You see signs everywhere about a town being twinned with another random town, does anyone know what benefits this gives the town (if any)? And I’m assuming there’s usually a connection between the places twinned. Genuinely curious to how the process works

by Exchangenudes_4_Joke

25 comments

  2. I pity those other towns. Redditch is where you would put the tube if you were giving England an enema.

  3. They’re connected via wormhole and are perfect mirror images, with the only difference being the languages used.

  5. You swap postboxes. True story. Redditch has a French postbox.

  8. When I was a kid I thought it meant the layouts of the twinned towns were identical and that when I got older, I could move there if I wanted to and I’d know my way around.

  12. It shows where your local councillors go on holiday a couple of weeks a year, paid for by you, under the guise of “fact finding”.

  13. I read about this the other day. My understanding was that it allows local authorities to share knowledge, difficulties and solutions with a town or city with similar characteristics—pen pals.

  14. Just a jolly for the councillors I think, they go over to those towns and get shown a good time, the councillors from those towns come over here for the same.

  15. The residents of each town line up in pairs and perform the schoolboy “Blood Brothers” ritual of each cutting a palm and smearing them together.

  16. Well a really small village near my parents, Empingham is twinned with Paris. I think they put it up as Paris never bothered to answer them. Not sure if it means anything though.

  19. Serious answer – the way it works today goes back to WW2 and the bombing of Coventry when the mayor wrote a telegram to people in Stalingrad, and later on a subsequent mayor organised a round of donations from a bunch of the women in Coventry which was sent to Stalingrad during the battle there – though after the invasion of Ukraine, Coventry has apparently terminated their link with Volgograd and has been talking about twinning with Mariupol instead. Twinning was initially a way of showing solidarity and creating links between cities that had gone through traumatic events. After the war, it sort of evolved as a way to foster friendship between cities directly.

    These days it’s mostly about promoting trade and tourism, establishing business links and so on. You sometimes see twins purely based on the names of two towns – Dull in Scotland is twinned with Boring in the US, for example. It’s basically councils doing their own diplomacy and establishing their own trade links and international partnerships and whatnot.

    As to *how* cities create these links, it probably varies country to country and city to city. There are organisations that help cities find suitable twins and act as facilitators as needed during the twinning process (a superficial Google is telling me Sister Cities International is the organisation in the US, Australia has Sister Cities Australia, but I can’t find one that covers the UK). It doesn’t look like there’s a formal process, it might just be two mayors know each other personally, prominent people within two cities might know each other and lobby their mayors to create that link, or (in the case of Dull and Boring) the mayors might have just got in contact with each other and decided to twin because it’d be funny. Once they get in contact, the mayors sign an agreement to create that link, and that agreement can basically be whatever they want, it’s not something set in stone or anything.

    [This is the guide Sister Cities Australia published](https://www.sistercitiesaustralia.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/FAQ1-Setting-up-a-Sister-City-Relationship-MJ-9-2021.pdf) for creating twin links, I’d assume the process is broadly the same everywhere.

  20. It’s where the local town councillors go for their free all expenses paid holidays.

  21. I know this town from the Brass Boardgame! It is quite useless.

  22. In my old Hometown we could sign up for a penpal scheme & get a penpal in the twinned town.

    I never bothered, but did once go to our town hall & asked for some branded stationery to send my (fictitious) penpal. I ended up with a ruler & some other tat with our concil’s name on it

  23. Manchester’s twinned with Wuhan. They gave us covid in return for Shaun Ryder.

  24. Has anyone been abroad and seen a town in France twinned with a British town??

  25. Hey I live in Redditch, literally never see it mentioned anywhere, so it’s quite odd seeing it here

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