Who can identify the town that is the primary focus of this lament?

 

The Sky Reflects Our Labours

Her calloused hands and tired eyes,

are grey and wet and green and steely;

her gaze is stoic, and often flinty

at the JobCentre counter, as her future dies.

 

The grey-blue smoking ramparts march,

graven beyond the terracotta houses;

their Wellsian vision of War arouses

silent panic in survivors' search

 

for salvation. Failing which they'll settle,

like dubious believers, for fish and chips,

a night in, E-bombs and dodgy trips.

By three a.m. they'll test their mettle

 

on an ageing chav from Rotherham way,

but wake up in their clothes again;

threadbare and skint, they'll flee the den

for a lazy assault on easier prey.

 

Meanwhile, under slag-dust skies,

Britain's least romantic town

is buffing up her new renown

while underneath she simply cries.

 

Chris Hubbard

Perth

2017