As Wordsworth almost said, Earth hath not anything to show more foul. London has just won the coveted title, held for the last decade by Hull, of number one Crap Town in the UK.
When Crap Towns Returns is published next week, "back by unpopular demand", it will reveal that the capital has soared ahead of hotly fancied contenders including Rhyl, Pontefract, Thetford, Jaywick ("I could well have been in downtown Chernobyl") and even Chipping Norton, the pretty Cotswold town known for its local "set" of acquaintances including David Cameron, Alex James, Rebekah Brooks and Jeremy Clarkson.
As votes and bile poured in on the Crap Towns website, Chipping Norton looked well placed to take the title. But in the end it was nudged into third place by Bradford ("you name it, we're bad at it").
London was catapulted to victory by multiple nominations for its dismal suburbs, murder miles, high house prices, City bankers and a transport system that abandons late-night revellers to the mercy of rickshaws, minicabs or night buses, "a must for all fans of vomit, paranoid schizophrenics and R&B played through tinny mobile-phone speakers".
The city's trump card was undoubtedly its most affluent parish, Mayfair: "Its inhabitants are virtually without exception the biggest shower of needy, self-important bumwipes in London, with a self-pity complex and misplaced sense of entitlement to match. The architecture is either dull west London stucco or a twattish approach at some kind of meaningful landmark building. Either way it's rubbish. Most importantly the pubs are shit. And full of people who live in Mayfair."
Sam Jordison, co-founder and editor of Crap Towns, said: "People in London just have no idea what's happening in the rest of the country. They take a lot of what works in Britain, but you don't see much sign of them putting anything back. I think that's what lies behind the rage of a lot of the nominations.
"A lot of the entries for other places are what you might call affectionate hatred, as you might tease a member of the family but know you have to put up with them. That's not the case with London – the hatred is real."
The original Crap Towns was a publishing sensation in 2003, born of a moaning late-night conversation between Jordison and Dan Kieran, co-editor of the list and deputy editor of the Idler, about the respective awfulness of their home towns, Morecambe in Lancashire and Alresford in Hampshire. Jordison now lives in Norwich, which hasn't even managed to scrape into the top 50.
Although a lively debate continued on the website, the authors never intended to produce a sequel. But when it appeared to them that Britain had got even crapper, they felt the nation needed it.
"Back in 2003 when the first book of Crap Towns came out, boarded up high streets were a novelty. Youth unemployment was still sometimes regarded as a lifestyle choice instead of universal and compulsory. Riots were something that happened in history books – and not Ealing. Regeneration was a distinct possibility rather than a bitter joke. Money was flowing into previously crap towns like Hastings, Hull and Morecambe. Old buildings were being fixed up, new ones were being built – and amazing, they weren't all awful."
But as Jordison writes in his new introduction, "things did not, as we were promised, only get better".
Except for in Hull, it seems. Not only has the city been stripped of its title, it has dropped out of the top 50 completely. The 2003 nominations claimed the city "smelt of death", but Jordison says the pong has now gone – a mixed blessing because the closure of the offending chocolate factory cost many jobs.
The 10 crappest towns
1 London; 2 Bradford; 3 Chipping Norton; 4 Southampton; 5 York; 6 Gibraltar; 7 Coventry; 8 Nuneaton; 9 High Wycombe; 10 Stoke-on-Trent.