This is Warren Draper’s second instalment of his six-part series on his vision of what a utopian city in Britain might look like. Here Warren dissects the anatomy of what makes a Crap Town and how we can avoid this. 

“Nuking Russia might not be a bad idea as far as the bleedin’ world is concerned. They’ve plunged a lot of people into miserable lives. You’ve only got to be in East Germany to see it. It’s a horrible way to live. It’s like Doncaster.”

Mark E. Smith.

I FIND IT HARD to disagree with the above quote from that legend of The Fall, Mark E. Smith. On winter-grey Sunday mornings I like to climb to the top of the Furniture Factors building – a high point in a remarkably low town – and listen to Arcade Fire’s Surf City Eastern Bloc whilst drinking in Doncaster’s flat – in both topography and tone – Soviet-style skyline. Surf City Eastern Bloc should be made into a film. A biopic representing the lives of a generation threatened by every form of modern malignant authority known to man; totalitarian communism, corporate capitalism, state socialism, the birth pangs of debt-based neoliberalism, we had the lot, all topped off with a terrifying nuclear umbrella. There’s a line from the song which goes “The Eighties ain’t been kind to anyone.” And they certainly weren’t kind to Doncaster.

Mid-Eighties, while Frankie went to Hollywood and Mad Max went way beyond the Thunderdome, the police and the armed forces marched through the streets of Doncaster’s many mining towns while the BBC talked endlessly of the ‘violence of the miners’ and the ‘slow drift back to work’. It was a lie of course. A lie to be lamented by the same media machine a decade later in salt-of-the-earth dramas like Brassed Off. But by then it was too late. The industry for which the mining towns were built for was dead, and in most cases there was nothing to replace it. Never mind the ‘Credit Crunch’, Doncaster has been in recession for 30 years. But although poverty certainly makes the situation worse, it isn’t the root cause of our town’s crapness. As with Mr Smith’s misery-inducing USSR the problem is far more systematic.

The bureaucratic systems of local authority are perfect breeding grounds for the kind of apparatchiks expertly described in Robert Shea’s The Empire of the Rising Scum

“The apparatchik’s aim in life is to out-ass-kiss, outmanoeuvre, out-threaten, out-lie and ultimately out-fight his or her way to the top of the pyramid – any pyramid. Appropriately, Russia produced a superb specimen of homo apparatchikus – Josef Stalin.”

Indeed the Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council (DMBC) was run just like the Kremlin until the 2002 ‘Donnygate’ scandal saw 21 councillors convicted of fraud, with one councillor and one property developer being sent to prison. As we can see from the first edition of The Ilder book of Crap Towns (Boxtree, 2003), the initial winner of the Crap Town crown, Hull, was also a victim of systematic mismanagement:

“As recently as 1999, Hull was said to be the richest local authority in Britain after the sale of their share in the local telephone exchange, Kingston Communications, netted them £264million. They blew the lot … By 2003 the estimated annual overspend for Hull City Council was £8.4million: £2.5million more than they ‘expected’. Chris Jarvis, an inependent Hull council veteran says that the council have been ‘behaving like children in a sweet shop.’ The people from one of the poorest regions in the country are now paying for this profligacy with ever increasing council tax bills.”

Bureaucratic systems also mean that each council employee is slave to an incredibly narrow remit and even narrower legislation. This would not be so bad if the remits and legislation were there for the good of the town itself, but all too often a local council’s raison d’être is no longer the welfare of the town and its populace, but to ensure the status quo of the council and (now that we have become consumers rather than citizens) to provide a tempting environment for the business sector. The DMBC changed the roads and the entire public transport infrastructure to force people into the town’s Frenchgate shopping centre, which has had devastating effects on both the High Street and Doncaster’s much-loved Market. So modern planning not only favours the business sector over the social needs of a town’s human inhabitants, it favours larger businesses over the independent retailer – which ultimately leads to further localised economic decline (the much lamented death of the High Street).

The situation is exasperated by another highly systematic problem. Once an area is in decline local education and training opportunities are also reduced. So the ‘professionals’ employed by town councils, especially with regard to Town Planning, are often outsourced and rarely, if ever, have any direct or deep attachment to the town itself. Local needs, desires and sensibilities are routinely ignored by a professional class who are either unwilling or incapable of deviating from their one-size-fits-all form of Town Planning – which is why every town now looks exactly the same.

The systematic failings which have led to the proliferation of Crap Towns in the UK is expertly summarised in chapter 4 of another of Dan Kieran’s books, I Fought The Law (Bantam Press, 2007), which should be on the reading list of all British idlers. On a more positive note this book documents people who are taking a stand against injustice and inspires each of us to fight crapness in all its forms. In part 3 we will begin to look at the alternatives to one-size-fits-all Town Planning.

Warren Draper is a writer, artist and photographer based in Doncaster. He is co-founder of the Doncopolitan magazine (doncopolitan.com) and is a keen Anglarchist. He can be reached via Twitter at @TheLuddicLife

Photo above by @DrMuttley 

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