My friend Adam has gleefully sent me a link to the Daily Blackshirt's article on Wolverhampton. It's a confused one. That particular newspaper doesn't like The North. It doesn't like The Poor and it doesn't like the Ethnically Other.
Nor, on the other hand, does it like The Young, The Cool, nor The Foreign.
So we have a conundrum. Lonely Planet, it claims, has announced that Wolverhampton is the 5th worst city in the world, behind Detroit, Seoul, Accra and Los Angeles. I say 'it claims', because I can't find any mention of this on the Lonely Planet website, and because the article is rather confused. It's tone implies a profound tension between its desire to bash poor, ethnically-diverse northern Wolverhampton, or to condemn the snobbery of the cosmopolitan Lonely Planet élite (wait until this revolting mag remembers that Lonely Planet is owned by the BBC, the only institution it hates more than black people or trades unionists).
So they've gone for the local outrage angle, and dredged up the deputy mayor to claim (predictably) that Wolverhampton is a tourist mecca.
It isn't. It's a small, poor place which has declined from filthy but lucrative engineering town to unnecessary outpost of Birmingham. It has its good points (a fine university, despite the best efforts of those who 'run' it, some decent architecture, excellent art gallery, good transport links to Stoke, Shropshire and Wales) and its bad points. It's no worse than a large number of other depressed towns, and certainly isn't one of the worst 5 cities in the world. My personal list would include the most polluted ones in China, Pyongyang, Mogadishu and Riyadh. I'm none to keen on Oswestry or Wrecsam either.
The lessons are: don't read the Daily Mail, and don't believe anything in the newspapers during the holiday period. There is no news.
6 comments:
"gleefully" he says, all I did was send a link, with no comment or gloating statement, without any contaminating words that might express any opinion whatsoever. And "gleefully" he says. Sheesh.
OK, I assumed it was gleeful because a) I live there and b) you don't!
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/california/travel-tips-and-articles/42/9782
The list is apparently based on suggestions from readers.
Thanks Lou - really well buried, so good detective work.
So they've decided it's the 5th worst city in the world based on one bloke's comment: they've no further information about the place.
Wolverhampton isn't a tourist city, but so what? It is rather snobbish to put it in this list.
Wonder what they have to say about Stoke.
I've been there and they've got a point... and, by the way, Wolverhampton isn't in the North, it's in the Midlands.
I live there! It's dull and ugly, but not up there with downtown Detroit. Yes, it is a Midlands town, (I'm from further North) but I see it as culturally Northern (poor, anti-metropolitan etc).
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