There's a few jokes tossed in about the town being kind of a dead-end.
My British friends, I ask you...what is it about Newton Haven that sucks? Is it just some boring town or are there large groups of a specific stereotype there that bring it down?
It isn't a real place.
OOM POM PAH OOM POM PAH thats how it goes...
Many people hate the town they grew up in. At lest for some time in their life.
Glasgow's FOREMOST authority Italics = irony. Infer the opposite please.
It's based on two 'Garden Cities' in England just north of London - Welwyn & Letchworth. Lovely places in some ways (hedge rows, grass verges, tree lined streets, pretty shopping area, lots of gardens), also a bit dull in other ways (few pubs, lack of nightlife), but neither of them are far from London. The irony in the film is that they had all left 'Newton' because it was boring, yet in real life these out-of-London towns are growing more popular for younger couples because London has become extremely and disgustingly expensive.
shareYes, it looked like Welwyn Garden City
shareThe town isn't real, but its meant to symbolize the small hometown that everyone wants to escape.
For most of the guys, there was nothing there for them. Andy hated it, likely because he associated it with drunkeness and his accident, Peter was beat up and bullied there for most of his life, Steven and Ollie both had bigger dreams (and Steven likely thought it brought up painful memories about his unrequited love for Ollie's sister). Gary is the only one who has any kind of fond memories for the place, and you realize throughout the course of the movie it is more the nostalgia that he draws his love from, not the actual pubs or the town itself.
Young people hate villages for the same reason older people like them, everybody knows everybody. Also we city-dwellers like to mock them, insisting that they must get driven to school in a tractor or that their father is vegetables breeder. I've taught my children to have compassion towards these simple folk, but I was a right bastard in the 80's and wouldn't be invited on school outings if a farm or a village was involved.
Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived. -Isaac Asimov
Yes, but Garden Cities aren't villages, they're artificial towns, built all of a piece by benign philanthropists to house the deserving working class. This Wiki article looks pretty accurate to me - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_city_movement
All very worthy, very respectable, very dull. They were mostly teetotal, too, hence the joke about going on a pub crawl in one. There are pubs now, of course, but not many and not very interesting.
The Garden Cities were a noble idea though... to be fair, and the original ideals have been diluted elsewhere.
shareI used live in a sort of a one, here in the South London suburbs. The Southfields/Wimbledon Park grid. No pubs inside - so ringed with pubs just outside, over the teetotal border!
Very pleasant, but certainly way beyond the pocket of the deserving poor, these days, houses will be well over a million and flats more than half that. The only way for your ordinary joe to live in London these days is to have been born here, a good long time ago,
It's bland.
shareAs others have said, it is fictional, but I see the name translated as 'haven' (safe/boring)for some, but not others(straights). Plus after ww2 the uk built various supposedly ideal 'new towns. Ta da Newton Haven.
shareWell there's NEWPORT Pagnell just up the road from where this is set which is half new town... I suspect they took the name from there...
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