'I thought it was a hole' - Anger over Guardian column on Widnes

Author Stuart Turton said Widnes was 'a load of chemical factories and manufacturing plants with some houses squished between them'. 

He added he hated living in the town and as a child wished he could 'move to Runcorn'. 

The Costa first novel award winner also said he was regularly 'chased by a teenager with a stick that had nails hammered through it' and that it was a place where you 'could reliably depend on somebody to shout abuse, or maybe throw rocks, or steal your bus money' as well as racial slurs often being painted on his local chippy.

Many comments said they were not sure which area of Widnes Stuart had lived but it 'certainly wasn't the town they grew up in'. 

While others took to Twitter to disagree with the author and described the piece as an attempt to 'degrade the town for a few laughs'. 

One tweet described the piece as 'lazy and full of apocryphal cliché' while another said it was 'A dated snapshot full of inaccuracies from a writer who hasn’t even been back to the town for years'.

The author has since attempted to defend the piece on Twitter adding: "I'm sorry you think I'm sneering at Widnesians, that wasn't my intent.

"There are such nice people there, but I've got terrible memories of violence and bullying and gloom.

"Your experiences of Widnes don't resemble mine at all. I'm glad."

Many Twitter users also invited the writer to return to the town to see it now. 

One user added: "Trust me, it’s nothing like your article."

What did Stuart Turton say about Widnes?

The piece appeared on The Guardian website and in the paper with the headline: ‘It was famous for its smell. On bad days, the air punched you in the nose’

It read: On a map, it looks as if it’s sidling up to Liverpool to scrounge a cigarette. Manchester has taken a step back, probably to get away from the smell. Widnes was famous for its smell. The town was basically a load of chemical factories and manufacturing plants with some houses squished between them. On bad days, the air punched you in the nose.

I hated living there. As an adult, I know that Widnes is a deprived town that’s suffered awful neglect under successive governments who don’t give a toss about the working class or the places they live. As a kid, I just thought it was a hole.

I didn’t understand what mental illness was, so I thought it was perfectly normal that every few weeks we’d be chased by a teenager with a stick that had nails hammered through it. That was just the price of playing out. You could reliably depend on somebody to shout abuse, or maybe throw rocks, or steal your bus money.

There was always litter on the ground and dog poo in the grass.

“Paki” was a catchall racial slur for anybody who wasn’t white, which is why the owners of our local chippy had to scrape it off their window every other week, despite being Thai.

Every other place I read about, every place I saw on telly, seemed better. When I was eight, I’d sit at my bedroom window, staring at the lights of our neighbouring town of Runcorn, wishing I could move there.

I’d never been, but that didn’t stop me pining. One night my mum caught me sneaking down the stairs after bedtime, my rucksack filled with underpants, books and, somewhat inexplicably, a saltshaker. She asked where I was going and I showed her the money in my hand.

I was catching the bus to Runcorn, I said. She put me back in bed and took me herself the next day. It wasn’t any better, and I began to wonder if the entire world was like Widnes.

That feeling persisted into my teens. Everybody seemed to have jobs that sucked the life from them.

On Fridays, angry young men drank to forget, then started fights to feel better about themselves.

Paul Simon had apparently been so demoralised by the place in the 60s he wrote “Homeward Bound” on the platform of Widnes station. He’d only been visiting.

I had to bloody live there, and each year it seemed to get worse. An Office for National Statistics report found that our borough had the fourth highest rate of cancer deaths in the country.

Our municipal golf course was shut because arsenic started bubbling up through the ground.

Widnes is full of stories like that. It’s the sort of place where horrible things queue up to happen.

Reading was my escape. Agatha Christie mysteries were my favourite. They were delivered to our house by our lovely neighbour Doris, who’d buy them from car boot sales for me. The good people are like that there. They’re funny, kind. They’ll go out of their way to help each other.

I haven’t been back to Widnes for a long while, but I sincerely think our country would be better off if parliament relocated there.

If our next prime minister were forced to suck in Widnes’s stinking air for a few years, we’d have a better, fairer, more equal country in a decade.