Our beloved author Tim Moore travelled the length and breadth of Britain checking out some our country’s most famously unappetising corners. But on his travels in his Austin Maestro he found that although many of these places were awful, he just couldn’t help but like them. The result is his new book, aptly named YOU ARE AWFUL (BUT I LIKE YOU). In its honour we have launched a competition on this very website asking people to nominate the place in Britain that might be despised by some but that they just can’t help but love. 

Due to pesky terms and conditions (harrumph) employees at Vintage Books can’t enter (You can win railway vouchers! That you can use to go anywhere in the UK!) and so we have put together our secretly loved places for you here in this blog…

Clara, publicity manager, can’t help but be fond of Dundee: Some may call Dundee ‘Scumdee’ but this city has so much more going for it than this unfortunate title or being the fourth-largest city in Scotland and the 28th most populous settlement in the UK. Lesser known facts include the following: Dundee has the only jute textile museum in the UK and it’s really good; Sensation Dundee is the only UK science centre based on the five senses (who’d have thought it?); Dundee is situated in a stunning geographical position (90% of the population of Scotland is only 90 minutes away, amazing stuff); the RSS Discovery, Scott’s Antarctic exploration vessel, was built and resides in the city and the 24 Hour Tesco stocks everything you could ever want under the sun, including cashmere. These facts alone clearly make Dundee officially ‘City of Discovery’ with a past history second to NONE in innovation and invention. You can also buy deep fried Mars Bars everywhere and we all know they taste wrong but good wrong.

Vicki Watson, our Marketing Executive, chooses Bracknell:

Despite the 3m building that no-one’s used since the early 90s

the graffitied underpass,

the McDonalds that is the only restaurant in town

 
And the fact that even the Met Office left! I do love it!
The friendliness of the people – the men in the market who can do ANYTHING you need to your iphone to make it work. 
The ice rink – how many post-war new towns have an ice rink and an ice hockey team? And let’s not forget South Hill Park

 
Classical music recitals, plays, art exhibitions and an awesome playground. And a ghost.

And finally – Swinley Crown Forest

You can hate the dirt and graffiti and the 3m building as much as you like – but when your town has all this beauty to its south – it’s still worth a visit :).

Steven Messer, editorial assistant, on Wolverhampton:
 
Out of darkness cometh light.
 
Wolverhampton’s city motto is decidedly apt. Yes, it is one of the dingiest places in Britain – the fifth worst city in the world, officially. And yes, it has emitted a few photons in its time – Enoch Powell, Eric Idle, Suzi Perry. Visitors would much prefer to travel through it than stop off; but those who survive its travails are proud of their hometown. Why is it so appalling and yet applauded so?
 
We must look beyond the light for a moment, and into the darkness, to the mysteries that lurk there. Who named the poorest, most dilapidated part of Bilston ‘ABCD’? Is Varsity one of the only bars in Britain still offering pound-a-pint tickets to Boozetown? Is it true a girl once pleasured herself on the Prince Albert memorial? No one knows. And, I suspect, no one cares: it would ruin the charm.
 
And so, like dusty moths, we’re drawn back to the intriguing light. The city hosts the UK’s first set of electronic traffic lights. It was also a long-running base for Chubb Locks. Soon, it will erect a bronze statue of a much-loved tramp to honour him after his death. Praises, yes, but worth mentioning in conversation? Probably not – these are futile facts.
 
Why do I like my hometown, and loathe it so? Probably because I can’t explain the place or its people. Perhaps that’s why they chose an axiom for the motto. Better to throw about some proverb than actually proclaim any true feelings for the place.

Our Marketing Director, Roger Bratchell, eulogises about Barry Island: Aaaaahhh… Barry Island. The most exotic, Mediterranean-sounding two words in the lexicon of a South Wales schoolboy in the 1970s. Barry sounded sort of like the Barrier Reef… and Island just conjures up, well, adventure, exploration, escape, sun, sand and you know the rest. So every few weeks throughout the mid-70’s we took the dusty old railcar down through the docks to the ‘resort’. Barry had everything: Butlins – you could break through the fence and go and mess around on the slot machines; a scrapyard full of rusting old steam engines, that you could clamber over and pretend to drive; there were fossils in the rocks; a beach, and… the blue sea. Well, I say blue. It was kind of browny-greeny blue. Not really very blue at all – but blueish in the memory. I remember sitting on the beach eating fish and chips and drinking beer. I remember people taking off rather too tight clothes and timidly exposing bits of flabby flesh. And I remember that browny-greeny, not-quite-bluey sea. I remember it particularly powerfully because, having eventually summoned the courage to dip into it, and got used to the cold, the crowds and the embarrassment of being semi-naked, as I ventured just above the waist line, with children all around me, and as I began to submerge my head in the water, I was confronted with what can only be described as a big fat Welsh turd. Yes, the one thing they hadn’t mentioned in the brochure, is that Barry Island was graced with a municipal sewage pipe, which took the outage of the good people of South Wales into the deep browny-greeny-bluey sea.

And for me, it has to be Blackpool. True, the pubs might have carpet on the walls, and it can be tricky to get hold of any form of vegetable beyond a potato, but somehow Blackpool is always full of life. From its pleasure beach (The Big One is a must for any thrillseeker) to its sandy beach (crowded even in winter), it is a big welcoming hug of madcap Britishness. 

What corner of Britain secretly holds the key to your heart? Enter our competition for a chance to win…

 by Chloe Johnson-Hill, Publicity Director.