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I couldn’t tell you which smelt stronger outside the shopping centre lavatories, male urine or weed. I’d probably rather pee outside the loos. And some people had done exactly that.
This was my first impression upon arriving in a former market town I had not visited for a couple of decades.
I won’t name and shame this town. Apart from not wanting to insult those readers who may be residents, the sad fact is it could be one of many towns.
If you call to mind an English market town you probably imagine a long and wide street, flanked by picture perfect period buildings, accompanied by a couple of pretty churches, a manor house, perhaps a former Bishop’s palace, almshouses, geranium-bedecked pubs, a park and a bowling green. Those architectural remnants look faintly ridiculous here, unloved mausolea in a world which has no use for them anymore. The Victorian facades of the old shopping parade jut like grim gravestones between characterless lego buildings. Even John Betjeman — the British Poet Laureate who loved Victorian architecture — would call for ‘friendly bombs’ if he could see the state of this place.