Tim Moore’s guide to unlovable Britain

Having a good time in the UK’s worst places is easier than you might think. Unless you’re thinking about any of the towns listed below, where travel writer Tim Moore struggled hardest to justify the title of his new book about unloved Britain, You Are Awful (But I Like You).

The town was wreathed in freezing fog when I went there, which didn’t do much for its looks, and may explain why I missed the restored and apparently 100% unhorrid quayside area. As it was, I found myself driving through a semi-demolished ghost town: street after rubbled, empty street of roofless, frontless back-to-backs and red-brick inter-war estates. The first and only gathering of townspeople I encountered was a crowd of females, old and young, piling purposefully aboard two coaches parked outside a civic centre. It looked for all the world like the evacuation of the womenfolk, first phase of full withdrawal from a town deemed unfit for purpose.

When at last I did find some men, they were standing in the road taking turns to belt each other with maces made out of baseball bats, cricket balls and gaffer tape.

Slough is like a what-not-to-do showcase of everything that made post-war British towns so very hard to love. Giant concrete cereal boxes stacked around stagnant, stinking rivers of gyratory traffic, the casting down of the pedestrian into a forlorn and sinister netherworld of wind-tunnel underpasses. And the default tendency to offset these massive wrongs of old with ever more massive superstores: the Pentagon-sized Tesco rearing up behind the bus station once ranked as the biggest in Europe. Now, just seven years later, it isn’t even the biggest in Berkshire.

All that said, I was rather sad to learn that a few weeks after my visit, the monolithic and almost thrillingly hideous Brunel bus station – star of The Office’s title sequence – was knocked down to make way for a flimsy and insipid metal-roofed wave of a structure, which in the architects’ sketches recalls a pair of Bacofoil flares hanging out to dry on a windy day. I think we can be certain that this will become a dated embarrassment even more quickly than its predecessor, but at least when that time comes it will be a lot less bother to knock down.