Coming from Morecambe, you might have thought that Sam Jordison would have been mildly impressed by Oxford.

No such luck. His five years spent living here have not been enough to spare Oxford from inclusion in the one guide book in which no city wants to appear Mr Jordison was the co-author of Crap Towns, which identified “the 50 worst places to live in the UK”, as nominated by the British public.

It might not have been the most carefully researched urban study ever undertaken, but the book was to sell more than 120,000 copies.

A decade on Mr Jordison has overseen a new edition, Crap Towns Returns, and horror of horrors, there amongst the likes of Great Yarmouth, Dursley, Merthyr Tydfil and Blackpool is Oxford, “the golden heart of England”.

The insult is all the greater coming from someone who came to work in the city as a freelance journalist in 2003, living off the Cowley Road.

But placing Oxford as the 48th worst place to live is only the slightest of the slights that he has in store for Oxfordshire. For Crap Town Returns proclaims Banbury to be the 17th worst and puts Chipping Norton in third spot.

That’s right, Chipping Norton, the West Oxfordshire market town, nestling in the Cotswold Hills, the third worst town in England, positioned between Bradford and Southampton in the book that promised “to lift the concrete slab in the garden of England”.

When Mr Jordison first embarked on the new edition with Dan Kieran, the deputy editor of the Idler magazine, hundreds of nominations from members of the public poured in via Twitter, Facebook and the Crap Towns website.

While the authors aim to shame bad council planning decisions and highlight the bland and boarded up, reasons behind nominations can include anything from grinding poverty to snobbery.

But whatever stirred people to send in suggestions, Mr Jordison seems not in the least troubled that Oxfordshire figures so prominently in the search to establish the worst of Britain.

The truth is that the 36-year-old writer has been having far too good a time to worry about accusations of rudeness, disloyalty and being darn right unfair.

“It is pretty unscientific,” he chuckles. “It is all based on emotion, rather than the usual crime statistics, house, prices, local facilities, transport and schools.”

Nominations that are well written, and have the virtue of making him laugh, are good bets for inclusion — so at least there is the consolation that Oxfordshire has the funniest writers.

“In the same way that people laugh or moan about their family, they can laugh at the town where they come from or live, although they love it really.”

He and his co-author began being bombarded with messages soon after the last book came out.

He recalls: “They demanded to know when we were going to give Chipping Norton its just desserts, when we were going to reveal the truth about Banbury, why we hadn’t included Great Yarmouth in the earlier versions.”

So what have Mr Jordison and the book’s contributors got against Chipping Norton?

Well, not much apart from “rank corruption, lurking evil and spouting on about cheese” apparently. But Chipping Norton’s real sin seems to come pretty well down to the Chipping Norton Set — Jeremy Clarkson, Rebekah Brooks, David Cameron and the rest — most of whom actually do not even live in the town.

“Those who haven’t been to Chipping Norton probably imagine it as one of those beautiful Cotswold towns with solid, elegant buildings made of soft honeyed stone,” the book tells us.

“They probably also think of red telephone boxes, bicycling vicars, pretty gardens and cosy pubs. They’d be right too. It gets surprisingly cold in winter, and otherwise there’s a refreshing lack of concrete and even more welcome lack of chain stores. So, in plenty of ways, it’s a nice little town. I think I’d even enjoy living here, if it weren’t for one thing. Or rather several hundred of them.”

For it seems that it’s not just the presenter of Top Gear and members of the Murdoch clan who get to him then. He also displays a particular dislike for those who use Daylesford Organic, the award-winning farm shop and eating place, some 10 minutes’ drive from Chippy.

The cheese-making rock star Alex James stirs similar fury. The ex-Blur man is held up as a “good example of the Chipping Norton way of life”. His offence? “He now spends his time banging on about cheddars and pretending to be a country squire.”

So why attack a town because you don’t like a few residents who live in the area?

“These people are there for a reason,” he tells me. “It is their spiritual home. It’s cut off, expensive and they can live the country life and not have to worry about the terrible things happening elsewhere.”

When the first book came out, he recalls boarded-up high streets were something of a novelty.

Highlighting bad planning decisions that had seen beautiful buildings demolished or hidden behind new frontages had been the serious purpose of the project.

Then Gary Barlow, of Take That and The X- Factor fame, stirred new interest by tweeting how much he’d enjoyed reading Crap Towns, which had named Hull as the worst town.

The new edition, Mr Jordison says, shows that the nation’s talent for mockery, self-deprecation and laughing in the face of adversity remains as strong as ever.

The inclusion of Oxford in the new edition is clearly based on some local knowledge.

“In a lot of ways, I really like Oxford. There are amazing and beautiful places and always something going on,” says Mr Jordison, who now (ironically) lives in Norwich, a place damned by its association with Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge.

“But I couldn’t believe it when I came back and saw the student building at Port Meadow. It just robs the meadow of its character, spoiling what is unique about it.”

The closure of Jericho’s Castle Mill boatyard has also enraged him, along with the threat to libraries and the state of George Street.

Crap Towns informs its readers: “To drive down George Street on Friday night is to recreate the experience of Windsor Safari Park with kebabs. Hairy creatures will block your way...they will bend your aerial and display their bare bottoms.”

There are cruel words for his old stomping ground too, with Cowley Road said to have “fabricated the mirage of a cultural hotspot”.

As for Banbury, it is dismissed as “a town famous for being mentioned in an old song having a cross and pretty much nothing else”.

It is London, no less, that tops the list of the worst place to live in the UK, with Tottenham, Croydon and Teddington taking a hefty share of the blame.

Chipping Norton and London? Is Mr Jordison having a laugh?

The simple answer is, yes. To those who see it as a scourge of contemporary Britain, a modern Domesday Book of misery, or simply insulting, he shrugs.

“It is a book to be read on the toilet. It is meant to make people laugh. But I think the humour of contributors always has something behind it.”