Find and share an opinion (literature, local paper, blog posts, Wikipedia etc) of your local town or city, for example:

‘Sheffield, I suppose, could justly claim to be called the ugliest town in the Old World: its inhabitants, who want it to be pre-eminent in everything, very likely do make that claim for it.

Even Wigan is beautiful compared with Sheffield.

It has a population of half a million and it contains fewer decent buildings than the average East Anglian village of five hundred. And the stench! If at rare moments you stop smelling sulphur it is because you have begun smelling gas. Even the shallow river that runs through the town is usually bright yellow with some chemical or other. Once I halted in the street and counted the factory chimneys, I could see; there were thirty-three of them, but there would have been far more if the air had not been obscured by smoke. One scene especially lingers in my mind. A frightful patch of waste ground trampled bare of grass and littered with newspapers and old saucepans. All buildings are blackened within a year or two of being put up. I doubt whether there are any architecturally decent buildings in the town. The town is very hilly (said to be built on seven hills, like Rome) and everywhere streets of mean little houses blackened by smoke run up at sharp angles, paved with cobbles which are purposely set unevenly to give horses etc., a grip.

In the central slummy part of the town are the small workshops of the ‘little bosses’, i.e. smaller employers who are making chiefly cutlery. I don’t think I ever in my life saw so many broken windows. Some of these workshops have hardly a pane of glass in their windows and you would not believe they were inhabitable if you did not see the employees, mostly girls, at work inside.’

Discuss whether it is an accurate representation of your town and if not, why it might not be – they might be out of date (the above was written in March 1937 by George Orwell) or written with a specific purpose in mind (city tourist websites are often positively biased). Highlight the descriptive language.

Design a route that visits the rough area/s of the town/city written about and record down evidence that supports and opposes the statements within the text.

Whilst in the locality pupils could also create word clouds or write sentences that represent the town/city today.

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The Geographical Association (GA) has worked closely with the Field Studies Council (FSC) to develop these resources.