But the rage in Ely knows no bounds. It’s all the result of a survey by Travelodge, published last week, which listed the UK’s ten least visited cities.

Heading the list was Bradford (“ugly and boring”) followed by Wakefield (“dull and depressing”) Dundee (“bad weather”) Sunderland (“nothing to offer and the people speak in a funny accent”) and Newport, home of the Office for National Statistics (“high crime”).
 
All these cities can take it on the chin. They’ve been criticised before and generally have the sense to put it down to the ignorance of outsiders.
 
Not so in Ely, which appears at number 8 on the list. In the Cambridge News, the Mayor of Ely, Councillor Richard Hobbs, says he is very annoyed to see Ely listed alongside “places like Bradford”.
He goes on to present a cast-iron case for the city. “Ely is a beautiful place. We have the cathedral and a stunning river and every year we win awards for our loos.
 
“I challenge the bosses of Travelodge to come here and I will show them what Ely is really like. This sort of sensationalist survey is damaging to our city and I demand an apology.”
 
Other papers ran similar stories, though without any reference to Ely’s prize-winning loos. The Daily Mail wrote: “Other towns and cities in the least-attractive list were St David’s in Wales, Wells in Somerset, Ely in Cambridgeshire, Ripon in Yorkshire and Lichfield in Staffordshire”. An identical sentence appeared in Metro, which suggests it originated in an agency report.
 
Just writing down this list ought to have given the journalists pause. All these places have charms, some in abundance. Wells has a cathedral, Ripon is a pearl in North Yorkshire, Lichfield was the birthplace of Dr Johnson (quite enough to redeem any city, even had it been Sunderland) and Ely ... well, we already know about Ely.
 
The truth is that Travelodge never claimed these five places were unattractive, but simply unvisited – “predominantly due to the fact that Britons have not heard of these cities and they do not know their geographical locations”. So while the top five were unvisited because they were deemed unattractive, the second five got no tourists out of sheer ignorance.
 
That puts rather a different complexion on the survey. It was badly reported, and Travelodge is not to blame. Its press release, available on its website, makes the position clear. Of 5,000 adults questioned, 72 per cent didn’t know where Ely was. Travelodge describes it, correctly, as beautiful and historic.
So Councillor Hobbs might have done a bit of research, as might the Cambridge News, the Daily Mail, and Metro. It wasn’t hard.
 
So here, to soothe him, is a picture of Ely Cathedral, sometimes called “The ship of the Fens”. I’d have used a picture of the prize-winning loos, but I couldn’t find one. 
            
                          
 
If Noel Coward were still with us, he might have written another verse to the song that provides my headline. “They’re out of sorts in Sunderland/ and terribly cross in Kent/ They’re dull in Hull/ and the Isle of Mull/ is seething with discontent.” But what rhymes with Ely?
 
I’m afraid Councillor Hobbs will have to console himself with the conclusion to the second verse, very appropriate as an election approaches:
 
                                         We all get bitched about, lads
                                            Whoever our vote elects
                                        We know we’re up the spout, lads,
                                         And that’s what England expects.
                                               Hurray-hurray-hurray!
                                               Trouble is on the way