Places

I come from Des Moines, Iowa. Somebody had to.
The opening line to Bill Bryson’s first book

I’m out of here, I’m better than all of you.
Tracey Emin on her home town of Margate

You gotta live somewhere.
Jimmy Brogan, a suggested motto for Cleveland, USA

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough
It isn’t fit for humans now.
… Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.
John Betjeman, Continual Dew, ‘Slough’

I see you come from Slough. You can go back there. It is a terrible place.
Mr Justice Melford Stevenson, to a prisoner acquitted of rape

Erith isn’t twinned with anywhere, but it does have a suicide pact with Dagenham.
Linda Smith

In 1956 the population of Los Angeles was 2,243,901. By 1970 it had risen to 2,811,801, 1,650,917 of whom are currently up for a series.
Fran Lebowitz on Los Angeles

The difference between yoghurt and Los Angeles is that yoghurt has a living culture.
Sean Penn

She’s blended right in – not necessarily a compliment around here.
A member of the public after seeing Gwyneth Paltrow in London’s Kilburn High Road

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.
Bill Vaughan

Can pigs grow wings and fly, unwonton birds?
Can the salt sea grow black with grazing herds?
Can the lean thistle blossom into figs?
Or Oxford aught produce save fools and prigs?
Geoffrey Howard on Oxford

Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
Matthew Arnold on Oxford

So this is Winnipeg. I can tell it’s not Paris.
Bob Edwards on Winnipeg

From 20,000 feet in the air, on the way to Paris.
Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, asked the best way to see Darwin, Northern Territory

One has no great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.
Jane Austen, Emma

When a man is tired of Birmingham he is entirely right.
Hannah Betts

Getting drunk is the quickest way out of it.
Anonymous High Court Judge on Manchester

Manchester is, in the main, dull and workmanlike, the majority of its people live between the workshop, the racing columns of the newspapers, the organized banality of the music hall and the mean street.
D.L. Kelleher, The Glamour of Manchester, 1920

He chose to live in Manchester, a wholly incomprehensible choice for a free man to make.
Mr Justice Melford Stevenson, of a man in a divorce case

Not such a nice place.
Queen Elizabeth II on Manchester, during a visit to St Petersburg, 1994

The best thing that comes out of Yorkshire is the road to Lancashire.
Dame Thora Hird

Never ask a man if he comes from Yorkshire. If he does, he will tell you without asking. If he does not, why humiliate him?
Sydney Smith

They see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it. Part of this flawed psychological state is that they cannot accept that they might have made any contribution to their misfortunes, but seek rather to blame someone else for it, thereby deepening their sense of shared tribal grievance against the rest of society.
Editorial in the Spectator. The editor, Boris Johnson, took responsibility. It was alleged that the journalist Simon Heffer was involved in drafting the column.

Here we are, in one of the most depressed towns in Southern England, a place that is arguably too full of drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs.
Boris Johnson on Portsmouth

An inverted pyramid of piffle.
Boris Johnson on allegations against himself

A small nodule of erupted spleen at the eastern edge of England.
Camilla Long on Thanet

They will steal the very teeth of your mouth as you walk the streets. I know it from experience.
Judge William Arabin on the people of Uxbridge

New York … That unnatural city where everyone is an exile, none more so than the American.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Any time three New Yorkers get into a cab without an argument, a bank has just been robbed.
Phyllis Diller

I am faced with a typically New York problem, which is how to bring my mediocrity before the public.
Kurt Vonnegut

London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

I don’t know what London’s coming to – the higher the buildings, the lower the morals.
Noël Coward

Rome’s just a city like anywhere else. A vastly overrated city, I’d say. It trades on belief just as Stratford trades on Shakespeare.
Anthony Burgess, Inside Mr Enderby

The young Cambridge group, the group that stood for ‘freedom’ and flannel trousers and flannel shirts open at the neck, and a well-bred sort of emotional anarchy, and a whispering, murmuring sort of voice, and an ultra-sensitive sort of manner.
D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

You will hear more good things on the outside of a stagecoach from London to Oxford than if you were to pass a twelve-month with the undergraduates, or heads of colleges, of that famous university.
William Hazlitt, The Ignorance of the Learned

Oxford is on the whole more attractive than Cambridge to the ordinary visitor; and the traveller is therefore recommended to visit Cambridge first, or to omit it altogether if he cannot visit both.
Baedeker’s Great Britain

Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.
Elizabeth Drew

Bugger Bognor.
George V, alleged last words when told by his doctor that he would soon be well enough to visit Bognor Regis; also claimed as the king’s response to the proposal to rename the town Bognor Regis in honour of its recuperative effect on His Majesty

Brighton looks like a town which is helping police with their enquiries.
Keith Waterhouse, in the Evening Standard

Very flat, Norfolk.
Noël Coward, Private Lives

Roast beef in human form.
Horace Walpole on the inhabitants of Norfolk

Shake a bridle over a Yorkshireman’s grave and he will rise and steal a horse.
Lancashire saying

California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
Joan Didion

The continental United States slopes gently from east to west, with the result that everything with a screw loose rolls into California.
John Naughton

In Marseilles they make half the toilet soap we consume in America, but the Marseillaise only have a vague theoretical idea of its use, which they have obtained from books of travel.
Mark Twain

If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell.
General Philip Sheridan