It’s true. Whilst it’s technically in Chesire, it comes under the jurisdiction of “Halton Borough Council”, or somesuch. It spoils the nice, clean, upper-middle-class money-friendly feel that the rest of Cheshire so revels in. Frankly, I can’t blame Cheshire too much for not wanting it; whilst it claims to be an old Victorian market town, the truth is that there are only about three actual Victorian buildings left in the place (one of which is, in fact, our old office) and those are falling apart and suffering from a severe case of pigeon infestation (true story: before I joined the company, the ceiling of the top floor gave way one night. Everyone came in the following morning to find a room full of pigeons – and their associated excrement – that had been residing in the loft for the last 6 months). Most of Runcorn was built towards the end of the New Town era. You probably have a fairly good idea of what that means, therefore: stacks of council estates, a horribly misplaced shopping centre thing and an excitingly “modern” road layout – including roads only for buses (the idea being that you can get anywhere in Runcorn on public transport – which is patently untrue) and an expressway system which makes Spaghetti Junction look like a one-way street. We once sent someone 20-odd miles around the outskirts of the town rather than try and give them directions as to how to drive through it. True story.

Daily Mail Runcorn edition

Runcorn got itself a small portion of fame courtesy of the BBC comedy series, Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, which purported to be set in the town. This was patently untrue. No-one ever stole a car, wore their shellsuit tucked into their socks, got pregnant at 14, had a boyfriend called “Darren” or “Tyrone”, or hung around with a group of identical clones on the highstreet, furtively smoking their stolen fags whilst bunking off school. Sure, they used a few shots of the Bridge and the High Street and that, but the fact is, you couldn’t actually make a programme with characters you remotely cared about if you wanted to set it in Runcorn, because you’d basically have to have a bunch of shellsuit wearing pikey dolescum who spend all day on the sofa whilst watching Sky One and eating Pringles.

On the plus side, however, there’s a good chippy in the town centre and it’s handy for the M56, which is useful if you want to, say, get away from the place in a hurry.

Oh, and an accident at the chemical plant a few years back rendered a large portion of the west side of the town uninhabitable. It’s a nice town, really.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 5th, 2003 at 5:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.