I watched this video on one of those relentlessly chill comedown days, where YouTube takes you on a cosmically random journey from “World’s Most Dangerous Gangs” to “Russian Prisons”; from “Put A Donk On It” all the way through to this, “The Scallies of Manchester”.

This video stood out and has stayed with me for 2 reasons:

Firstly, I couldn’t believe scally culture was deemed so important – that anybody would produce a totally non-ironic piece asking existential questions, like, what is a scally? How do they behave? What do they want? Why are they here? Etc.

Secondly, I was actually thrilled thinking some American guys honestly sat down, “thought outside the box” and decided that scallies was a subculture that needed to be shown to people beyond these shores. How did they even know about scallies? Every country has an undercurrent of scum, but why focus on a subsection of ours?

So with bemusement, I watched it. What you’ll see is a bunch of, well, scallies, just sitting about, wearing trackies. These so called scallies were/ are essentially just the North’s answer to the chav. You know them because you’ve seen them, all the time, everywhere. To my brethren living up North, they’re all around you. Black Reeboks are the crep of choice for these lads.