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Extracts from www.craptowns.comEveryone you meet who knows you come from Lancaster says the same thing. Oh, historical town, university, close to the Lake District, marvellous, blah blah blah. It's not, it's crap. Lancaster has slowly drowned its historical legacy under a succession of dismal concrete retailing ventures and has compounded this disaster with the traffic planning of a three year old's train set. You could be brutal to the people and point out the harsh dimwitted accent with its short vowels and lots of grunts, which has none of the purring warmth of south Lancastrians, or the rustic character of Cumbrians. It isn't pretty. But Lancaster's real problem is one of schizophrenia: it simply doesn't know whether to completely give up and become an utterly awful rough arsed Lancashire town like, say, Burnley; or to cling to the last vestiges of civic pride and pretend to be on the same heritage map as York and Chester. Attempts at introducing arts, music, theatre and a modern restaurant culture for its growing colony of middle class types working at the university, and the burgeoning student population, look more forlorn and desperate by the day. Culture of this kind is utterly wasted on Lancaster as the majority of the populace are fantastically well catered for by more and more yob pubs, whose very presence fuels the bloated heads of the locals and encourages the popular pastime of 'student bashing' amongst the natives. At weekends hoards of scum pour down into the city centre on weekend nights from the ring of bleak council estates which circle the centre and indiscriminately extend student status to anyone that doesn't wear the cheap sportswear and cheaper gold' uniform of the fat-necked and gormless everywhere. Michael Taylor STUDENTS NOT BASHED I agree, it IS shit, but I'm a student there and
there hasn't been any student bashing at all that I've seen, and the only fight
I've been in has been with another group of students. STUDENTS BASHED A few years ago, there was, (there still is), a terrifying pub in Lancaster town centre called The Blue Anchor. Famously, the Student Union of Lancaster University included it on an itinerary of a pub crawl designed to introduce freshers to the town. The young innocents were given clipboards and a tick list and they were split into couples, so that there weren't huge crushes at the various bars. They went into the Anchor in pairs, and left in pieces, until word finally got round and the whole thing was called off. A friend of mine once saw someone being run over, because as the driver shouted over the screaming rubber he was a "fuckin' styowdant". One of my teachers at the excellent local grammar school was also attacked for looking like a student, but he was the British champion in Tae Kwondo. Maybe that's why Ric P feels safe now. He shouldn't count his chickens too early though - or go anywhere near the Marsh estate. Sam J |