The five strangest places in the UK - apparently :p

[DanaC]

Saw this in the Guardian and it made me chuckle -

Are these the five strangest places in the UK?

Residents of the south London suburb of Sutton were probably surprised to find their quiet borough hitting the national news headlines this week, until they discovered that it was only because it has been described as “the most normal place in Britain”. The remark was made to a committee of MPs by Neil Couling, the services director at the Department for Work and Pensions, and an expert on mediocrity thanks to his role in implementing the universal credit scheme.

Couling explained to MPs that Sutton was the ideal place to trail a new benefits service because it had such an average population. “It’s the most normal place in Britain,” he said. “Its population is average for the United Kingdom as a whole.” He added: “It’s a wonderful place and I adore it,” before seemingly admitting that he had never actually been there.

On that evidential basis, I too am happy to declare my love for Sutton, and also to declare that it’s too boring to discuss any further. Not least because thinking about what makes the residents of Sutton so “normal” immediately gets me wondering about what an abnormal set of UK people might look like? Where can the DWP go to make an even bigger hash of their trial scheme than the one they’ll undoubtedly make in Sutton?

Here's the list -

http://www.theguardian.com/commentis...east-grinstead

Out of the five my favourites are these:

Cambridge:

Particularly during term time, Cambridge has a distinctly non-average population. This isn’t so much to do with the fact that they are academic high achievers, or that over the years the place has generated more Nobel prize winners than France, as the fact that these are people who call kitchens “gyp rooms”, have their stuff tidied by “bedders” and most of whom don medieval gowns every other week in order to have their food served to them in candlelit halls. This place is Hogwarts for wankers.

Glastonbury:

Reputed to have been the home to King Arthur, our Lord Jesus Christ and numerous Hedgewitches, Glastonbury is now the place to go if you want to be seduced by an aging hippy in a rainbow-coloured jumper. Here the local industry apparently consists of flogging crystals, catching dreams and explaining to people that they have been horribly treated in a past life. No doubt that any data gathered here would skew the DWP survey massively – although possibly the strangest thing about Glastonbury is the way it warps reality. After a few hours in town, all the people smelling of patchouli and weed start to look the same and seem oddly conformist. It’s a place where being out there is entirely normal.

And

Newcastle (where my eldest niece is currently studying):

Not long ago, I met a tour operator who was visiting his sister in a Thai pub in Norwich. He’d had a couple of drinks and was boasting about his job – as well he might, since it consisted of travelling to the world’s finest cities and partying. He came from Bangkok, which he told me is no slouch when it comes to carousing – but he was absolutely certain that the craziest place he had been in more than 20 years of constant travel was Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He even had started taking groups of Thai tourists there just to marvel at the people pouring onto the quayside, legs and arms exposed to the biting winds of winter, no one wearing coats, everyone drinking more in a night than normal mortals would get through in a month. “These people,” he explained, “they are not like you and me.”

[Clodfobble]

[Cambridge] is Hogwarts for wankers.

The physicist Richard Feynman spent awhile there, and he described a lot of the weird cultural bits of the school in his memoir. It did, indeed, sound like Hogwarts for wankers.

[footfootfoot]

Massachusetts has a former governor with three towns named after him. Peabody, Marblehead, and Athol.