Nick Nolte - Waldemar Januszczak TV - Traditional Shanty - Gore Vidal - Boardwalk Empire TV - The Captive City 1952 - American Graffiti 1973 - Sweet Smell of Success 1957 - Hugh Noon 1952 - Yellow Sky 1948 - The Specials - The Jam - Ewan MacColl - Lenny Bruce - George Orwell - D H Lawrence - Alan Jackson - George Burns - Hunter S Thompson - The League of Gentlemen TV - Michael Collins TV - A Lawless Street 1955 - Ken Jones - Rio Bravo 1959 - Bob Dylan - Waiting for Guffman 1996 - Our World: Europe’s Greenest Town TV - Horizon: Toxic Town: The Corby Poisonings TV - Tonight TV - esias -
Living in a small town one of the keys to survival was your imagination. Nick Nolte
This idea that people in small towns have small minds, that small towns hold you back, restrict you, has become one of our cultural certainties. Waldemar Januszczak, Big Sky, Big Dreams, Big Art e3: Made in the USA, BBC 2018
There is a tavern in the town,
And there my dear love sits him down. Traditional shanty
I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small American town; they may be the backbone of the nation, but they are also the backbone of ignorance, bigotry, and boredom, all in vast quantities. Gore Vidal, Death Before Bedtime
How dirty is this town, Nuck? Boardwalk Empire s2e2: Ourselves Alone, reporter to Nucky, HBO 2011
Kennington wasn’t just a town, it was our town. The Captive City 1952 starring John Forsythe & Victor Sutherland & Joan Camden & Harold J Kennedy & Marjorie Crossland & Ray Teal & Martin Milner & Ian Wolfe et al, director Robert Wise, commentary
How would you like to bust this town wide open? ibid. dude in library
You don’t know this town, not the way I do. ibid. widow to hero
We’re finally getting out of this turkey town and now you want to crawl back into your cell, right? American Graffiti 1973 starring Richard Dreyfuss & Ron Howard & Harrison Ford & Paul Le Mat & Charles Martin Smith & Candy Clark & Wolfman Jack & Bo Hopkins & Kathleen Quinlan et al, director George Lucas, Howard
I like Larry but I can’t deny he sweats a little. I love this dirty town. Sweet Smell of Success 1957 starring Burt Lancaster & Tony Curtis & Susan Harrison & Martin Milner & Sam Levene & Chico Hamilton & Emile Meyer & Barbara Nichols et al, director Alexander Mackendrick, Curtis
They’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight. High Noon 1952 starring Grace Kelly & Gary Cooper & Lee Van Cleef & Thomas Mitchell & Lloyd Bridges & Katy Jurado & Otto Kruger & Lon Chaney & Ian McDonald & Sheb Wooley & Robert Wilke et al, director Fred Zinnemann, bloke in bar to Ben
Yellow Sky Fastest Growing Town In The Territory. Yellow Sky 1948 starring Gregory Peck & Anne Baxter & Richard Widmark & Robert Arthur & Harry Morgan & John Russell & Charles Kemper et al, director William A Wellman, sign
This town, is coming like a ghost town
All the clubs have been closed down
This place, is coming like a ghost town
Bands won’t play no more
Too much fighting on the dance floor … The Specials, Ghost Town
Rows and rows of disused milk floats
Stand dying in the dairy yard
And a hundred lonely housewives
Clutch empty milk bottles to their hearts
Hanging out their old love letters on the line to dry
It's enough to make you stop believing
When tears come fast and furious
In a town called Malice. The Jam, A Town Called Malice second verse
I met my love,
By the gas works wall.
Dreamed a dream,
By the old canal.
I kissed my girl,
By the factory wall.
Dirty old town,
Dirty old town … Ewan MacColl, first verse and chorus
I hate small towns because once you’ve seen the cannon in the park there’s nothing else to do. Lenny Bruce
The crowds in the big towns, with their mild, knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar boxes. George Orwell
As you walk through the industrial towns you lose yourself in labyrinths of little brick houses blackened by smoke, festering in planless chaos round miry alleys and little cindered yards where there are stinking dust-bins and lines of grimy washing and half-ruinous WCs. The interiors of these houses are always very much the same though the number of rooms varies between two and five. All have an almost exactly similar living-room, ten or fifteen feet square, with an open kitchen range; in the larger ones there is a scullery as well, in the smaller ones the sink and copper are in the living-room … Not a single one has hot water laid on … Great numbers of them are by any ordinary standard not fit for human habitation. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
In a town like Wigan, for instance, there are over two thousand houses standing which have been condemned for years, and whole sections of the town would be condemned en bloc if there were any hope of other houses being built to replace them. ibid.
One thing that always strikes me as mysterious is that so many of the northern towns see fit to build themselves immense and luxurious public buildings at the same time as they are in crying need of dwelling houses. ibid.
In a Corporation estate there is an uncomfortable, almost prison-like atmosphere, and the people who live there are perfectly well aware of it. ibid.
I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt. There are some Corporation estates in which new tenants are systematically deloused before being allowed into their houses. ibid.
It is only when you get a little further north, to the pottery towns and beyond, that you begin to encounter the real ugliness of industrialism – an ugliness so frightful and so arresting that you are obliged, as it were, to come to terms with it. ibid.
A slag-heap is at best a hideous thing, because it is so planless and functionless. It is something just dumped on the earth, like the emptying of a giant’s dust-bin. On the outskirts of the mining towns there are frightful landscapes where your horizon is ringed completely round by jagged grey mountains, and underfoot is mud and ashes and overhead the steel cables where tubs of dirt travel slowly across miles of country. ibid.
I remember a winter afternoon in the dreadful environs of Wigan. All round was the lunar landscape of slag-heaps, and to the north, through the passes, as it were, between the mountains of slag, you could see the factory chimneys sending out their plumes of smoke … nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes, and foul water. ibid.
Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life. D H Lawrence
Growing up in Georgia, I used to think people up north or out west were so different. They’re really not. They’re just regular people who live in small towns. They grow up and try to raise families and have a job and go to church and play softball. It’s that way everywhere. Alan Jackson
I spent a year in that town, one Sunday. George Burns
It was the kind of town that made you feel like Humphrey Bogart: you came in on a bumpy little plane, and, for some mysterious reason, got a private room with balcony overlooking the town and the harbor; then you sat there and drank until something happened. Hunter S Thompson, The Rum Diary
Welcome to Royston Vasey You’ll Never Leave! The League of Gentlemen s1e1: Welcome to Royston Vasey, street sign, BBC 1999
Royston Vasey next stop. This is the end of the line. ibid. bloke on train
Are you local? ibid. Tubbs
Don’t touch the things. This is a local shop for local people. ibid.
What’s all this shouting? We’ll have no trouble here. ibid. Edward
He has a plan. He covets the precious things of the shop. ibid.
This is a decent town and a local shop. There is nothing for you here. ibid.
In this house we don’t masturbate. ibid. Host
Poofter, eh? ibid.