There is almost something heroic about their stupidity on this level.

Is it important that not only is Northampton close to the physical centre of the UK but as it has gone through the last two or three decades it now looks like a lot of other places in Britain. It looks like Sheffield, it looks like Gillingham, it looks like Truro. The pedestrianisation of the shopping section of town, the chain shops moving in, the local family run businesses moving out...

AM: That's it. They pedestrianized the main drags, so you get a decrease in traffic. You get shops closing down because the rents are still disproportionately high but the trade isn't there any more... You could even be forgiven for thinking that some of these councils are actually trying to divert the life and activity away from town centres to the more profitable retail parks which are surrounding most of our conurbations nowadays. That certainly seems to be the case in Northampton. 

We are promised developments but these are only in the hope of making the town as soulless as Milton Keynes so that we can compete with them for custom and tourism. 

It's never going to work. 

You're never going to get people saying 

'Let's go to Northampton and see the marvel of the Express Lift Tower or the backwards bus station.' 

When they built the bus station they had the plans the wrong way round so they built the entire bus station backwards. 

There is almost something heroic about their stupidity on this level. 

As I said in the editorial of the first issue of Dodgem Logic, yeah, we're basing this in Northampton on the understanding that one dilapidated and abused shit hole is pretty much identical to another one. We're all practically living in the same place. There has been a great levelling. We have the same brand names reiterated in all of our shop front furniture. The same chain stores in every town and like you say, all of them are pedestrianized. All of them have the surveillance cameras. Although probably not to the same degree to which we have them here. 

Northampton has always been a bit of a laboratory for social experiments 

so we've got ones that talk. 

Y'know, they say things like 

'Pick that cigarette butt up. 

Yes you, the one in the anorak.' 

It's this kind of sub-Orwellian theatrics that just make people more annoyed than anything else. 

They don't do anything about the crime figures, or people's behaviour or people's levels of happiness.”