Town squirms at ugly description

By Steve Cunningham

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THE TOWN of Walsall has reacted with fury after being described as like 'Ceaucescu's Romania with fast food outlets.'

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The US magazine New Criterion says the Black Country spot was one of the 'most depressing areas of urban devastation' in the world.

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Psychiatrist Dr Anthony Daniels, writing under the pseudonym Theodore Dalrymple, claims: 'It is possible that there are uglier towns in the world than Walsall, but if so I do not know them.

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'While Walsall undoubtedly exists, it is difficult to know where precisely it begins and ends, because it is in the middle of one of the largest and most depressing contiguous areas of urban devastation in the world.'

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The feature, entitled Crudity Beyond Belief, was even rude about Walsall's pride, the award-winning �21 million New Art Gallery, saying it resembled a post-modernist grain silo.

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'There is nowhere in the world where it is possible to travel such long distances without seeing anything grateful to the eye,' Daniels wrote.

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'To the hideousness of 19th-Century industrialisation is added the desolation of 20th-Century obsolescence. The Black Country looks like Ceaucescu's Romania with fast food outlets.

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'One veers between thinking oneself in a fascist foreign ministry and a sauna of gigantic proportions.'

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Walsall Council leader Mike Bird replied angrily: ''Walsall is a town which is working hard to pull itself up by its bootstraps and the gallery has received international acclaim.'

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But this is no isolated attack. Walsall hit the headlines last year when resident George Roper launched an Ugly-Walsall website, which features photographs of boarded-up buildings, scenes of urban decay and other eyesores.

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There's no doubt that Walsall is not Britain's most picturesque spot. But is all this criticism justified There are surely plenty of nastier new towns in other parts of the country and the world.�

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Take these examples:

• Sheffield: George Orwell, in The Road to Wigan Pier, said: 'Sheffield, I suppose, could justly claim to be called the ugliest town in the Old World.� It has a population of half a million and it contains fewer decent buildings than the average East Anglican village of five hundred. And the stench! If at rare moments you stop smelling sulphur it is because you have begun smelling gas. Even the shallow river that runs through the town is usually bright yellow with some chemical or other.'

• Nearby Rotherham was once described by television presenter Jeremy Clarkson as a 'chip-eating, booze-swilling scrapheap.'

• In a BBC survey, the Northern Ireland towns of Larne, Millisle, Portrush and Donaghadee got the thumbs-down.

• And in the USA, Irwindale, 26 miles east of Los Angeles, was crowned MacTown by McDonald's in 1998 for the dubious distinction of eating more than twice as many Big Macs per capita than any other city in America. This Californian suburb has been described as a 9.5-square-mile moonscape of open-face gravel pits and industrial waste.< xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

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