TRASHFUTURE - *UNLOCKED* Britainology 3: Understanding Home Counties Guys

Episode Date: March 5, 2021

In this unlocked content, Milo and Nate are on another Britainology, this time with Kent guy Hussein, to discuss the Home Counties and how the deeply cursed world of London suburbia has created an identity of Britishness that you've probably encountered, even if you didn't recognise it. Hope you enjoy! If you want more Britainology, you can find them on the Patreon -- and if you sign up at the $10 tier, you get a second Britainology each month: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture If you like the Britainology theme song, you can get the full thing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J77C9ODFflw We support the London Renters Union, which helps people defeat their slumlords and avoid eviction. If you want to support them as well, you can here: https://londonrentersunion.org/donate Here's a central location to donate to bail funds across the US to help people held under America's utterly inhumane system: https://bailproject.org/?form=donate *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS dot com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, trash future listeners. Please enjoy this unlocked episode of Britannology. And just FYI, there are a bunch more episodes of Britannology on the Patreon, and if you sign up for the $10 a month tier, you get a second Britannology each month, as well as our monthly Q&A episode. Thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoy. Hello, and welcome to Britannology. This is going to be episode three of Britannology, as we intrepidly explore the psychoses of

this septid aisle. I'm joined as ever by Nate Pathay. Hello, it's me in the studio with some freemium British vape juice, cycled in from Peckham to Whitechapel. No one's wearing a mask unless they're on a bus. Pubs are open. Everyone's going to die. I love this island.

Everyone's in the pubs because we're not a fucking slag. And this week's topic is one for which I had to get fellow Briton expert Hussain Kuzvarni on for, because we're going to be talking cursed suburbia. I love coming on the spinoff podcast of the podcast, but I'm on and also being introduced as a guest by my full name as if like I'm kind of an exotic online content writer. Hussain, we need perspective on the no-go zones of Briton suburbs that we're not allowed to go to because we're not Muslim. Oh yeah, that's true.

So obviously, we're joined by the supia tola Hussain Kuzvarni. Obviously like Hextable or fucking where, you know, Dartford, clearly that's a no-go zone. No white people live there. It's all Muslims. It's all Isis. It's basically Idlib. Yeah.

That's the way it is. So we need your opinion. Yeah. I mean, I've always seen like the suburbs outside of London as also being like a refuge for people who basically see it as a refuge for people who don't want to live in like the Islamized areas of Islington or Stratum or whatever the fuck they think is like next. So they go to like the suburbs where, you know, you can have a garden, you can have a pine, you know, you don't have to hear the like the call to prayer or anything, you

know, simple as, right? I'll never, I'll never go to London because it's full of fucking Muslims. The only time I ever go is once a year to have a pint in all bar one and a meal deal with a lot of bites. You know what? Seeing Mama Mia the musical too, which is my favorite. You know what? This is actually like, this is actually very accurate to a guy I went to school with who

came to visit once because he, he, so he lives in Northwest Kent as well. He lives in a place called Graves End. I don't know whether you've been there. I don't know. Very bougie. Nate probably hasn't. It is, it is a kind of bougie area, but it's also really grim. It's worse than it sounds.

What I know about Graves End is that when they wanted to create the fictional summer house estate for the series Top Boy, they filmed it on a shitty estate in Graves End. Oh, no way. Did they? Oh fuck. I mean, supposedly in Hackney that they live on is not actually. That's amazing. Okay.

I need to go. I need to go see one or whatever. Yeah. So he came. So he lives in Graves End and he was coming into London because he had like a job interview and I said, okay, let's go for lunch. Our office is in Whitechapel. So I was like, okay, come meet me in Whitechapel and he comes and he comes in and we were going

to go to like the Brick Lane Curry House and he's just kind of like, oh, there's not a lot of white people around here is there? And I was like, well, I mean, like, what do you say, like, what do you say to that? Like this is, this is like an area that has historically been Bangladeshi for ages. But you could kind of see that. A weird flex to go and meet your non-white friend in London and complain that there aren't enough white people. And I think you could kind of see like how uncomfortable he was in that place.

And like, you know, it was really just coming from this environment where like he's grown up in this very, very white area, but one that is like very hostile. So like they kind of, the area that they live in exists solely for the purpose that like they think that, you know, the old East End where, you know, my grandparents used to live and stuff, you know, it's been taken over now. It's been taken over now. It's like, no, like your granddad moved to Essex because like he wanted to buy some property there.

That's why you're in Essex right now. Not because like you've been pushed out by like mischievous Saracens from Bangladesh. If you go to the Iceland in Watney market, it is pretty heavily South Asian, but you'll periodically see a bunch of really old-ass Cockney white people, you know, with walkers or in wheelchairs. They love prawn rings. They've lived here forever and they live in the same social housing and they just never left.

I mean, somebody, I remember, I think it might have gone to the flat roof pub next to the Wimpy Burger. It might have been McDodd Versey who said this to me, I can't remember, but basically we were talking about some of the dumb shit people say about Tower Hamlets and the idea that like folks in the suburbs are convinced that it's the Cal fate and it's a no-go zone and so on and so forth. And the gentleman with whom I was speaking said, you know, statistically speaking, if you look at Tower Hamlets, it's actually equally, if not more white than South Asian.

There are some neighborhoods that are primarily South Asian. Tower Hamlets is massive. Yeah, but the borough itself is not. And so, you know, it's weird that, you know, Tower Hamlet, named Tower Hamlets has somehow become this like, synestarchy for... Yeah. ...Muslimization. Because when people talk about Tower Hamlets, what they're talking about really is Bethnal

Green and Whitechapel, but what they don't realize is that Tower Hamlets includes like Tower Hill fucking Whopping, which is white as hell, and like all these like outer areas which are... Oh, which is pretty black, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, like almost as far as Stratford is still... It becomes Neum at some point, but it's still Tower Hamlets and then it becomes much more Afro-Caribbean. A friend of mine, she married a British guy and she's lived here for like 12 years now.

She and her husband, they finally bought a place and they bought... It's in like some... You know the type that it could be in Notting Hill, it could be in... Well, it's correction. It could be in Brixton, it could be in Peckham, it could be anywhere. It's built by Notting Hill Genesis. It's like the same floor plan style of Newbill Flats. They bought a place on Fish Island, which is in Tower Hamlets, but it's basically in

Stratford. And so... Fish Island. Whenever I see their posts on Instagram, I'm like, what the fuck is Fish Island? And then I realize like it's something near pretty close to the Olympic Park. It's the first place of fish, a fucking British fish crawled out on a river and put on a England football shirt and said, simple as. I mean, to be honest with you, I can understand the...

I've had it happen to me one time, there was some guy who in his Twitter profile said that he was an ex-Marine and he was... I said something, it was something that got retweeted. Marine Bazz, the British version. It was an American guy and he was like, you know, Muslims don't integrate, it's just Islamization. What about Nogo Eris? How do you explain Whitechapel?

And he said this to me... How do you explain Whitechapel? I'll do that in Marine Todd voice. How do you explain Whitechapel? But you know, I was sitting in the studio in Whitechapel and I was just like, it's a neighborhood in London dude, like I'm there right now, I'm white, I'm Jewish. Going to the Chalamarka Bab House in Clayton. Yeah, you refuse to talk about the times you've been arrested just for having white

skin. So, you know, stop by Islamist because they're wondering why you haven't grown a gingerbread. I mean, I have to be fair, grown a huge unkempt beard. I definitely look like a teenage ISIS fighter. Why is it that Nate never says that he's English? There can be only one explanation. But that's the thing though, is that ISIS in Tower Hamlets believes in passing down the crimes of your family.

And so because my mom is English, I also have to be arrested and thrown in jail. That's right. That's just the way that it works. Exactly. I guess the point I was trying to make and bring that up is more that like I understand that level of crazy from insane right wing Americans who have seen nothing but just like nightmare Facebook, you know, radicalization memes. But when it's British people, white British people who live in the suburbs of, you know,

Surrey, Kent, Essex, et cetera, who probably have family links to these neighborhoods or these parts of the city, it's always so insane to me that they fall for the same shit. Like if anything, it's people who live 15 miles from here who were more disconnected from reality with regard to what these neighborhoods are like, and then, you know, you're like 4chan meme Lord who posts about, you know, Rotherham and Britain all the fucking time, but has like 10% more of an accurate understanding of what this these kinds of areas are like than suburban white English people. My theory is like two things.

My theory is first of like the suburban people who like live only like a train ride away from London, they're reading the same type of Facebook post. So like a lot of people in like Northwest Kent, you know, so the Dartford Graves Ends, Wilmington areas, they don't really go into like other areas of London that much. So most of them will probably like if they work city jobs and they mostly have jobs in central London, and they kind of like are commuters. So they'll kind of either commute from Victoria Station, or they'll commute from London Bridge or Charing Cross.

Like that's kind of your main routes into the Southeast and Northwest Kent. So there's not really like any excuse. They don't really have any kind of, you know, they're not really, you know, they're the ones who are going to like all bar ones and stuff. And for them, like London is kind of like the theme park London that we talk about on trash futures sometimes. So when they see like these other parts of London, I think my theory is like they expect that Whitechapel and stuff should have been that way.

Then they kind of like, oh, there's a big mosque there instead of like, you know, another big like glistening glass towel. There was going to be an outdoor ice rink where you could get an infused gin cocktail, which I like because I'm a fucking bloke. And I think a lot of it is also like, you know, especially among kind of people around like my age in their late 20s and early 30s and stuff, where they're facing the same problems as we are in terms of like not being able to buy like, or like even kind of rent cheaply in places closer into the sissy, but then they're kind of like reading all these

Facebook posts about how like, you know, all the Turkish people and all the Pakistani people who like, they see as interchangeable for some reason, for some weird reason, obviously the same culture. Yeah. So they're the ones who are like pushing up the prices by like, you know, taking all the houses and stuff. So like, you know, they're subject to all the same bullshit that like property developers are doing whatever everywhere else, but because there is that

Pakistanis are conspiring with their spiritual leader, Erdogan to take over my name and Harun Yahya. Um, you know, so like, I feel like there's a, there's a mixture of those things, but I think it's also like when you're a commuter and I feel like we can talk about this maybe in the episode, I feel like the commuter, the commuter like has a very different experience of London than say like, you who lives kind of in, you know, who lives in like, uh, the southeast end or like further into the southeast end, or basically like, if you have lived within London, like you have a very different experience of what that is.

But I would also point something out to, you know, and then we can start talking about that the, you're bona fide British suburbs. Um, is that living in Peckham, like it's not that long of a route, you know, by bike, or bus or whatever, for me to get to our beloved co-host, Alice's hometown of Bromley. And Bromley is absolutely leafy Tory suburb in a lot of ways. Yeah. It's also like unquantifiably bleak. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so Cynthia and I, when we went back, we've, since we've moved here, we've been back to the United States to visit once and when we went to see my parents last October, we flew out of, um, Stansted or correction, um, Gatwick airport. And so we could have taken the train, but we, our flight was early enough in the morning that we figured it was easier to just get a cab. So we, we drove from, you know, in the cab from, from Peckham to, to Gatwick, uh, which

is in Surrey, I don't know what the, Sussex, yeah, I don't know what the, what the town is. Um, it's like, it's, it's basically halfway between London and Brighton. Yeah. And, uh, and so the M23, if you're interested. And driving off on your trash future official road map of the United Kingdom and just going basically do South, maybe a little bit Southwest from Peckham to get to Gatwick. You go through these more and more suburban communities, you go through Croydon.

But it's, as you said, both obviously more spacious, wider, you know, way more detached houses. Some of them are really fancy, but it's also incredibly bleak and you have to remind yourself like you're within the M25 for most of this trip. You're within the sort of notional boundaries of what counts as greater London before you really hit like the hardcore home counties. And if you really look at some of these places, I don't have it like right in front of me, but some of the areas that are right on the periphery of the M25, like you look at these

and if you told me that this town was in, I don't know, endorse it, if you just gave me Google street view, I'd believe it. Yeah. Okay. So in that, in that case, by, by way of introduction, I've got a little primer I've prepared on the suburbs of this, of this great nation, right? So like, I think we're going to, we're going to basically, for the most part, apart from a short reading series at the end, we're going to limit ourselves to the home counties,

which are the counties surrounding London. So canonically, that's like Essex, Hartfordshire, Barkshire, Buckinghamshire, Kent, Surrey, Sussex, basically. I might be missing something, but those are basically the, and I think there are no more, there are no more canonical home counties than Kent and Essex, which are the places where Hussain and I grew up, right? So people talk a lot about what makes Britain the way it is, and they mention a lot of different things, but I think really what has been fundamental to the driving political force in

Britain over the last 20 years is the kind of people you find in the home counties. There's a certain type of guy that we're talking about who defines the home counties. And I think the best way to describe this person is working-class Range Rover owner, right? Like the guy, and this is not a guy who's broke and he's doing it on credit. This guy has money, but he's absolutely, it's fundamental to his identity that he asserts to you that he is working-class. Yeah, he's no nonsense Baz, but he owns a very successful plumbing business that employs like 14 people, owns a 1.5 million pound house that is somehow still pebble

dash, nevertheless, and drives and drives an ice white Range Rover with a number plate that says like legend or something like that. And bear in mind, his plumbing business pays him a salary of £8,600 a year, and he does not have any more reported income besides this. Yeah, the Range Rover was a gift from a friend of ours. So to understand this person, you need to understand a bit about the origin of the modern home counties. So again, as a very short potted summary, cast your minds back to World War II, some things happened Churchill, the original Antifa, we all remember it,

right? So after World War II, basically a lot of people in South and East London, primarily, had essentially been bombed out of the slums, the slums they lived in by our friends in the Luftwaffe. So the Labour government decided to build a shit ton of social housing in all of the counties around London, but especially in Essex and Kent, to the point where they even built a lot of entirely new towns, which are sort of like concrete. I mean, like a lot of shit is talked about how like, oh, you wouldn't want to live in the Soviet Union, go to a fucking new town that was built in the 1950s in Britain.

And it feels like fucking, I was about to say Khabarovsk, but actually Khabarovsk is quite nice. It feels like Nova Kuznetsk. The only place I've been in Britain that has gridded streets that are perfect grids with numbers like 1st Street, 2nd Street, 3rd Street, the way that you would in American city is Milton Keynes. Everyone's favourite town. So this includes the town where I grew up, which is called Harlow in Essex. And basically, yeah.

And then ultimately, over time, huge numbers of these people basically became like a property owning class because they went from like renting what we call council houses, but in America would be called like, I don't know, like. Well, council houses in America would be housing projects, but housing projects in America obviously have a very different connotation because of redlining and segregation and desegregation. Whereas in Britain, it's really important to remember that people up until the Tories started selling out, allowing people to basically buy condo units within housing

projects at absolute just unbelievably low prices and basically creating a huge class of landlords, something like 70% of British people lived in public housing effectively. That was the standard. It was my mom's whole family that lives in Norwich. They all did live in council estates and they weren't all tower blocks. A lot of them in the inner cities or the community towns were, but also elsewhere in the country, in the home counties even. Some of these were just like townhouse, row house neighborhoods.

They just were built and operated by the council. One thing I want to point out too is just a famous point of reference for American listeners, somebody whose life trajectory took this route and who his entire life had an absolute horror of English suburbs. David Bowie was born in Brixton, but in a house, his infancy house literally had a hole in the roof from a bomb. Like, and they had like four families living in a row house, his family moved to Bromley and that's where he grew up.

There you go. That explains the Alice called Well Kelly to Bowie pipeline. But yeah, so and then basically through like the late 70s, 80s and 90s, most of these people, all right, I hesitate to say most, but like huge proportions of these council houses were sold off to the people who live in them at cut rates. And now they're all mysteriously owned by landlords. And we won't comment on how that happened. And so in the home counties, you kind of have this group of people who are, they

are overwhelmingly white. They are essentially London people, but with like a generational gap, they're like a London diaspora, right? Like they've moved out. So they're still like, fuck in, cockney led you, you fucking what, son? But they're like, and so they have this kind of like folk memory of being like these working class cockneys who lived in hovels, but a huge number of them have become sort of basically like a monied property owning class, but who have this

kind of like authentic white working class aesthetic that, you know, the Labour Party is always trying to cultivate. If you're familiar with Staten Island or New Jersey suburbs, Guido's, who are like, yeah, yo, my fucking family's from Brooklyn, that kind of thing. Their families aren't from Brooklyn. Their families left Brooklyn by the absolute, the latest by the 70s. They grew up in suburbs either on Staten Island or elsewhere in New Jersey or Long Island, but there is this absolute sort of like people who live in homes that

are worth a fuckload that they got like hugely discounted prices and loans on. But they still purport themselves to be, hey, I'm not like these fucking yuppies who think they can fucking run this town, like that kind of thing. It's the same phenomenon. But in Britain, I feel like the notion of appealing to these people or having to sort of have them on your side is a much more pressing political and cultural issue because it's a smaller country with basically one big city as opposed to America, which is fucking huge.

And like, if you're not on the East Coast, none of that shit matters. And I think this plays into like a very important socioeconomic point, which I think is essentially what Hussain was alluding to earlier, which is there is now that there are now like two divides in class in Britain, because there's your kind of the old school system of British class. It fell along economic lines, but it was like primarily a cultural assertion, right? Like, you know, there was like a divide in like education aspirations, like the kind of like cultural things that you defined yourself by.

But now you have this kind of two tier thing where you have a lot of educated people who are effectively working class because they earn dog shit money. And you have a lot of people who are completely uneducated and have very like a quote unquote working class, you might say cultural tastes and so on, but who are definitely not working class because they're like millionaires who own plumbing businesses or whatever, which has reflected the way in which in Britain, particularly a lot of those jobs and trades and so on, which were traditionally considered working class have effectively become like kind of

putty bourgeois things, whereas a lot of the things which were traditionally considered middle class, like office work and like educated things of like sort of the wage stagnation has been so great that they have become more and more working class over time, but our perception of what is working class and what is middle class hasn't changed. I think there's like a similar trajectory to Dartford, but what I was very interesting because I hadn't really researched a lot of like Dartford's history before this, this, this here episode and I didn't realize that like

actually like the origins of there were like some radical roots of Dartford's history. So like it was one of like the, um, it was one of the central points of the early days of the peasants revolt. So what Tyler was like hanging around, uh, quite a lot, but he eventually like he and the other, he and the other like rebels eventually left not because they were sort of forced out, but because they couldn't, uh, garner enough support from people in Dartford. So you see some things don't change.

It should make it worthwhile. So we kind of like went further south. Like, so we kind of, we had more success in our graves end and they didn't doubt it. I hate it when I fail to convince as wheel rate to come alongside of my peasants revolt. I know my peasants revolt, which aims to shut down the Dartford crossing there by crippling the economy. What was interesting was like in the, so in the 20th century or like just

before the 20th century, um, Dartford was a like industrial hub. So it had like paper mills. It had like, like various factories. There was kind of, there was like a thriving working class. There was like a working class culture, um, various working class clubs. And as with many places in, uh, the UK during like the reign of factory. And what's interesting is also about Margaret Thatcher, when she was first running for parliament, I can't remember what year this is in.

Um, she actually ran for the dot. 79 was it? No, she, she became PM in 79. She, she would have been running for her first seats in parliament, probably in the late sixties. Uh, so she, she was running in Dartford and she didn't win and she didn't win largely because of like, again, like there was like a lot, there was like a big working class community in Dartford, which declined along with

many other like towns during her reign, um, because of deindustrialization. And Dartford is one of those places that has never really recovered since then. So it's gone through like various iterations where it's like had like a high street that's kind of, you know, and the high streets still exists. But when I was younger, high street had like your conventional stuff. So it had like a TK max and it had a subway and it had, you know, a couple of like money transfer places where you could, uh, you could, uh, pawn, pawn, pawn your, uh, wife's gold or something like that, right?

Which was a very popular place. Like, you know, I, uh, I, um, I used to see that whenever I used to go get my subway sandwich at lunch. Um, yeah. That was where I got all that wife gold. I went back very recently and like every third shop on that high street is a vape shop. So there are like Turkish restaurants, a KFC and McDonald's, the, the, the, the,

the, the money transfers, pawn store and vape stores. So the vape stores are like the thing that I like keeping this like local economy afloat. Um, it's funny to me because my great, great grandfather was, uh, in the royal army band at, uh, Woolwich arsenal and my great grandfather was born in Plumstead and where he was born, that street doesn't exist anymore. Cause it was blown up, you know, Aaron bombs, trying to hit the fucking army base, hit the street in the war.

And so they built a bunch of social housing there. Um, but as I understand it, my family then moved further out. So after the war, they left, uh, Plumstead and went to Croydon. Yeah. Um, and it's weird how if I look now, it took me a while finding, looking on old maps to figure out where the old station road was. Cause that was, and I've seen a photo on ancestry.com of like the house he was born in in 1900 and, uh, that house, that, that street doesn't exist anymore.

There is a station road, but it's just a different street now. And, um, God fucking hell, man, around the actual station, it's just really, really grim, like it's just scrap yards and like, like what you're describing. You know, I mean, I, I, I don't live too far away from that. So like I, I see them, I see, I see it a lot. And yes, it is. It's a pretty, uh, it's a pretty grim place along with all the other places that we were talking about.

Listen here in Dartford, you ate the Muslims, you love your wife, gold, and you love glowing fat cows, simple as, but that's the thing. Like, I feel like with one of the, like the through lines that connects all these places is the fact that like these high streets are basically being supported by vape stores run by like, um, stone, South Asian guys who are wide Mohammed. No, but the vape stores are run by like, wide Mohammed's right. Who are also like in the property business as well.

So this brings me onto my next point, which is like, okay, if you have this like very derelict town, why are houses here north of like 300, 400, 1000 pounds, right? Um, you know, so you, so you end up in, you end up in a situation where like this is a town that like is largely designed as like a transport hub. So in Dartford, you have the Dartford bridge, which will take you to, which will take you into the city. Um, you have like a train station where I'll take you into the city.

Um, you have like various grammar schools, which also kind of like have an effect on prices. So I don't know about Essex, but I know that in Dartford, um, house prices have kind of like been very, very high because you end up having, um, lots of kind of immigrant families or like upper middle class immigrant families who move into the area to kind of like get on the catchment to get in the catchment area to like get into, to get into the schools, right? Um, because of like the 11, because you can rig the 11 plus tests.

So the demand for these grammar schools, which for American listeners are basically like, if you had a private school, but the state paid for it. Um, and I went to one of these, there's state schools, but there's like, you have to take an exam to get in. So they're like sort of competitive placement. And they have like private school aesthetics as well, right? Um, so they kind of like add an appeal to like poor immigrant families who want to give their kids like a good education, as well as like very rich,

upper middle class white people who don't want to pay for their feet. Don't, don't want to pay to like send their kids to Dulwich College, right? Um, when there's also that whole thing where you get like, you get like the incredibly rich liberals who could afford a private school, but they send their kids to like, they, what they would rather do is spend the money, like for nagging the state system to get their kids into the best state school. So they can say like, we didn't send our children to a private school. We merely completely fucked the system.

Yeah. And then as a result, like you end up having kids who like, will still stay in like their kind of nice leafy area of like Kent. But then all of a sudden this family now has an, has an investment property. As we want to call it to like play with, right? So now not only like, uh, not only have they like increased their property portfolio, but they also know that this is like a stable real estate investment because so long as those schools are there and so long as those links to the city are there,

like those prices are going to stay high. So even though like the, the travel infrastructure within Dartford like fucking sucks in terms of like, you know, if you want to get from one part of the town to the other part of the town, we're paying like £5.50 one way on the Arriva bus. Regardless of how old you are, I think, I don't, I think they don't even have like the old pensioners discount anymore though, like maybe I'm wrong, but it's still like really expensive to like actually travel within the town. If you don't have a car, but like the, if you want to drive into the city, it

doesn't really take as long as it would. If you were like the same distance, but in, I don't know, like maybe in Essex, but in other like poorer areas, um, it would take you a lot longer to kind of get to the same place. Yeah. I mean, to like, to add to that, like sort of the town where I'm from in Essex is similar in a lot of ways. I mean, definitely like the cursed high street aesthetic.

I mean, my town doesn't really have a high street because it was, it was built on spec in the 1940s and 50s. So it has like a sort of artificially constructed town center, but the, the, the, the sum total of it is exactly the same. Like there's a boots, there's a vape shop, there's a massive Starbucks for some reason, which has been done up with the Starbucks aesthetic. So it's all like glass walls and like very modern, but like everything it's next to is like cursed concrete pillars and like it's very weird.

I have one of those in my, near the placement in my flat actually, which is like, yeah, I always find it very funny. I find it funny though, because like you guys, where you're from, there's, there's similarly, you know, you, you have, you grew up in similar areas, but then also if you pick, considering how big Essex and Kent actually are, you can find cities that are similarly connected, but just don't have the same sort of like striving or like even downwardly mobile, middle class sort of vibe to them.

Like we're talking, uh, Basildon and Essex or like Ramsgate or Canterbury. Like if it's a weird thing that the Basildon, if you look at the connection to London is pretty quick to get into the city, but houses in Basildon, you can actually get decent places for under 200,000 pounds. Whereas like you were saying, Hussain, like as a reason for that. And like, let's not talk about Ramsgate, like the, the, the hell world seaside town, uh, there's, there's just, there are places that have sort of been deemed, I don't know how to describe it.

Like to use the very American, very loaded expression, sort of good areas. And those places are weirdly competitive to live in, to go to schools, to buy places in, despite being pretty shit. But I think in a way that kind of belies how, uh, overwhelmingly shit most of the towns that aren't like that are. Yeah. I mean, there are two basic axes, right? Which define like the desirability of British property, which is where it is,

uh, in terms of like distance from the center of London and where it is in terms of desirability of that area. And there are certain areas which, despite being undesirable, get a place in face price inflation, just because they're so close to London. So like my town is exactly like that. Like you can drive to a tube station in like 10 minutes. So it's pretty like the prices are going to go up, even though it's shit. Or you've got places like Bishop's Stortford, which is further away, but it

has like more cache as like a nice market town, even though it's full of the same people, right? Um, but what I was going to say about my town is that like it has this kind of cursed aesthetic, right? There's an area of the town called the Rose, which I love because it's just like one of those like little shopping arcades where like none of the things are congruent to each other at all. Like there's like a hairdressers that's next to a fish and chip shop, which is

next to a Chinese takeaway, which is next to a, uh, corner shop, which is opposite a nightclub, right? Okay. So this place has been a number of things in the time I've lived there. At first it was a nightclub called Liquid and then it was a nightclub called Quatro's. If you're wondering how that's spelt, that is Q-U-A-T-T-R-O-Z. Yes, for anyone following along.

And, uh, now it's been taken over by, I am pretty convinced as a Turkish mafia, because they've turned it into like a two-floor like luxury restaurant. But it's like, okay, imagine if someone let Gemma Collins from the only way as Essex decide what the aesthetic inside a restaurant would be. And it's called melon, which is like a word from no language. Um, and so anyway, so there's got this like weird like chandeliers, like weird like silver curtains, like everything's like really, like the wine glass is a huge, like, but of course it's been, does it like never anyone in there?

Cause it's in like the grimmest area. It's like, it's next to the fucking Polish food shop. Like it's not in the like even vaguely more aspirational bits of the town, but there's always a G-wagon parked outside it with the number plate that says melon. So I feel like there's something going on there. Um, but that's reflective of kind of the, the transformation that that town's undergone because it was interesting to me here saying that you were saying about how like Dartford is has for all of its like curses, suburbia, aesthetic, it

does also have like an immigrant population, which Harlow absolutely never did. Yeah. I mean, in some areas, there isn't immigrant. I wouldn't say even it's like an immigrant popular in immigrant community. I would just say that there are kind of like a wider mix of people. Um, and I think a lot of that is kind of, it's much more to do with class than anything else. So it's more like visa.

This is where you go. If like you become, um, you know, when you, when you get to like the upper middle class aesthetics and like you don't have to kind of rely on, um, a community to kind of keep you up anymore, which is, you know, the case of like my parents, when they move from like, you know, when going from like Southeast London to Kent, a lot of other people have the same thing. Um, and they all come for like very similar reasons, right? So it's either coming because they want to buy a house that will appreciate in

value, um, because they want to send their kid to like, you know, the best school, but they don't want to like pay private school fees for it. Um, so there isn't really a community as much as there is just like a diversity of kind of people who all exist within the same kind of class strata. Um, and I wonder whether that kind of creates this sort of kind of weird aesthetic because when I, you know, Dartford High Street and like even kind of the, the surrounding areas is basically the same. Like, you know, you can go to the nail salon, then you can go to the chippy,

then you can go to the kebab shop, uh, then you can go for a succulent Chinese meal. This is democracy manifest. Um, and then you can end the night by, um, taking some nos and going to, uh, our version of melon, which is, uh, air and breathe. Um, I have very cursed memories of air and breathe. Do a great taste that tastes great together. I have very cursed memories of air and breathe because it was also the place

where when I was younger, they used to have VR, they used to host like under 18 discos every, every month. Um, and I was, I was never allowed to go to them. Obviously. Well, I, as a ram, you are bad. I mean, yeah, but also like, I wouldn't have really like, I can only imagine myself at like fucking 12, like 13, 14 years old, obsessed with like Bayblade going to the, going to an under 18 disco at air and breathe, um, wearing one

of those like shiny shirts that you wear, um, like that is going up to the DJ booth and insisting that they play limp biscuits, Roland. I have to specify though, that although this is deeply cursed, don't get me wrong where I'm from. I mean, when I was 11, my parents moved to, uh, a suburb of Indianapolis. And, uh, there, there was no such, there were no youth discos, youth, youth, dance, things, there's nothing, the closest equivalent we ever had to anything like that would be like, there would be a school dance periodically.

But there was never, there were no businesses that catered to teens. There were really, like where I lived in Carmel, I remember in New Mexico, where I lived before, we had lived in like a housing development. There were no stores in the entire development. And there was the only, the only thing you could go to, you would literally would have had to cross like a major motorway to get in. Like there was no way as a kid, you could ride your bike to get it. Like there just wasn't anything to go to in Carmel, at least there was, but

like what I'm, when I say there was a place to go to, you could ride your bike to like a grocery store or a video rental store. There wasn't like anything, like maybe like an ice cream shop. There wasn't really anything that catered to kids. In many ways that feels really normal, like that feels so much more normal than like an under 18 disco. I just, I think there's more of like a tradition of that kind of shit here in the UK, because I mean, like obviously, you know, with nonstop austerity,

they've closed down a lot of like the youth centers and stuff like that. But we, one of the things about like the sort of YMCA model, you know, in cities in America and like youth centers and like all these kinds of things was that a lot of people in like white flight suburbs in America got away from like the whole point was to get away from that shit. Like if kids were doing anything, it was like structured club things where there was a fee to enter so they could keep out the riffraff. Like so much of how that exists in America is sort of based on the idea

that like it's pay to play for everything. And like you live in the suburbs to get away from the idea of there being a community. And so that to me is interesting when you talk about, because don't get me wrong, I can imagine in, you know, suburban Kent, it probably sucks. But it's also, there wasn't a public transit in Carmel at all. Like none whatsoever. I don't even think there is now, if there is, it's like absolutely brand new. There was no way as a kid to get from Carmel to downtown Indianapolis if you wanted to.

There was no way to get to any of the malls. There weren't, back in those days, there wasn't really any mall in Carmel. The only, the closest mall was, I'm not joking, something along the lines of like four or five miles away from like where I lived and at least two to three miles from the county line. And there was no sidewalk or footpath. There was no way to walk there. So the whole point of being a kid, there was, you were trapped until you had a

driver's license, which I mean, in America, you can drive at 16 until you had a driver's license and hopefully you had a car. There was nowhere to go. Yeah. And that's one thing that I would say that's kind of weird about it for me is that on one hand, I totally understand where you're coming from. That like it does seem deeply cursed. But like if you would wanted to Hussain as a 14 year old, you could have

fucked off and like gotten on a train and gone to London. That none of that exists where I grew up. Well, this is the thing I think you have to understand about these British suburban towns that we're talking about here as compared to American suburbia, which is that my understanding of American suburbia, having spent a bit of time in the US is that the stress is very much on the sub part and not on the urban part. Whereas in Britain, it's the other way around. Like these suburban towns have like kind of an urban feel, but it's just like

imagine the most boring city you've ever been in. Like it has public transport and so on. But there's like nothing to do like Hussain, bring up the under 18 discos is like an amazing because I think what you need to understand about the under 18 night clubs, right, is that we had like school discos, like everyone has to do that. That was that was the thing, right? But the kids who went to the under 18 nightclubs were like the kids of the parents who did not give a fuck, right?

Yeah, if you go to the under 18 discos, like you were the kids who were like doing poppers at 13 and like just doing weird shit, probably getting like nonced by some guy who was like 19 and you thought was really cool. Like the amount of people I knew at school who basically to make their life less boring were like dating people who were like in their 20s when they were like 14 and like girls who'd be like, yeah, he's got a car. It's like really cool. And it's like, and then I remember even at the time being like, sounds like a nonce.

Oh my God, Milo, did you ever have that situation where like you would just see these like 20 year olds like waiting outside school gates? Oh, I never had that at my school, but I can really imagine that. There was a lot. So I went to an all boys grammar school and there was an all girls grammar school, like just down the road. And I used to get my bus back to my house from there and during the time between the end of school and the bus coming, you'd see all these kind of,

you see all these cars coming in there, all these like shitty cars. Like I can't even remember what they are, but they were all like, these fucking like, you know, those badly pimped out nissans and like, you know, the Subaru's and stuff like that. I don't even know if those were the cars, but like I can imagine a Ford Sierra with like a halogen like taped to the underside, so it looks like something out of Tokyo drift. Or those unnecessarily like large wheels that like you kind of look and you think, like you shouldn't have that on like your shitty car.

Like a Vauxhall Nova with like a paint can taped to the exhaust. Right. Yeah. And it just like exists just to make loud noises and they would always be there and these were always like, I didn't realize that they were in their kind of like 20s until way later. And I also didn't realize how weird it was until afterwards. It was sort of amazing how like in the girl, you know, in the kind of girls grammar school, you'd have these older teachers who would bear just to kind of like really supervise and make sure like nothing kind of like was going on.

And even you just have these 20 year olds just like sitting on their cars waiting for their school age girlfriends to come out of like to come out at the end of the day. And very regular. And I am the American energy equivalent of that. We didn't have not to my knowledge. I mean, I don't remember anything like that, but we did have three separate incidents in one calendar year of teachers basically getting in legal trouble for fucking their students in my hometown. And in one case, one of the, this guy who was like a girl's basketball coach in his late

forties or early fifties went to prison for it. But then when he got out, the girl that he was, I'm scare quotes here, dating by that point, she had turned 18. She got emancipated from her parents and they got married. Now that to me is the big Indiana story. Imagine telling your grandkids that one. Also bear in mind that the difference between Britain and America in this regard is that in Britain the the alleged consent is 16 whereas in America it's not. And it really depends on where you are, but like it's hard to explain in one false swoop.

But long story short, if someone over 18 is fucking a 16 year old in America, they will go to jail if they get caught and the parents press charges. So that's not the same here. And as a result, you have these weird situations. But I feel like the question I wanted to ask to since you're the subject matter experts when it comes to Britain here who's saying I'll start with you. What do you think if you had to conjure up a vision of like the Dartford guy? What is the Dartford guy? Like take the trope of the Essex man, you know, that they always fucking like to use in the 80s and 90s or the fucking

Wokington man from the last election. What's what's the Essex guy or correction? What's the Dartford guy? The Dartford guy, I think. Okay. So I feel like there are variations of it, but if I was to kind of like really essentialize what a Dartford guy would be, there would be someone in there would be like a white male in their maybe late 20s or towards their like 30s and maybe early 40s. They are probably like a trades person. So they probably run like a small plumbing business or a small like landscaping business or something like that. They have a white van that they drive very, very fast on roads that like there's no

point driving very fast on. They are the type of people who they have a type of people who honk at school girls or like just honk at any woman that they see on the street regardless of like slight subdivision. They might own one of the sports models. Have you ever seen the Ford RS transit? Yeah, it's like how much of a rush are you in to get to a decorating job? Like what? They have an Essex accent for sure, even though like they don't need to have one. They just kind of they just kind of do, they just have that like they have like what when Milo does the Dave Courtney voice, like they have that voice sort of vestigial East End South London accent passed on through the generations. Yeah, the one that I can't do is that it should get fucking road tested,

you fucking cunts. It's like a lot deeper and it's also as if like it's slower as if they're kind of they just woke up. I'm just reminded of a friend of mine whose dad was from his family was from Jersey, but they they lived in Indiana. Yeah, and his dad was was real like Jersey suburbs Guido. And this was at the time I want to say it was season one or season two of American Idol was coming to an end when it was like Clay Aiken versus another guy who was like kind of heavy set dude. I can't remember the other guy's name. I think it was Ruben something that I can't remember. Anyway, so we were after swim practice, we're hanging out at my friend's house and his dad came in to ask my friend's younger sister about like, you know,

it was just bullshitting with her and he's asked about American Idol and this is a quote. Joe Benani is his dad said, Hey, Jillian, who was it who won on that American Idol? Was it Quibo or the fat ass? And Joe's mom or you're listening to Quibo and the fat ass. My friend's mom was like, Yo, don't talk to your daughter that way. Now these people weren't from Brooklyn, they were from the Jersey suburbs. But that's the same sort of phenomenon of like, the vestigial accent getting passed on all the way down to the point where like a person talks like a part of the country, a part of the city, they're absolutely not from, but it's central to their identity that they talk this way. Yeah, I mean, I think that's, I think that's

absolutely true. And that very much like the Essex guy is like a very similar vibe. But I think that like my own, my own town is kind of an interesting example of this because like, when I was growing up there, it was incredibly boring, like, but in no way like really deprived, like incredibly boring in the sense of like, I remember we would as teenagers go on nights out to the cinema where we would go and see a film, but it was mostly about hanging out at the cinema before and after. And like, I can remember just like other like reasonably middle class kids or at least kids that were absolutely not in gangs or had ever experienced like crime in any meaningful sense, but who were all like, in hoodies, like with the hoodie done up, like, you know, pretending

to be like roadmen, basically. And they were all white, obviously. And I remember once being outside the cinema on one of these evenings, there was a, there was like a group of like 30 of these guys who we didn't know. And they were like stood around one of the, one of the like, you know, the big light up signs for like what films are on, but it's like a standalone one, right? And they're like gradually like hyping each other up. They're like, yeah, go on, bro, go on, yeah, fucking do it, do it, do it. And then eventually one of them runs up and like kicks the sign and the sign breaks. And then there's like this moment of silence as they all stand there. And then one of them just goes, peg it. And then they all just run away.

And I'm like, that, that sums up a certain kind of teenage experience, right? And that's kind of that. So it was almost like a slightly like, closeted environment in which we grew up, even though like a lot of like kids at our school, like definitely had like problems at home. There was the odd like dad in prison and that sort of thing. But then now the dynamics of the town have shifted a lot because people who would, who are from London basically, and would be socially housed in London under normal circumstances have essentially been farmed out by their local authorities to these towns and Essex. I mean, famously that terminus house place where they've just like converted a load of offices into like cells for the homeless is in my town. It's like,

it's right above the bus station. And so Harlow has like suddenly become a lot more like ethnically diverse over the last few years. And I'm sure there's a lot more deprivation there now. But that hasn't really colored the kind of guy that I've grown up with. I think like the most like the symbol, like obviously like Dartford guy definitely exists in Essex, like the white van mandatory, who is like worth over a million quid 100% exists. But there's also the guy I would like to call the white personal trainer Tory, who's like a guy I went to school, middle class parents, like I knew one guy whose dad was a policeman and whose mom worked at the bank, like reasonably, like reasonably well off, like, I mean, not not like wealthy by any means, but like kind of a

normal lower middle class family. And, and he now owns a personal training business. And is he just endlessly posts on Instagram about how, you know, the Tories are right and how, you know, Jeremy Corbyn is a communist who must be destroyed. And like, it's just, it's like that is, that's kind of the energy like the young people in these towns have kind of just accepted like this kind of like dog eat dog reality that we find ourselves in. I've heard people refer to it as like Darkfruits Twitter, in reference to Strongbow Darkfruits Cider, that there's a sort of like, like hustle and grind culture of that sort of demographic. And they are absolutely, if not like politically Tory,

they are sort of like, unformed ideologically Tory. And that, go ahead. I was going to say, I definitely don't like, I definitely don't think that Dartford's like a highly politicized place in the way that like, in terms of like party politics, but there is this very, there is like a very, very Tory vibe, like socially Tory vibe to it. I always like attributed it down to just the idea that like towns like Dartford sort of exist, because the main aspiration among many is like to basically own your own house in Dartford, so it's like to kind of, eventually like you want to kind of like buy a place in that area where you have a garden and you have like two kids and stuff, and that's kind of like the suburban

dream. One thing I was going to say earlier, like was, I think we were talking about how, well, Nate was saying that in Indiana, like in places like that, you couldn't actually get out, so you sort of like had no choice but to like make do until you could drive. Going to the movie theater, like what you were describing, your parents drop you off, you know, people are like stupid 13-year-olds getting in fights at the movie theater, screaming out the word penis during like the screening of like a fucking Alicia Silverstone movie in 1997. That happened in Dartford as well, right? I would also say that like, there comes a point where like, even though access, getting out of these places,

especially where you have like decent enough transport networks, isn't like difficult to do, I think there is a culture in these towns of like trying to get people not to go out. Yeah. A lot of people adopt this like weird like civic pride about being from this like awful town that people only move to in the first place to get a free house. Well, I remember like, whenever there was like new years and stuff, and I was in school, we would, there will always be people who were like, oh yeah, I'm going to go see the fireworks, but I'm worried in case I get stabbed in London or something. And that like happened, that kind of really intensified after the 7-7 bombings, when people were very openly saying,

but oh yeah, if you go to London, like there's a good chance you might be killed or something like that, right? And that was just like, normal. Like, oh yeah, okay. So like, we shouldn't go to the city because, you know, you might not come back in one piece, which is why so many of like my friends at the time were like, yeah, I'm happy to go anywhere, but I just don't want to go to London. It's like, okay, so you want to go to like the mall then? I mean, I was out getting drinks with a friend of the show who was in and his, one of his friends who was also back in the UK, but they all live overseas, who was from, I think, from Surrey, from like, maybe not from Crawley, which I've been to

Crawley, it sucks. We can talk about that later, but somewhere around that area. I happened, we were just in conversation, was talking about, you know, where I live in, and I mentioned that I live in Peckham. And she's like, you know, I'm not going to approximate her accent, but she basically was like, let me ask you a question. Like, why would you choose to live there? And I was just like, oh, my wife is black, we wanted to live in like a neighborhood that had a black community, and it's fine, it's close to London, it gets 7 when we need to go. She's like, okay. But there was this absolute sort of like, what you might describe as vestigial suburban fear of famously bad neighborhood in South London. I mean,

to tell me wrong, if you look back on stuff, like in the early 2000s, late 90s, there were some pretty shocking things that went down in Peckham. But that's not really, it's not like it was- But also these people are so out of touch with the pace of gentrification. And like, how like, now a town where like, like my town is like much more on a trajectory of becoming somewhere, like what they imagine Peckham used to be like in terms of being full of deprived people who are being pushed out of social housing more and more further and further out. Like when people talk about knife crime in London, like most of the knife crime is in places like Romford, which traditionally weren't even really considered London. But like that is where like the poorest

and most marginalized people are being pushed out to because like, oh, if you lose your council house in Tower Hamlets, well, there isn't another one. So you're going to end up like somewhere the fuck else. Yeah. And that seems to be like a bit, I mean, whereas in America, you just have to understand that there was definitely the same sort of phenomenon. I remember people telling me like, don't go south of, you know, first it was 38th Street in Indianapolis, and then it was like 54th Street in Indianapolis. Like basically anywhere south where it became black neighborhoods that were absolutely redlined, it was this idea of like, oh, you're going to get killed. And like, the one time somebody from not even my hometown, but from north central, which was the like the

sort of township that was south of the county line where you were still technically part of Indianapolis, there was a story of that happening. And it was literally a kid whose dad was a coke addict, brought him along to try to get drugs. And something went wrong in the deal, and a dude shot the back of the window and killed this kid by mistake. But like, that's the level that that it's like, yes, if you're with your dad buying cocaine at one in the morning somewhere in Indianapolis, you might get shot. That is true. Thank you kid on a field trip to infernos. But like, it's not as though if you go to like fucking, you know, like yummy Chinese food on fucking 19th Street Indianapolis, you're somehow going to get fucking killed. Like that doesn't

happen. Careful to them Chinese, they know karate. It's the same laws that happened to Dave Courtney. He got in a sword fight, remember? He's a sword fight in the Chinese takeaway. Britannology heads will know. So in a way that mentality still exists. But I do think that's a good point, Milo, that like someone raised in the suburbs of, you know, Surrey or Kent or Berkshire or something like that, would only know of these places as sort of being representational of like this highly exaggerated sort of like London decadence. And so it doesn't really have any correspondence with reality. Yeah, I to add to that, I have just remembered an absolute guy, like not not a not a composite guy, not the platonic form of a guy, but a guy I actually

met right who I think perfectly describes like his generation of Essex man, which is so I went to I went to school with this kid who his dad was a wealthy, like he owned a construction company, but which specialized in like railway shit, like they did like Stullard and a railway points and shit like that, like railway maintenance basically. And it's a lucrative business, right? They were very wealthy, but they lived in like, like a house that was like originally from like unfairly normal row of like detached like pebble dash like shit looking houses in this town, but which they had like extended to the point where it looked like something like JR from Dallas would live in, but on this like preposterous street. And he always had like a car that would

be like a brand new executive car, like an S class or a Jaguar or something like that, that had like 19 TVs in it, like a TV in every surface, which was it was the style at the time. And so I remember once when we were, I think it was this kid's 12th birthday, and we went round there for a sleepover. And as part of the sleepover in classic suburban style, we were going out to Pizza Hut for dinner, which was like, you know, the Olive Garden of the British suburbs. Was it like one of those like sit-in Pizza Huts? Oh, of course. Yeah, we were going out. It was like the salad bar and everything. Yeah. And so there were like nine of us or something. And so like the mum and the dad like dangerously loaded more of us than was legal into like their

two cars and drove us down there, right? So then I'm in the back of this fucking Mercedes, right? We're all like crammed in. There's like three TVs all blaring different things. And then we stop at a traffic light and this guy's dad, and I remember this vividly to this day, it just turns around, it looks me, 12 year old, like pudgy, incredibly middle-class child, directly in the eyes and just goes, you know, I've got the entire collection of Ray Winston films. And then there's this like slightly awkward pause where I don't really know what to say to that. And then he goes, my personal favorite is scum. And it's just perfect because it is like this guy who's like never lived in London or had anything meaningfully to do with London, but sort of

aspires to be this kind of like Dave Courtney figure when all he is is just like a dumb guy who's made a lot of money from maintaining railways. I want to throw something in there for American listeners to understand. Have you ever seen pictures of British houses that look like they're made out of gravel, but in Minecraft? That's what pebble dashing is. It's basically like a weatherproofing seal of fixing lots and lots of gravel pebbles. It's cosmetic. There's no actual reason for it. It's just that in the 70s, they thought it looked dope to like spray stones on a house with cement. It looks hideous and it's impossible to remove. Exactly. It's almost impossible to remove. It's so expensive to get removed. You basically have to like sandblast

and jackhammer the entirety of your house to get rid of it. So British houses that are pebble dashing, the best thing you can hope for is just like painted white, because then at least it won't look like, as I'm describing, a big block of gravel in Minecraft. It looks like the thing from the Fantastic Four has not on your house. That's basically the only way I can describe it. We don't have shit like that in America. There are some brutalist buildings, let's say not really as much apartment buildings, but some office parks that have kind of pebble dash-ish accents on them. But I've never seen anything like it. I live very close to a housing estate near Old Kent Road in Packham. That's the entire 20-story towers, and there's like

two or three of them. They're all completely pebble-dashed. I'm not going to lie. I know that there's like a full, like a very solid community there, and there's a lot of civic pride there, but it's because of the that they're a community sort of put into these buildings. The community is formed there. The aesthetics of the building is fucking dog shit. Yeah. There was no necessity for the buildings to look that horrible. That was purely a decision that was made for reasons which will remain a mystery to everyone. Anyway, so I'm going to leave a bit of space for like final wrapping up thoughts on like the suburban vibes of Kent and Essex, because I've prepared a reading series from

Scotland to prove that we're not purely Anglo-centric on this podcast. There's a suburban vibe that exists north of the border too. Hasein, do you have any final thoughts? There is one thought that I have, and I feel like this should be like a unifying theme, which could kind of round off, which is about all these towns are connected by one single can of NOS. That's how I think you can understand. I feel like that's the key to like the human instrumentality project regarding these types of guys, but they all join together. American listeners, we don't mean NOS like fucking in the Fast and the Furious to make your cargo faster. We mean people huffing nitrous oxide, which is a thing British people do

to a degree that I have never seen in my entire life. Because the thing you can guarantee on like a Saturday morning or something, is that if you go to one of these like clubs, whether it's like Mellon or Air and Breathe, or like, I don't know what the other ones are called, like maybe like Vixen or something like that. It's like these very badly named nightclubs. There was one in Bishop Stortford that was called H2O, and they burnt down, and they built a new nightclub on the same site that was called, and I shit you not, Scorch. I know in Chatham, a guy that I went to school with, he now like owns this kind of nightclub

where he hosts like under 18 discos and stuff. And it's like he got the money. It's a more perfect nonce profession than hosting under 18 discos. I'm not saying it, but I'm certainly thinking it. And he's like a very classic fail son of this particular type of guy. So his father is a manager of Jillingham Football Club, or like one of the managers of Jillingham Football Club, and has also been involved in some, you know, fairly like slightly, I don't want to like libel myself too much here, but let's just say like some fairly spicy side business deals regarding assets. He runs a curry house.

Regarding assets and property. So he got like, he got this money from his dad, and he bought this nightclub. And this is a guy who when I went to school with, like he was, he was, he, he, how do I describe him other than like a short skinny white dude who always had a bowl cut and looked like he was like Randall from the cartoon series Recess. Awesome. But he was like obsessed with certain point about like just having clout and being called. And the only thing he had was money, right? So he used to kind of like lavish like his parents' money, giving like all the girls who came to our sixth form like lifts home,

regardless of how far they lived. And he would like have these house parties where he would invite like, you know, so-called cool people too and everything. So his whole life has kind of been about like basically seeking clout. And he bought this nightclub and every kind of couple of weeks, he posts a picture of himself with like someone who he thinks is very cool, but is basically like a B-rate celebrity now. So it's like people like Tiny Temp, like Tiny Temp, like Tinchy Strider, the people from the guys from N-Dubs. Joey Essex. Yeah. I mean, just like basically those types of people who were like kind of popular in like

late 2000s, maybe the beginning of like the early 2010s. The rail guy from N-Dubs, Fazer, is that his name? The third bipolarity member of the three-man group N-Dubs. Like Mike GLC and stuff like that. Like these people who like, you can kind of search them on YouTube and you'll find them on like Radio One, Fire in the Booth, back in 2000 and 2009. Doing a rap about going to Neto. Yes. And Tim West would be like, yeah, that's sick, bro. That's sick. Anyway, I've not heard anything that good. It's the last time I was hanging out with my girlfriend. You should absolutely do that.

Had a tough time taking a GCSE. Shouts out. You should absolutely do an episode one day about Tim Westwood, because I feel like he explains a lot about precedent at a particular moment. Oh, man. Son of a bishop who's like a white guy who like, it pretends to be a rapper and it's just like preposterously old. He's like 62 years old. And he talks like this dog. Yo, dog. That is some fire bars. Why was going to say was that like outside all these clubs, like there's like so much not like all these like tiny canisters everywhere. When like, when I used to go to work in my dad's

store in the mornings, like one of my jobs was to sweep up all the kind of canisters outside of the store before it opened. And there was so many of them. And I also like, there's also like a side business to that where people actually like buy those empty canisters off you and sell them as like scrap metal. So like this is a very surprising immigrant business. This is just imagining like the innocent Hussein as a child just like tutting at the kafar as he like sweeps all of these canisters into like a bucket. And then your dad's selling them. That's how I ended up having like, no, no, these were just like people on the street who were like, yeah, can I buy those empty canisters off you so I could like sell? You know,

and then I found out later that they were selling them to like, you know, the scrap yards to like get a bit of money. But like, that's the thing. That's the thing that like unites all these people together. It's you know, it's balloon gas. And I feel like to understand Britain to truly understand Britain really just have to understand balloon gas. I think that's a very good summary. I will also add you alluded to the song, the rap song about Dartford town, which will absolutely be the outro music of this episode. There were definitely there was a lot of like wannabe rap in Essex, all of which was filmed in NCP multi story car parks by guys in like full Donne. I don't know why they felt like a car park was like the most gangster place you could possibly be.

Yo, fam, it's three pound an hour. I've got I've got bear pee. No, the best thing you do is on a HSBC debit, Brov. The best thing you do is you do it after 6pm where like all these car parks are free or like you go to the big you go to the big Sainsbury is that all these towns have what they have like the kind of multi story car parks and you do it exactly. Big Sainsbury is big Tesco, even the big Aster. There we say it. Okay, so on that on that note, I've got I've got us this this reading series, which we're going to we're going to see how much I mean, I basically I just picked it because of the headline. It's from the daily record. It's from Scotland.

I think it gives a certain kind of like maybe like people who are in a slightly higher social strata than the like Ray Winston dad. But like nevertheless, it portrays a certain kind of suburban British energy. Angry indoor bowlers got rid of Joe Swinson in revenge for leisure center row. It's no longer the swim zone, guys. So the subheading is the bowlers claim they played a key role in former Lib Dem leader losing her seat after blaming her for their sport being snubbed in new 33 million pound leisure complex. This is a company with a picture of the club secretary like taking one knee in the middle of the bowling green and like just death staring into the camera. He really reminds I can't pick out who it is that he looks like, but he definitely

like look it up. So angry indoor bowlers can they played a key role in Joe Swinson losing her Westminster seat. They say they got revenge against the former Lib Dem leader as they believe she played a major part of the exclusion mistake. Okay, they're upping the word count here basically. So Winston lost her East Dunbartonshire seat in the election earlier this month is from a while ago. She was beaten by just 149 votes by the SMP's Amy Calligan, right? Callahan probably. Some members of Allender indoor bowling club in Beersden near Glasgow claim Swinson's loss was because of her party's bias against 300 bowlers. This is where the Lib Dems went wrong. It would not allow bowlers to be dudes. There are too many like the 300 bowlers like the 300 Spartans just like holding

off Joe Swinson at the pass as she attempts to turn it into a swim zone. So it says they were fuming that the Lib Dem and conservative led East Dunbartonshire Council didn't put a bowling hall in plans for the new leisure center. Yesterday, the secretary of the closure threatened club, Sandy Torrey was unrepentant over the result and revealed bowling club members had been urged to vote tactically and spread the word to others to oust Swinson. Sandy said the Lib Dems had had their party line and chose to vote against having a bowling hall in the new sports center. My wife went to the meeting when it was voted on and it was a 13 to 7 vote for every issue raised. It wasn't just about the bowling but other aspects too. Every 13 to 7 vote followed the party whip.

Councillors saw no need for a bowling hall in the new center, claiming membership had slumped from 700 in 2005. But the club disputed the figure and despite having over 300 members, more than 200 more than 2500 supporters backed a petition for a bowling hall. The bowlers were left with nowhere to go and accused the council of stringing them along with the promise of light for light facilities. Sandy said we felt undone by the Lib Dems and the conservatives on our council. We were looking for a change of direction. We didn't know there was going to be a general election so soon but said come election time, don't vote for the Lib Dems. So basically the long story short is that Joe Swinson apologized over not supporting the

bowling thing but said it was like out of her hands. There's more angry quotes from bowling members. But essentially what happened was the bowling club were busing people to the polls in order to get them to vote against Joe Swinson. Yes. We don't like Joe Swinson obviously but yeah, apparently if you cross the bowling club in Easton Bartonshire, you will lose your seat in Parliament. Dude's rock. And if there's anything that this example shows is that when dudes rock together, they achieve great things. Also, let's just be perfectly honest. If you've got a town and its council is dominated by Lib Dems

and Tories, you live in a wealthy suburb. Yeah. I mean, it's one of those things where like, to understand British politics, you really do have to understand these places because all the MPs that represent those places, even if those MPs are themselves, not insane. I mean, there are plenty of Tory MPs who aren't insane. They're still bad but they're not insane, right? But they are beholden to completely insane people, right? They're trying to negotiate these issues of national politics but really, what's going to determine whether or not they lose their seat is the fucking bowling green. And if they don't do the right thing about the bowling green, there's going to be hell to pay.

Milo, you once told me that the fates of British politicians were decided on bin collections and I feel like this is a great example of that. Yeah, 100%. Ultimately, what does Baz of Baz's stun baton shop really care about other than like the Muslims, Brexit, what day the bins are collected on and how often and whether his pals at the bowling green are kept happy and whether or not he can have a pint in a pub that feels like the staff room of a particularly rundown comprehensive school. That's how it works. Well, once again, we hope you've learned something on this episode. I've certainly been enlightened and also weirdly find more common ground with cursed British suburbs

than I thought I would find with my own cursed suburban upbringing. So Hussain, thank you for making time for a second recording of the day. No worries. I love doing pods. I love being on my own pod, but as a guest. Exactly. Pod save Britannia. And so with that in mind, let us regale you with the dulcet tones of a rap song Hussain found for us called Darkford Town. See you later. Right.

Oh, listen, yeah. The thing about darts would is it's known to most people. You always know, you're there here because you level pussy so low. So terrible that you will end up going home with it when you limbo dance under the standard bar. Bitch, yeah, fuck it. Guaranteed to be more greasy than any Kentucky bucket to be worn. Them buggy poochers are filthy in it. You scratch me nuts in the morning thinking shit, rent and clinic. We'll take a trip to the bulletin rick, step over the skate, being sick and learn the language. You fucking prick. Cracks me up, don't forget, let's fight like men. But then again, let's go because some of them kind of look like men.

Get me. Welcome to dark foot town. You ain't mine, well it sure ain't mine. Welcome to dark foot town.