Never pour scorn on Croydon

‘So f-ing Croydon,’ was the worst insult David Bowie could think of to describe a person or thing that revolted him. ‘Less of a place, more of a punchline,’ was a recent swipe by Sue Perkins, the Croydon-born comedian who grew up at the tail end of the town’s golden era of rampant employment, ambitious cultural venues and well-endowed private schools.

London’s outermost, southernmost, most populous borough is an easy target for condescension: too brash, yet too poor; too try-hard, yet too lethargic; too ambitious, yet not ambitious enough. As the Croydonian author John Grindrod has written, locals are accustomed to Croydon’s ‘very existence – our existence – provoking outrage’. Croydon, neither London nor suburb, can’t win.

In this gutsy, charming book, Will Noble asks us to think again. He suggests that the national contempt for Croydon as a ‘philistine, materialistic wasteland – a godless place’ is deflected self-loathing, bound up in anxiety about social class. In truth, Noble argues, Croydon is Britain in microcosm, with ‘its diversity of denizens, its mixture of urban grittiness and rural beauty, its antipodal wealth and poverty, its amassing cultural fecundity’. If you pour scorn on Croydon, you pour scorn on yourself.

Noble, who edits the cheerful Londonist website, looks beyond Croydon’s sprawl, grit and traffic and seeks to reframe the borough as a national marvel, the embodiment of brio. That is a lot to ask of readers whose only encounter with it has been as a foil, rattling over the dusty A232 flyover towards Gatwick and on to somewhere – anywhere – else. But Noble is undeterred.

He starts from the town’s earliest history, with various archbishops of Canterbury who settled there from the ninth century (six are buried in Croydon Minster), and ends in the present era of Brit School stardust and municipal bankruptcy.