: What happened when the book came out?
DK: Sam put the book together, it was released in October, before that we were invited on BBC Breakfast News and Channel 4 news along with Simon Jenkins and Iain Sinclair debating the book, on the front page of the Guardian, there was a real buzz around it, including lots of local radio stations, which was still quite a powerful medium back then. I think it sold something like 150,000 copies.
AS: So the book captured something of the zeitgeist; the spirit of the times?
DK: It was 2003, in principle, these were good times. But post-Iraq war the sheen had really come off of Tony Blair. Sam and I took a road trip that year and met the people who lived in these places, getting shouted at. Many people felt like the people in charge around here don’t care—my big takeaway from this was that the country was being run to make money for the people that ran it, not the people who lived here, this seemed quite profound and original, at the time. But it was also the era of the Iraq War. A lot of them felt marginalized, sidelined by mainstream politics who had their heads in the sand. These were the ‘Rotten Boroughs’ written about in Private Eye; pieces which were really sharp and would just eviscerate places but really well written.
I grew up in Hampshire, relatively well-to-do, and these places were nice but mind-numbingly boring. I used to go to the local skatepark so that singled you out already, once some people called the police when I was right outside my own house! I remember a journalist went to Winchester, which is near to Alresford, and called me up saying: ‘We can’t find the place with the graffiti featured in the book–everything’s just so perfect’. And I was frustrated; it’s not perfect, have a real look at what’s going on in the place.
The book managed to mix together places of high unemployment and other places that considered themselves very highly, and this was happening in the fourth largest economy in the world, but lots of people’s lives were just not reflective of that. We were trying to provide a bit of social commentary alongside humour; the main strength of Crap Towns was that it was really, really funny.
AS: The book was a bestseller – I praise it as a perfect toilet book gift – did the positive reception inspire the sequels? Was it a cash cow for The Idler, later Quercus?
SJ: Thank you for that praise. You're very kind. I still like to hope that it gave people quite a bit of fun and food for thought at Christmas. And yes it sold a lot of copies. And yes, that inspired the sequel and some spin off books. The Idler definitely made cash from it. (I was cut out of quite a few of the spin off deals so didn't thrive in quite the same way.)
DK: I did a Crap Jobs book, that also did really well. And then another book came out the year after called Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit? And that was a really big seller, but of course it was just slagging everything off.
AS: What was the idea behind the voting system in the second book? If the electoral system has shown us anything, British vox populi generally ends badly...
SJ: I apportioned the rankings in all three books in a very unscientific way based on the number of emails people were sending in about each town, weighed against how many people actually lived there - and also a more gut level feeling about how funny people were finding the entries and how much they were being shared. The system wouldn't stand up to much scrutiny, in all honesty. But! It did always catch important ideas and was a good reflection of the feelings people had about places around the UK. It was notable that London was the subject of so much negative correspondence for the 2013 book, for instance... which now feels like one of the early warnings about the way fear and loathing of Metropolitan elites would go on to inform the Brexit referendum.
DK: I didn’t feel it at the time, and I can’t speak for Sam, but the book now feels like a sign of where things were headed a decade later. Those people who felt ignored made themselves heard, very loudly, with the Brexit vote. So, I’m not claiming that we were ahead of the times, but we definitely tapped into something that going on, under the surface. And that’s why the humour really resonated with people, because we were being told that everything was great, but it definitely didn’t feel great
AS: Do you think the Crap Towns books are something of a precursor to the (now seemingly inevitable) rise of nostalgia (Remember Proper Binmen etc) and the healthy friction with British Memes which often expose Britain at its sincerely crappest –nowadays it would be a blog/instagram feed etc?
SJ: My first instinct is that I want to say 'no' because I really don't enjoy those memes - and especially don't enjoy the way so many of the accounts spreading them seem to be three clicks away from far right hatred... But I suppose if I think about it long enough I would start to worry that the books did tap into some of those feelings... I mean they were mainly inspired by my nostalgia for Morecambe and many other people wrote in because they felt a similar mix of emotions about their own towns. It was that Bruce Springsteen thing of simultaneously longing to break free of the place where you grew up - and loving it hopelessly. And yes, it would be on instagram on youtube nowadays.
AS: I think some people (chiefly residents of the Top 10) found the tone of the books hectoring, too Londo-centric; which was always going to be a common complaint – did you ever think 'we're punching down too hard' or were the targets so obvious / deserving of a kicking, that you were in a fashion 'doing God's work' – because for lots of us having experienced crap holidays, work trips, stags from hell in these places, would echo the pains of a thwarted tourist!
SJ: Yes, that criticism was often made. I always thought that it didn't help that the books were associated with The Idler magazine, whose founders were posh and were easy to stereotype. But I think I also always hoped that the actual content of the books would dispel such notions... Because it was so often people from the towns themselves who wrote in about them - and also because there were all kinds of places in there. So sometimes it was people kicking themselves, sometimes it was people kicking up and sometimes it was just written for kicks... And expensive and supposedly exclusive places were some of the best targets. And, just to extend the metaphor even further, and as you say, the hardest kicks were aimed at social injustice, corruption and nasty buildings. It was revenge for the misery people had endured in these places.
That was the hope, anyway. Twenty years later, I'm not sure how well it worked. I can also see that there was a level of snark in all the little introductions I wrote and bits of crap town trivia and the photo captions.... I know that nowadays some people react against that kind of humour. I just wanted it to be funny - but some people just aren't laughing any more.
CHECK OUT MY ‘CRAP TOWNS’ PIECE IN THE FENCE
AS: So have the books and their reception become something of a jaded experience?
SJ: Journalists who talk to me about Crap Towns often say "you couldn't write it like that now"... There are two possible responses to that. One is to push back and say that it's a shame that people seem to have lost that kind of self-deprecating humour. It's a shame we all seem to find it a bit harder to laugh at ourselves and we all want to take ourselves so much more seriously, somehow... But the second response is to take my lumps and admit that maybe I shouldn't have written the books like that then, either. I'm not always confident about which of those two responses is the best. One thing I can say is that I recently listened to a podcast about the book on which the hosts were complaining about how distasteful if was to try to try to be funny and I ended up feeling quite sad for them. I couldn't help thinking how painful it must be to find so many things offensive and to have so little room for laughter.
DK: It was many years after the book came out that I met John Harris, who used to edit Select magazine and then became prominent in the Guaridna. And it was just around the time of Brexit, and he said ‘Oh God, you did Crap Towns—Brexit is your fault!”.
AS: What was your favourite Crap Town?
SJ: Morecambe (#3). I still love it and still hope for it to have a brighter future. It's actually in this terrifying state of limbo at the moment, waiting to see if the new Eden project is going to be built there or not. If it actually happens, it's going to be wonderful. If it doesn't, well... I just hope the place gets a break for once. It's so beautiful in so many ways and doesn't deserve to have been so neglected.
DK: It’s not my ‘favourite’ but Cumbernauld (#2) made a huge impact on me. It’s a new town in Scotland, between Glasgow and Edinburgh, built in the 50/60s. It was quite simply the most depressing place I’ve ever been; I was horrified. One of the entries for the town told a story about how someone tried to break into his house using a chainsaw, and everyone just wandered around like this was completely normal. The best one was Hastings.
AS: Sam, you've gone on to found Galley Beggars, a serious heavyweight in the world of literary fiction. I remember you once told me a story back in my first magazine venture in Coventry, Here Comes Everyone [still going, under new blood leadership!] about what finally prompted your exit out of London to begin a new life in Norwich (and go on to found the distinguished Galley Beggars Press!)
SJ: It was actually two stories! One was that there was a party down the road from our house where someone who was DJing got shot by a bullet that came through a wall (it had been aimed at someone else in the next room)... But the thing that finally made me and my girlfriend feel it was time to leave was the night we came home to find our front door taped off by the police, because someone had been shot in the shop next door.
AS: So, was Crap Towns more innocent times for ironic high-jinks?
SJ: It does feel like it came from more innocent times. Post Brexit, especially, a lot of the jokes have curdled. I also really hoped that Crap Towns might encourage improvements in places... That all feels hopelessly naive in the face of austerity and the years of Tory misrule and cruelty that followed.Now the books feel like warnings that no one heeded. That was quite a serious answer to a question about high jinks, wasn't it? I guess what I'm saying is that I was pretty serious about Crap Towns too. Even if I was also joking.
AS: I have a loose argument that the books should have forced people / councils to get their shit together, instead of arguing, 'actually, we have lovely churches' — was I reading too much into it?!
SJ: I would have agreed with you! That was always one of my hopes. But it was quite a forlorn hope, time has shown. I should have remembered the joke Peter Cook was supposed to have made when he opened the satire venue The Establishment Club; saying he was doing it because he was so aware of how successful satirists had been at bringing down bad governments in the past...(which is to say, satire never changes anything...)
DK: I do find it weird now that people get nostalgic for those years [the 2000s] claiming that we didn’t have that political uncertainty. But I guess that was the time that so many awful things were happening, the results of which only came out later. So it is odd that Crap Towns made such an impact during that period. Now, you forget about the amount of anger about The Iraq War and we’re here in the era of Trump. That’s why I pushed really hard for places like Winchester to be in the top ten of Crap Towns, because there were people there relatively oblivious to what was going on, because ‘I have a nice car, and I’m doing well, thank you very much’ kind of attitude. I do wonder if we will eventually end up in a better era.
AS: Post-Brexit – where are we now? I can't believe how crap(per) the UK is, and people still want to be here to find work [zero hours etc] and flock to London; a dream dying on its arse – any chance of getting the band back together – 'one last book' ?!
SJ: I've sometimes wondered. But I also worry about how depressing it would all be... I used to joke about boredom, alienation, despair and car parks... But that joke only worked if there was at least some hope of escaping from them.
DK: Crap Towns relied on a very British sense of humour. People do still talk about it here and there. People send me random photos where they find the book; it was weird to have done something small that resonated with people in some ways. The viral platform of the book has become the new model for popular books built upon public following and social media—the internet has shown how their are audiences for books that we could never have discovered in the past.
There was a pitch for Crap Towns USA, but it was pointed out to us “you will get shot” Americans just don’t have that tongue-in-cheek irony. And the main thing was that it was mostly written by people from those places, ‘it’s crap here, but we love it’ that spirit of celebrating uselessness.
[Editorial note. Dan disputes the money story behind Crap Towns along with Sam’s views on The Idler – but like so many creative endeavours of the past this remains an unresolved entry in the annals of British publishing history]
To read my full Crap Towns piece, check out The Fence magazine, and the many excellent articles featured in issue 23 – available in digital and print format (and year-long subscription) via their Shop.
Like most things on the internet, the Crap Towns wordpress site still exists and is well worth 5-50 minutes of your browsing time – see if your hated/beloved childhood home is featured!
https://craptowns.wordpress.com/gallery/
Sam Jordison, is a freelance writer and one half of the award-winning literary fiction publisher Galley Beggars Press.
https://mbalit.co.uk/client/sam-jordison
https://www.galleybeggar.co.uk
Dan Kieran is an author, speaker and stay-at-home dad. His most recent book Do Start won a business book award in 2024 and he teaches the entrepreneurial module of the Publishing MA at UCL
https://www.dankieran.com