Amis cites northern blight of city he's never seen

Aberdonians, long accustomed to allegations of parsimony, do not offend easily. But the novelist Martin Amis, whose next work is set partly in Aberdeen, has managed to uncover a sensitive spot in the Granite City by describing it as "one of the darkest places imaginable" and the "epicentre of gloom".

The remarks caused particular consternation because Amis, who uttered them from the comfort of a north London recording studio, has never visited the city.

The author's comments are "ignorant", the leader of Aberdeen City Council, Councillor Len Ironside, said. "It is very interesting that he has not even visited Aberdeen. The city is clean. People want to be here for the quality of life and the people who come here want to stay because it is a good place to live and work."

Richard Lochhead, the MSP for North-east Scotland, said: "Given the reality is that Aberdeen is a vibrant, popular city, if this supposedly intelligent man had gone to the trouble to visit the city he would have seen this for himself."

There is some evidence to support their civic pride. Aberdeen is credited with inspiring at least 24 other cities around the world that share its name.

The oil capital of Europe, it considers itself a thriving cosmopolitan centre of culture, commerce and enlightenment. The city is about 85 minutes' flying time from London, and visitors will arrive at the busiest civilian heliport in the world.

Aberdeen owes its distinctive appearance to locally quarried and widely exported granite which was also used in London to construct Waterloo Bridge, the terraces of the Houses of Parliament and the fountains of Trafalgar Square.

One of the greatest boasts of Aberdonians is that the city had two universities when the whole of England had only one. Aberdeen gave birth to the world's first holographic 3D camera, the MRI scanner, the UK's first iron lung and the first chair of medicine in the English-speaking world.

But Amis is not the first author to find fault with Scotland's northern city, which in size is ranked only behind Edinburgh and Glasgow. In 1983, the American writer Paul Theroux, in his book on travels in Britain, The Kingdom by The Sea, described Aberdeen as a "cold, stony-faced city, over-cautious, unwelcoming and smug" populated by "the most unbearable Scottish stereotypes". Only last year the Glaswegian Christopher Brookmyre, author of A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away, among many other novels, pilloried Aberdonians as "greedy, humourless, ungrateful, conceited and whingeing".

On the streets of Aberdeen yesterday the remarks of Martin Amis were dismissed as "uninformed claptrap" by local people.

"What do you expect from somebody who probably thinks civilisation ends at Watford?" Jim Hepburn, an office worker in the city, said.

"He doesn't know what he's talking about. I think his books are complete rubbish, even though I haven't read any. But then I don't need to, because Mr Amis has shown you don't need to experience something to pass judgement on it."