All posts tagged Darlington

Last month The Economist hit the headlines for publishing a distinctly unflattering portrait of several British towns including Wolverhampton, Hull, Hartlepool and Middlesbrough. As the stats - for unemployment in particular, but also educational standards, welfare cuts and numbers of empty retail units - made clear, the towns and cities in question are undeniably enduring tough times. But the emotive choice of title for the article (“Rustbelt Britain”) and such sentences as “In Hull, teenagers in baseball caps and tracksuits wander aimlessly” betrayed a sneering, superior attitude encountered most frequently in the pages of the Daily Mail. A graph showing…