Crap Towns

Crap Towns: The 50 Worst Places to Live in the UK, Crap Towns II: The Nation Decides, and Crap Towns Returns: Back by Unpopular Demand, are a series of books edited by Sam Jordison and Dan Kieran, in association with UK quarterly The Idler; in which towns in the United Kingdom were nominated by visitors to The Idler website for their "crapness", with the results being published in The Idler and in the books. A sister publication, Crap Jobs, was created by similar means, and Crap Holidays was published in October 2006. In June 2012, the editors announced that they were gathering nominations for a third edition of Crap Towns (published 2013).

Controversy 
Publication of Crap Towns brought widespread criticism from residents, politicians and other notable figures from the towns listed.

Many notable figures were quick to defend their respective towns. These included a number of MPs, such as Michael Howard, who represented Hythe in Kent, which appeared at number four in the 2003 edition. Howard said that Hythe was "the jewel of Kent."

Some thought the selection process and/or subsequent portrayals to be inherently biased, "random", subjective, inconsistent and/or unscientific. The editors of the book wrote to "local worthies" in each of the nominated towns to gain their responses and views. Local newspapers were quick to defend their towns, such as the Stockport Express in 2006.

Conversely, some former residents have tended to agree with the assessments, such as Sarfraz Manzoor, writing about Luton in The Guardian (2006). However, Manzoor also concluded that there was "of course, an unmistakable air of snobbery around the people behind such a book; the stench of rich kids having fun at the expense of those less able to afford to be professionally idle" and added that "rather than sneering at towns such as Luton, we should be applauding the contribution that crap towns have made to all our lives."

Survey results 

Readers voted for the top 50 crap towns in the UK. The top ten by reader votes in descending order of "crapness" (with 1 being the worst) were:

Demise
No more books have been published since and the official Wordpress website has not been updated or edited since it's 2013 publication came out. 

The Mirror newspaper held a reader poll in 2017 on the topic of naming 'crap towns' 

A rival 'crap town' naming website was launched by °www.ilivehere.co.uk° in 2019 and it published it results for England in both 2019 and 2023 on one of it's it's web-pages.  It has been noted to be less arbitrary and subjective (ie: it criticises things like brutalise architecture, not whether Jeremy Clarkson wants to live there or not, and so on) and appearing more plausible in it's results.

References

External links 
Idler Website – 'Crap' section
BBC News — "UK's 'worst 50' towns revealed" — with list of the ten worst
BBC News — "Luton voted Britain's worst town" — with list of the ten worst in Crap Towns II
Crap Towns Returns – new nominations in 2012.
Official site.
BBC News – "UK's 'worst 50' towns revealed" – with list of the ten worst

2003 non-fiction books
Travel books
2004 non-fiction books
2013 non-fiction books
Books about the United Kingdom