The Olympics were good, weren't they? The Queen coming out a helicopter. Mr Bean on the piano. The chunky mums painting their faces with Union Jacks. All rubbish, but sort of good at the same time. The British do crap stuff really well. There's plenty of it here in Shanghai, too. Crap stuff just out there, being a bit rubbish without a care in the world. To celebrate Team GB and Northern Ireland beating everyone at the Olympics, here’s how to recreate the best shit bits of Great Britain here in Shanghai.

Crap British Food

Yeah, British people have some rubbish food. But hey, it's not that bad: "British favourites such as baked beans and cream of mushroom soup have proved an unlikely hit with Chinese shoppers at Marks & Spencer's flagship store in downtown Shanghai," trilled the Guardian last month. We went down to Marks & Spencer and found plenty of crap British treats, like this tin of beans for 10rmb. Check out that utilitarian packaging. Pretty good food, this. Pour over some crackers or eat cold out of the tin, up to you. Marks & Spencer also has its own brand of that shortbread that comes in a crap tartan wrapper, but you get that stuff everywhere so we went for this novelty shortbread selection instead. Pictures of buses and little public school boys. All pretty rubbish. Good old Marks and Sparks. For the less discerning shit Briton, there's Tesco, Britain's largest supermarket chain. Unfortunately, they’ve savagely adapted their product range to the Chinese market and we didn't find that much crap British stuff here. But what there was, scored highly. Look at these Savory Biscuits. Yours for 13.90rmb. Excellent value, there. But our top find were these Ready Salted Crisps. Again, note that no frills packaging. See the way they list exactly how much fat and sodium there is in each packet. So sensible! Top marks, team GB.

Crap British Buses

If you want a tour on one of those open-topped red buses, Shanghai has them. But they also have a single old red London bus in normal service on the 911 line. You can catch it and pretend you're just taking the bus, while you're really enjoying the crap thrills of a real London double-decker. This one goes from Lao Xi Men, down Huaihai Lu all the way out to Hongqiao. You have to wait for about two hours for it to come along because there’s only one on the route – just like in London! We got dressed up like a little city gent and hopped on board for a ride out to the zoo. There were plenty of crap things going on out the window. Not much of it was specifically British, but still good, in a crap sort of way. The second deck of the bus was shut for most of the route. They told us it was broken. How do you break an entire deck of a bus? We don’t know, but they managed it. London Transport would be proud. When it stopped we snuck upstairs to take some pictures. The bus had TVs and air-conditioning, plus little tables with drink holders like on a train, but it was still a bit skanky and it smelt of pee, which made it feel authentically London. No drunken teenagers stabbing each other, which was a bit of a let down, but still not a bad approximation of public transport in the British capital.

Thames Town

Here we go, now this really is the apotheosis of shit Britain in Shanghai. Built in 2006 by the Shanghai Planning Commission, the 1 square km area of gated communities comes with its own market square, River Thames, red phone booths, crap pubs and faux-Georgian houses. Thames Town was devised as a way to draw people away from downtown Shanghai. Oddly, it didn't work and now most of the town is empty and falling down. We chose last Wednesday, when the typhoon was battering Shanghai, to visit this pocket of ersatz dreariness and it did not disappoint. It felt just as achingly melancholy as the real Thames basin back home. Even crapper, it's all made of plastic. The mock Tudor beams? Plastic. That stained glass window on the church in the square? Plastic. The pub was shut. The shops were shut. It felt like someone had set off a neutron bomb in a market town in Kent. On a Sunday. Splendid work, everyone. Really first-class crapness right there. Like some nightmarish underworld, Thames Town is easy to get to (take Line 9 to Sheshan Station, then a 30rmb cab to Taiwushi Xiaozhen) but almost impossible to leave – there are no cabs so you have to flag down traffic in the hope that someone stops and rescues you. In the end, we found an illegal cab that took us back to town for 150rmb.

Crap British Stuff

Few more bits of crap here. David Beckham playing cards, featuring 52 intimate portraits of the former England captain including Beckham staring out of a window, Beckham contemplating a foosball table and Beckham with a ’tash. As an added bonus, there’s a heavily pixelated shot of a Brazilian footballer on the back, with the words “Football World Cup.” Craptastic! Union Jack Nails Quite a to-do at the Olympics about all the different nails the girls had done. “Olympic nail art is clear winner of London 2012 trends,” farted the Guardian earlier this month. Not to be outdone, we found our own shit British nails at Sephora on Huaihai Lu (easily accessible by that crap London bus we rode). Not too shabby. 69rmb for 16 nails. Jolly Good Sport Lolly The name says it all, really. Just that. Piece of chocolate on a stick with a ribbon attached and a drawing of an old car. Jolly good.

Crap British Boozers

The archetypal crap British boozer The Bulldog shut down in May. Shame, really, because it was a fair approximation of a shit London pub. Lots of dark wood, crap fish and chips, every surface sticky with spilt beer. Now we’re left with the Park Tavern and glo London. glo is nothing like a pub. The Tavern isn’t bad. They’ve got pies for cheap on a Thursday. We went down ready to revel in British crapness but it was quite a nice place, so no luck there. They have pints of Marston's Pedigree, real British pale ale, for 60rmb. Drink it and grumble about the decline of the empire. Your best bet for a spot of crap Britain and a pint is Abbey Road. It’s not really a pub, and it’s quite nice, too, with a good half-priced happy hour that no one really knows about. But they also have the spectacular James Zhou working there. He’s a Chinese cockney. He’s never been to the UK but learned his fluent English watching Guy Ritchie films and now he speaks like an East End barrow boy. It’s like having your pint served by a Chinese Jason Statham. Well done James, you're the best British thing we found in Shanghai, and you're not even from the UK. *** For British crappery at its finest, try this excellent blog, www.shitlondon.co.uk.