City, Country or the Suburbs
 

Not necessarily where you live now but where you feel most at home or aspire to live. Up till recently i was solidly in the city camp and I don't know if this is because I'm now utterly sick and tired of London but I've recently been appreciating the space and quiet of the countryside more and more. My favourite places to visit are still definitely cities but I'm not sure that I feel particularly comfortable living in them anymore. So are you a city, suburb or country person?

I voted suburbs, although Oklahoma City might be able to qualify for all three choices.

as a general rule for me, the cities have too many people and the country has too few.

country ( i hate crowds )

fuck! where is the remaining .01% of the votes?

city?
suburbs?
country?

Although I appreciate the country a lot more now, there's still something about cities (or at least certain cities) that I find attractive. I was brought up in suburbs, so have lesser love for those.

ooohh! the ex-weird monkey is here...i agree let the blood run.

^^^ I took that part out.

I'm a lover, not a fighter.

lover with whip?

City, although I have never lived in a big city. I just appreciate the fact that I don't have to take the bus to get anywhere.

Yeah, i don't think I could really deal with the suburbs. In their own different ways both the country and the city offer a kind of anonymity that i don't think you get so much in the suburbs.

I dunno, London is a very extreme city and maybe my rejection of it has tainted my view of other potentially more (for me at least) liveable ones.

I prefer hanging out in the cities, because I'm not a country boy and it offers me little entertainment. Suburbs? They are suburbs, and they are all the same. Not horrible, but nothing fantastic; they are meant for purely practical living, and they serve their purpose.

All this aside though, as far as living conditions, I've lately migrated from the city mindset to the country. Around Lexington, there isn't much for the suburb aspect of it, so you can live in the country and drive to the city in 5 minutes. Country living just seems nice because you don't have to worry about bothering people or making too much noise or anything.

I like either extreme. None of that in between stuff.

I live in teh city but not teh inner city. I'm comfortable where I am now and I wouldn't mind living in teh inner city really. Chicago is a beautiful city. I love it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYye59dstRY


ummm, I like the city and I like the country. Ideally I wish suburbs didn't exist, so I could be closer to the city while living in the country.

I think in the country on the outskirts of a reasonably large city is right for me.

I think the thing for me is that I've known all of them. There's a quite complicated continuum from City-suburb-country for me. To the rural hamlet, I was raised in the suburbs; to the city-dweller (particularly London), I'm the backwater yokel.

There's diversity in suburbs, you see - there's a big difference between city outskirts and commuter belts. Outside Bristol, for instance, you have somewhere like Portishead, which I view as Avonmouth commuters and local industrial houses (largely 20th-century) while somewhere like Long Ashton is ex-country rarified commuter living. Further down the road - in fact, all the villages flanking the A38 - you get variable degrees of disconnection. Winscombe is suburban council house terror, Sandford is cider-drenched industrial commuters, Wrington the 'rural' idyll for people without farms, Churchill is authentic (but small) commuter suburbia, Banwell is a lapsed village community... in fact, I'm struggling to think of local areas that are authentically 'country' - the little hamlets outside Yeovil that aren't filled with Etonite hunt supporters or somewhere like Hewish/ Wick St Lawrence maybe?

Anyway. Long story short, this thread is further proof to me that Londoners very rarely have any meaningful sense of perspective on the world, with due deference to my esteemed colleague Herr Rail.

Sorry, let me amend that - The perspective of a Londoner is necessarily distorted to the point of being incommensurable with that of your average Brit, with the possible exception of Brummies and Mancs.

Suburbs.
There I can reach the city and the country quite fast.

It's the right of every Londoner to make broadsweeping statements about anything they want and for those comments to be taken as gospel. It's in the magna carta, I think.

Could be worse, you could be doing the same thing in a Mancunian accent.

I had a conversation with a Mancunian once, during which it was explained to me at great length the superiority of Manchester buses over London ones. I came away unconvinced but entertained, as generally tends to happen when I have conversations with Mancunians.

I dig the country, but at the end of the day, I'm a "city boy." I'm still trying to get used to New Jersey after six years since I moved here from NYC. It's so weird to have everything shut down at 10 PM.

I've had that very same conversation. I also like the one where you're sat there eating really shit chips - and I do mean appalling chips - and you get "see, you southern lot can't make decent chips like this". And the thing is, somewhere like Hull, York or Sheffield - they totally own the South on the chip-making front, but Mancs are just useless fuckers.

Has anyone ever had chips from Hull? Hull is fucking awesome. They've got wrong-coloured phoneboxes. They're the only city in Great Britain with non-red phoneboxes. That's how to be an awesome city. You can produce as many Smiths and Oasises as you like, chips and interesting telephone boxes are the way forward.

in many ways i like the city, its nice to be close to everything and the energy of the city is good too but its also a real headache after a while. first its constantly busy which means fighting through crowds of people, lost children, tourists and the like which when your in a hurry is a real pain in the ass. then there are all the crazy people, in vancouver there is a really high percentage and its not nice to see someone injecting into their groin on your way to work or have a really aggresive woman covered in her own shit get mad at you on the train because you dont have any change. plus the rents are always high in the city, way more than they need to be i think. but the burbs are just kinda boring, there is that weird undercurrent you get in the burbs which just kinda freaks me out. the countryside is lovely but its too far from things but maybe when i am older.

I used to live in country for 20 years. In the middle of nowhere. Bored out of my skull.
I also used to live in Paris for 3 months. It was, woaw, awesome. One of the best chapters of my life. A lot of fun, alcohol, parties, gigs....
Now I live in Paris suburbs. But it's not exactly a suburbs, it's more like a little town towards Paris. It's not so bad, I think I could live all my life in this "town".

I've not been to Hull, but the chips thing interests me. I'm curious to know what they do that we aren't because i had a bag of chips yesterday and they were pretty terrible. Sort of soggy, which isn't what I want from a chip. At all. I don't want the thin French fry version either but I like their crunchiness. Ideally I want the crunch of the French fry transferred over to the fatness of the chip shop style. McCain Oven Fries get the balance right, but I refuse to endorse frozen oven chips.

I do genuinely think that London's lack of interest in applying curry sauce to its chips is a real problem. I suspect that the Hull chip has a firmness able to take such a sauce that, if poured over London sog would reduce it even further into mere mush.

Tell me more about chips in Hull. Seriously.

I don't know about Hull, but in LA, they look like this:



no curry, but I'm pretty sure the one on the left speaks spanish.

I fixed the whole "permission denied" thing in my last post.

I go through a complex process of clearing my cache every time I link, but in in the interest of providing you with timely information, I neglected this extra step.

my humble apologies to both you and chips-tv.com.

Shame they weren't allowed to continue in duty. No way would Jon and Ponch have allowed something like the Rodney King thing to happen.

yeh but the thing about hull is its shit innit?

Rodney King would have found his PCP-fueled adventure cut short by a solid blow to the head from Ponch's nightstick.

after a quick trip to the studio's editing room, the entire incidence would look like nothing more than yr standard 10-car pile-up.

grimsby. now there is a fish n chip place. its one of the worst places in the world where coastal errosion is met with cheering crowds but they do make good chips and i once got double fish n chips for 99p there. no word of a lie.

crinkle cut chips give you that crunch and flavour, or curly fries.

Crinkle cut chips never really caught on down here. I've only ever really seen them in frozen form. I've always been suspicious of curly fries. There's that hint of novelty about them that always suggests children's snack to me.

The great chip paradox has to be the chips you get from Chinese takeaways. Massively fat and not that crispy but able to deal with any amount of sauce.

The fish thing is less of a problem. I've had great fish all over England. Chip quality seems to be really region specific though.

Well, first of all - London doesn't do too badly for chips. Depends where you are an so on, but you get a proper Great British chippy - as in a shop that specialises in fish and chips, inevitably not run by Brits - and they're ok. Nothing outstanding, but London does better than everywhere else for everything else foodwise (there's a particular kebab house in Dalston that shits on the world, in my eyes).

Personally, I grew up with seaside chips. Very salty, quite dry, genuinely need to be drenched in vinegar. Good consistency, but resistant to ketchup. Since living in Bristol I've tried to love Evelyn's, really I have, but they're just not the seaside chips I grew up with.

I should also mention - there's a worrying trend for Chinese-style chips. This tend to be more oily than greasy, and tend to be cold before you've finished them. This is fine if they're an addendum to, say, pork balls and chicken fried rice, but on their own they're just substandard.

Now the Hull chip has optional spice. It's an odd thing. Sort of peppery, but not quite pepper. Also, there's this odd texture to them, like they've got a fine salty batter (which isn't the spice, I don't think). My understanding is that they take pride in their chips. It's not the typical 'will this do?' of chips in a kebab house. Oh no. Proper chips.

A bit of Googling reveals that you too can have the authentic Hull chip experience with chipspice

Came across this. Of MASSIVE interest:

http://www.lovechips.co.uk/assets/Pr...s-are-Best.pdf

Even Southerners Agree: Northern Chips are Best


If you’re looking for a great portion of chips, head north. So reveals a new survey for
National Chip Week, which shows six in ten people believe chips taste better in the
north of England than the south.
The great British chip has been a topic of fierce debate between the north and south
for more than a century. Arguments range from who opened the first chip shop in
England, to the best ways to enjoy chips: With gravy or dipped in mayo? Served
alongside mushy peas or curry sauce? Eaten with fingers or a fork? Britain is clearly
divided on how to enjoy the perfect portion of chips. But one thing the majority does
agree on – the best chips are found in the north of England.
It’s no surprise that northerners claimed their chips were best – although the passion
they showed was staggering. In fact a lip-smacking 93 percent of them claim the
north of England is the place to find the best chips. But they’re not alone - an
astonishing one in three southerners also threw their support behind the northern
chip!
The north and south of England have been divided on chips since the 1860s, even
disagreeing on who owns the rights to the first chip shop. The south claims it was
Joseph Malin, who opened a fish and chip shop in Cleveland Street, London in
1860. But the north is having none of it, firmly supporting Mr Lees, from Oldham,
Lancashire, who first served fish and chips from a wooden hut in the local market –
later moving to a shop which advertised itself as ‘the first fish and chip shop’ in 1863.
Wherever it was, it would appear that the north and south of England have finally
found something they all agree on – the chips in the north really do taste best.
But why do northern chips taste so good? – according to the results it could all be
down to local tradition. While only a third of southerners felt any provincial
connection to them, twice as many northerners (67 percent) felt chips were part of
their regional heritage.
Chef and chip connoisseur, Brian Turner supports this view. “Being a Yorkshire lad,
chips were part of my upbringing, and still remain one of my favourite dishes. As a
chef I’ve eaten chips all over the world and still believe the very best chips are made
in the north of England. I’m sure it’s the way we cook them, usually in dripping and
what we serve them with – they always seem to taste best close to home. There’s
nothing quite like going home and enjoying a plate of honest chips, with a bit of salt
and malt vinegar to top it all off.”
From Newcastle to Manchester, Glasgow to Leeds, the results showed that
northerners are infinitely more passionate about their chips. The most ardent fans
were those in the North East and North West, where just four percent broke ranks
and controversially favoured chips from the south. Those in Scotland and Yorkshire
and the Humberside were the next most fanatical, with nine in ten favouring northern
chips.
Although salt, vinegar and tomato sauce were universally popular accompaniments,
the results showed clear differences between the way northerners and southerners
enjoy their chips.
Those in the south were one and a half times as likely to add a dollop of mayonnaise
to their chips. In the north more ‘traditional’ accompaniments found favour -
northerners are two and a half times more likely to eat their chips with gravy; and
twice as likely to eat their chips with brown sauce. Mushy peas were also popular
with those in the north, who were more than one and a half times as likely to enjoy
their chips with them as southerners were. Favourite chip meals differed too, with
northerners favouring chip butties, and southerners opting for steak and chips,
although fish and chips found favour with all.
One thing everyone did agree on was that chips were part of Britain’s heritage. So,
whatever your favourite is, celebrate this culinary icon during National Chip Week (9-
15th February 2009)

See, this is proper British people forumming. No-one's saying 'dude' or pretending to like shit American things, like their terrible 'sneakers', we're having a decent conversation about chips. Proper British forumming.

That article is precisely the sort of bollocks that hacks me off though. I genuinely believe it's only Mancs who seriously believe in that North/ South bollocks. And I'm sure Herr Boy, as a bone fide northerner, would agree.

Whitby or scarborough had the best chips i have had and fairly cheap depending on where you go. i am old enough to remember chips being wrapped in newspaper and them keeping my legs warm on the bus on the way home, when bus drivers let you on the bus with chips that is. york has got some good chippies too.

one thing about chips from a proper chippy is that i can never put ketchup on them, it just doesnt seem right to me. mushy peas, curry sauce sure but never ketchup because that was always for the american french fries.

p.s. i have never had a good chip from a chinese takeaway. they dont have salt and vinigar on them even!

I've noticed a tendency of late, even in fish n chip shops, to use pre-cut potatoes that i have a suspicion have been defrosted before frying. This may account for an overall lack of substance in chips today compared with a few years ago.

I wonder if the 'seaside chip' is made differently to the city chip or whether the experience of eating them in the bracing coastal wind somehow affects our appreciation of them. Certainly the finest chips I've tasted in recent years have been from seaside towns, most notably Hastings.

The chinese style chip is ok so long as you know what you're getting. I don't really think of them as chips as such, similar to how i never really think of pork balls as pork. They're like a thing unto themselves.

I love the idea of the vague spiciness that comes with the Hull chip. I definitely agree that chips seem to be taken far more seriously in the north than they do in the south.

i didnt grow up hating the south or anything like that but some people i.e. the mancs like to rattle on about it. i mean there are the obvious differences like accents, eyebrow length and demeanor but otherwise its all very much a muchness.