Anal sphincter muscle of the cultural topology of Britain.

Having spent some horrible time in a wayward town on the east coast of this declining refuge from the empirical epoch of Britain called Boston I found a web site called CRAP TOWNS RETURNS and had to leave a deposit on their blog.

Having browsed their crap towns web site I soon realised that it was also a crap website about towns.  It's not entirely crap but it is not so easy to navigate and many of the pictures fail to load.  One of my favourite entries was for Newark.  Someone called "Chris D" had posted:

“Newark” is an anagram of “wanker”.  There is so much more that I don’t even need to write.

Since I had spent a while composing the deposit, and have no idea if it will ever be read, I thought I could also deposit a copy here.  This is my contribution to CRAP TOWNS:

Boston was the fattest town in the UK in 2006 with about a third of the adult population clinically obese;  Conveniently they don't have any figures beyond that date.  (Why not?)  Boston now has the densest immigrant population in the UK with over 10% of the 64,600 population from "new" EU countries such as Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Romania.  West street is now colloquially called East Street and the town is often referred to as Bostonia in Lincolngrad by disgruntled locals.  The central government have never addressed their legal responsibility to fund the level of immigration experienced by the town, leaving it collapsing under the pressure and unable to accommodate the changing demographics. 

Boston has not been a good town to inhabit for hundreds of years, being cut off from any progress in the rest of the country by wetlands which were only inhabitable for half of the year.  Major transport routes were developed up and down the country on the west coast helping the western ports, towns and industries.  But the east coast got left behind economically.  The Humber Bridge was part of a failed attempt to improve transport on the east coast but other infrastructure was never developed.  Boston has been isolated physically, culturally, industrially and economically for hundreds of years.  Some have mistakenly romanticised Boston as 'sleepy' but somnambulistic or zombified would describe it better. 

The liberating 1960's seemed to miss the isolated fenland town and it maintained it's feudal mentality with the few rich landowners bestowing poverty on the peasants.  The tragedy being that too many of the peasants kowtow to the landowners thereby continuing the legacy.  Boston is a cruelly hierarchical town and is one of the lowest points in the cultural topology of the UK.  Sure it has 'potential' but until something is done to realise that potential it remains perhaps the worst place to live in Britain.  There are places beginning with 'B' like Bradford and Banbury that may be the proverbial armpit towns of Britain but Boston is a certain orifice somewhat lower down the metaphorical body of Britain.

Thank you to Paul King for his photo of a tractor and Boston Stump circa 2011, and to J M W Turner for his painting of Boston Stump circa 1833.