These words were written by an Aberdonian, and perhaps one detects in them the hard edge of rivalry between the two east-coast cities. Yet their author's overall judgement of Dundee as a place, and as an urban landscape, was equally severe: ‘Dundee remains unspeakably ugly.’ Similar judgements of the city have dogged it throughout its modern history, and continue to do so today. Dundee, Scotland's Murmansk, the ghastliest place on earth, reminiscent of parts of Gdansk or Grozny, with its sour-faced and miserable inhabitants, has had a bad press. Even Dundonians are not exempt from taking a perverse pleasure in the ‘grim’ story of their city and its inhabitants. An example of this appeared in Scotland on Sunday towards the end of 1999, when a series of Police Court photographs of persistent drunkards from the turn of the twentieth century was used to reinforce the popular image of Dundee as Scotland's centre of hard drinking amongst a nation of hard drinkers. Well-worn shibboleths were churned out, regardless of chronology and without qualification, leaving readers in no doubt that nineteenthcentury Dundee was truly a wretched, drink-drenched place. The pictures represented, however, the few, not the many. They were of recidivists, of individuals similar to Anne Monroe, who early in 1867 found herself in the Police Court charged with disorderly conduct; it was the ninety-first time she had been convicted.