by Ask people where the North begins, and you’ll get the weirdest and weirdest answers.
“The North definitely starts after you leave Staffordshire and enter Cheshire on the West Coast Main Line,” declared a teacher from Blackheath, Manchester, before adding that although he was “essentially in the North” he had friends in Newcastle who “says I’. m from the Midlands”. Mm-hmm.
In contrast, an undergraduate at the Royal Academy of Music suggested that Stoke-on-Trent – in Staffordshire – is the point where things start to “feel up north” before qualifying, confusingly, of course, that the ” Proper North” at Liverpool.
“The North begins at Hull,” announced a bookseller from a native of – you guessed it, Hull – telling me it was a silly question anyway because “the North is not just about geographical boundaries.”
“Nottingham” was the choice of a retired engineer from Lancashire, which puts him at odds with a cultural conservative from, yes, Nottingham, who said “I’m from the Midlands and we don’t identify as Northern Ireland – although I think we probably wish it’s with us” specifying Sheffield and South Yorkshire as the right gateway.
Other answers that were much more recherché: Bicester Village, and, even more absurd, and an answer you get a lot from London: Watford in Hertfordshire, which is particularly offensive because it is on the Metropolitan Line of the London Underground.
This last is a corruption of the Watford Gap in Northamptonshire, a crossing in the limestone ridge that crosses England diagonally just north of the village (not town) of Watford. In popular culture, the motorway service station that sprung up here in 1959, the same day the M1 opened, is often referred to as the gateway between North and South. If you don’t believe the Midlands don’t exist, this is very fancy as it would put Leicester and Norwich in the North, and almost Stratford-on-Avon.
But it makes some sense culturally and metaphorically. It was here, in the 60s, that the Beatles stopped to get a greased plate on the way from Liverpool to gigs in the South – many other rock stars too. Gritty, but with an aura of rock star swagger: no wonder this became the southern metonym for the North.
Birth of the North
The drift of the great industrial cities such as Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Sheffield in the 18th and 19th centuries is sometimes said to be the historical frontier of the North. But its roots stretch back much further. The idea of ”The North” as a separate political entity probably dates from the 3rd century AD, when the Roman province of Britain was divided into Britannia Superior, ruled from Londinium, and Britannia Inferior, ruled from Eboracum (York).
Britannia Inferior consisted largely of what we call the Midlands and the North today, up to Hadrian’s Wall – the remoteness from a ruling city, in this case Rome, has always defined the North. This boundary is closely aligned with those who believe that the North begins at Nottingham today.
After the dissolution of the Empire and the settlement of England by Germanic tribes, the Angle of Northumbria – “North” of “Humber” to the River Forth – became briefly bright in the 7th century as a great sign of learning with the Reverend Bede, monasteries were in full swing. with books, and “Kings of the North” such as Edwin (616-633), who sometimes recognized other Anglo-Saxon kings as great lords, showing how the North, and its stronghold at York, could be the dominant political force in these islands.
But, at the end of the 7th century, the “sea spirits” from Scandinavia came to England first to raid but then to plow and plow people. The “Great Heathen Army” wintered in East Anglia in 865 after which kingdom after kingdom fell, like bloody dominoes. Much of Northumbria was overrun, and so was Mercia. By 880, the Norse settlers had control of almost all of England and it fell to Alfred of Wessex, frantically transferring books from his hearth in Winchester as the dark tides of the Norse invasion swept across the land, to the English kings. to unite what remained and defeat the pagan settlers. in London in 886.
As a result, Guthrum, the Norse leader, agreed to convert to Christianity and retreat within agreed boundaries with a distinct legal system – the Danelaw – northeast of a line from the Thames Estuary to the Mersey. It is true that there was intermarriage and cultural cross-pollination – the jury trial, for example, comes from the Danelaw. But for many years the Norse and Danish settlers were the haunts of the Anglo-Saxons to the south, and it is perhaps not too presumptuous to suggest a sort of doubtful historical date from that time.
The fall in the North
The Danelaw were eventually incorporated into the unitary kingdom of England. But the people living north of the Humber and Merseyside would be defiant against Southern rule. Perhaps the most vivid episode in the general drama of misery was William’s Harrying of the North, to enforce his authority, which was opposed by the Northumbrian and Danish nobles.
In the cruel winter of 1069-1070, towns, villages and farms were destroyed across Yorkshire, Lancashire and Durham. Thousands of people may have been lost in the north; when the Domesday Book was compiled in 1086, much of Northern England was wasteland, and historical memory was enforced as the region fell into decline following deindustrialization in the mid-20th century.
Another rebellion followed – the Pilgrimage of Grace and the Rebellion of the Northern Earls against the authority of the Northern Council, inaugurated by Richard III, and led by York. Finally, their independence was broadly aligned with the three administrative mega-units that officially comprise the North today: the North West, the North East and Yorkshire and the Humber.
“Feeling” of the countryside
These historical boundaries, as well as the natural features of the landscape, may inform our understanding of what can be called the North, geographically: the seven historic counties of Cumberland, Northumberland, Westmorland, Durham, Lancashire, Yorkshire and – the most controversial. – Cheshire. So the North could be bounded by three rivers: the Humber, Trent and Mersey.
But this only gets us so far. As everyone points out, the North is as much a mind as it is a place. As Morrissey says, “when you’re up north, you’re up north forever, and you’re inspired by a certain sense of life that you can’t quite reach.” But what does this mean?
When I traveled around the North earlier this year on a book tour, I found nothing but warmth and conviviality, beauty and Saturnalia, and a bit of sunshine, at almost every turn – in north Manchester with its fizzy red wines and elegant canals. -walks, in Darlington’s horror piazza with karaoke pouring into the air, in the hills and bookstores of Glossop and Ilkley and the coves and beaches of Liverpool and its satellites; in Newcastle, York, Leeds and Sheffield. In Manchester, someone told me I was the biggest Southerner he’d ever met (although that didn’t stop him from visiting me in London.)
The problem – or the beauty – of these fun stereotypes is that they can be a boost in the eye of someone who, when worn to the right, could be a badge of shame, a badge of pride. So, while a Southerner might accuse a Northerner of being short-tempered and lacking in social friendliness, a Northerner might again agree that they are just straight talk and that this only reflects the evasive and vague nature of the accuser .
When the Southerner could lump all the Northerners together as a working class, well they might protest that they are meritocratic and egalitarian, much better than being much better than being much higher and wreck carving the class. And where the people of the South could see a narrow parochial mind, the Northerners see only “citizens of nowhere”. This symbiosis of the soul feeds into the landscape as well. The North could reasonably be seen as a huge industrial zone but at least it was not a parasitic “Great Wen” that fed the graft of the North.
Might outsiders see the North as oppressively urban or, with its peaks, lakes, and murderous moors, as wild in the countryside? It’s hard to find the characteristics of the North when so much is a matter of perspective.
Identity, rooted in dialect
In the end, I suspect, a lot of it comes down to taste. Although Northern accents are highly regarded as an expression of local identity, they are too often seen by outsiders as a joke.
“I have not heard a better house story told in seven years” declared an MP in a speech given by the Speaker of the House who was born in Yorkshire in 1547. It cannot be a coincidence that the Watford Gap line is also about to be released. North-South brightness between long and short vowels, between “past/pahst”, “oop/up” and “falctha/bath”.
Reading Keats aloud Ode to the Nightingale at school in the early 1950s, the future poet Tony Harrison recalls how his teacher cut him off when he recited the line “Mi’ art aches”: “That’s enough,” he said: “you’re a barbarian .” Perhaps there is truth in the adage that language ‘communicates and annoys people’.
Other countries have North-South divisions. In Italy, the poor south is often contrasted with the richer north. But it is more prominent in Britain, partly because of London’s size – 15 times the population of its nearest Northern rival, Liverpool – and its unusual concentration of turbines of wealth, seat of power and headquarters of the arts. . and occupations all in the same place; “cattle”, as the Northumbrian Bede said in the 8th century, “of men and goods from all parts of the world.” “That London” is a point of contention to animate or evaporate the North but all the Northerners I spoke to were welcoming.
“That’s the best thing about London, it accepts you,” my Hull-born bookseller friend told me, “so I don’t necessarily see myself as a missionary or a northerner, but I do, I think, as a Londoner .” Dr. Johnson probably felt the same way, and perhaps the North and the South are not as antithetical as first thought.
