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 homogenised high streets. Steel's bespoke observations
on the small, sometimes forgotten, towns of Britain go 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
peculiarly ingrained sense of pride, no matter which village, town
or city, to give a refreshing take on Britain, its people and its
places.
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