On my way to Croydon, I stopped at a bookshop in Oxford. The title of a book caught my eye, while I queued to pay. “The Idler Book of Crap Towns”. I picked up the book, and flicked through. The page opened on Croydon. I skimmed through the statistics, and the following descriptive phrase caught my eye: “smells of piss and vaseline”. I carried on regardless, wondering to myself about the smell of vaseline.
No-one on the Idler website has chosen to defend Croydon, compared with a handful of people who leap to even London’s defence. In fact many people leap to put the boot in at this discussion of Croydon.