Banbury. Surely the home of Chavdom. I lived in West London (Kew) for 20 years and moved here in 2001 – I don’t think I’ve quite got over the culture shock even now. It all starts to go wrong at the railway station where a bunch of ****** lovely Irish travelling folk have set up their caravans nearby sending their kids to allegedly vandalise cars in the car park, abusing passengers leaving and arriving at the station (for no obvious reason) and generally throw copious amounts of rubbish into the river – what a lovely sight to welcome you to the town!
As you tread carefully over the bizarre new road system into the main town centre you are met with those giants of **** High Street Shopping, McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Ca$h Converters, Argos, TK-Maxx, NewLook and Poundstretcher. Oddly there is a Laura Ashley shop near the Castle Quay shopping centre (**** Heaven if its raining), but this is a one-off.
All the ******* pubs offer “doubles for £2.00” to discourage binge drinking (Banbury is a no-go area for non-***** on a Friday and Saturday night), and there are plenty of extremely dodgy-looking shops offering two tattoos for the price of one and a free spoiler with every £1 spent at Baseball Caps-R-Us. Outside one particular tattoo shop sits the car of “Mr Banbury” as I call him – blue lights under the car itself and on the wipers, massive (massif?) spoiler, thumping bass, darkened windows, three aerials, extra large dodgy-sounding exhaust pipe, and customised alloy wheels about 8 foot thick…there are many (hundreds of) pretenders to “Mr Banbury’s” throne but none come close…..
We don’t seem to have a Primark but it can’t be long before Laura Ashley shuts its doors.
