Imagine a land of pigeon-fanciers, flat-caps, faggots (the pork variety) and mushy peas, long-closed coal mines and vanished heavy industry, where the locals speak in a strange dialect and with a peculiar accent. Imagine a place where the pubs still serve dark mild with their ready salted peanuts, and the locals have a sturdy, misplaced pride in the place of their birth.

But this isn’t Yorkshire or Tyneside, but the Blackcountry, a place where people don’t go to die, merely to disappear for good, where the streets are full of holes (and not just in the red light districts) and the weather is always shit. A place where no one really knows where it begins and where it ends (the “borders” of the Blackcountry are notoriously hard to define) and the only thing people around here do know is that we ay from Brum, and we hate brum, and we hate Brummies.

Imagine a place where the majority of folk are Labour voters but the main local evening newspaper is a Tory mouthpiece edited somewhere deep in the bowels of Tory central office. A place where the people are more defiantly English than anywhere else in England, but who the rest of England loves to take the piss out of. A land full of cloth cap cunt, to be blunt.

A place that ay Birmingham, but isn’t much else either.

Imagine a place called the Blackcountry, and pretend it doesn’t really exist.

Nominated by : Colin Murray’s Brain