toward the end of the New Labour period, the region has it all: breath-taking countryside, the Sellafield nuclear complex, fish and chips.7 Through all their ups and downs, northerners have retained their inventiveness and independence of mind. Derelict industrial sites have found new life as heritage parks, leisure attractions and loft conversions. Manchester has been ‘utterly, wonderfully transformed’ since an IRA bombing in 1996 blasted away the city’s declinist mentality. Likewise, Liverpool is an ‘astonishingly different’ place to the decaying, demoralised hulk of the eighties. The credit for the latter’s revival belongs to Michael Heseltine, Thatcher’s minister for Merseyside, whose diagnosis of the city’s ills – sidelined and demoralised local leadership, weak corporate management and belligerent trade unions – was ‘spot on’.7 Forget, for a moment, that Liverpool still had one of the worst real unemployment rates in Britain, and that Manchester suffered the largest decrease in gross disposable household income per head, relative to the UK average, of any local area under New Labour and the Cameron coalition.8
In language reminiscent of Thatcher’s diatribe about ‘moaning minnies’ when challenged by a Tyne Tees reporter about high unemployment in the North East, Wainwright warns about a victim mentality spreading out from coalfields: a misplaced suspicion that London will never play fair by the region. It would be much better, in his view, to accentuate the positive. ‘I know there is a downside to life up here, just as there is everywhere in the world. But we really don’t need to go on about it.’ Northern editor of what was once the Manchester Guardian, Wainwright would probably agree that the North has a reputation for plain speaking: it warrants sharper treatment than this.9
Part of the problem in writing about the North is how to characterise a region which constitutionally doesn’t exist. For as long as it lasts, the United Kingdom is a unitary, not a federal, state: political power is focussed on the golden triangle of Whitehall, Westminster and St James’s – a West End counterpart to the concentration of financial power within the Square Mile. Devolved parliaments and assemblies in the Celtic fringe exist purely at Westminster’s pleasure, as periodic reversions to direct rule over Northern Ireland attest. Delegation of executive functions from London to the English regions is officially countenanced only in contingency planning for a nuclear attack or – almost as bad – large-scale trade-union strike action.10 There used to be a Northern region running along the Scottish border until the Major government, tinkering with the structure as it looked to draw in EU funding, reassigned Cumbria to the North West and created a North East region out of the remainder. So much for the official North: no more than a caprice of the Whitehall mind.
If the North isn’t a hand-me-down from the UK’s archaic constitutional arrangements, nor is it a product of simple geography. The old riverine markers – Defoe likened his foray beyond the Trent to crossing the Rubicon – weren’t clinching facts even in feudal times. According to a recent appraisal, the medieval North could be said to have comprised the five and a half counties above the Humber, Ouse and Ribble; the eight counties north of the Humber, Trent and Mersey; or these eight together with Cheshire and Lincolnshire.11
Does the North announce itself with any clarity? A sense of cultural belonging certainly exists, but it’s low-wattage compared to the nationalist imaginaries of the Basque Country and Catalonia, with their separatist movements, distinctive languages and jealously guarded autonomies. Unlike Spain, regional identities in England have been levelled out by a millennium of centralised rule and the modern impress of powerful institutions like the Fleet Street of old and the BBC. The British state may have independence movements to contend with in Northern Ireland and Scotland but there is no prospect of the English core coming unstuck. Despite a regional inflection to voting patterns, the English choose between national political parties and consume the same news. The Northern Echo, self-styled ‘Great Daily of the North’, has a circulation of just 23,000 spread across County Durham, north Yorkshire and Teesside. Another ‘national newspaper for the North’, called 24, launched in Carlisle in 2016 only to close within a few weeks, squeezed out by the Fleet Street dailies. Three northern regionalist parties emerged either side of the 2014 European Parliament elections, beginning with Yorkshire First, founded by an expat Holmfirth businessman, but it would require the introduction of regional assemblies elected by proportional representation to give such groups a foothold, and the Holyrood model looks increasingly foolhardy from a Whitehall perspective – devolution is ‘a dangerous game to play’, says Blair – so there will be no significant loosening of centralist shackles.12 Taken together, the current North East, North West and Yorkshire–Humber regions are two-and-a-half times the size of Scotland in terms of population and economic output, apparently without meriting any relaxation of direct rule from London.
In academic literature, ‘a consensus emerges that northern consciousness is both extremely fragile and generally secondary to other systems of identification.’13 Even smaller regional groupings struggle to overcome local particularities. The North East is ‘incoherent and barely self-conscious’; Lancashire ‘more a geographical expression than a cultural unity’; Yorkshire the butt of Conservative jokes on account of infighting between its municipal elites.14 Simon Green, co-editor of the Northern History journal at the University of Leeds, concedes that
England’s historic regions seldom enjoyed much more than the trappings of independent government. As a result, they always wanted, and now self-evidently lack, many of the most important political dimensions of modern regionalism. That institutional poverty had inevitable cultural implications too. Put bluntly, English regionalism was and is comparatively weak.15
Remarkably, Northern History nevertheless managed to pull together a working model of the North in short order. When it launched in 1966, the journal defined its target region, without further ado, in terms of ‘the six northern counties’: Cumberland, Durham, Lancashire, Northumberland, Westmorland and Yorkshire. Six shortly became seven with the surreptitious addition of Cheshire at the behest of editorial committee member Arthur Taylor. ‘The change was not only silent, it was unexplained in private as well as in public sources. It remains, largely, unexplained,’ comments Green quizzically.16 The selection may apparently serve as its own justification.
Northern History grew out of a campus study group established in Leeds in the late fifties by Asa Briggs, liberal historian of Victorian Britain, just as fresh ideas like new social history were emerging onto the academic scene. ‘Professional historians have begun to pull apart “nation”, “economy” and “society” and to examine the nature and significance of local differentiation,’ wrote Briggs. His edited volume Chartist Studies, a set of area-based studies, dates to this period. Outside the academy, public agencies and private-sector developers were combining to transform the face of the North – slums and smokestacks giving way to highrise flats, industrial estates, shopping precincts, ring roads and motorways. ‘The North of England is changing so rapidly,’ Briggs observed, ‘that now is the time to clarify some issues in its history which it may be difficult to sort out in the future.’17 The idea of the region was also in political vogue. Macmillan appointed a minister for the North East; Wilson pledged to create economic planning machinery in every region.18
In Northern History’s inaugural issue, Briggs urged contributors to keep away from the parish-pump, antiquarian school of local history. ‘Outward-looking rather than inward-looking northern history is what is most needed, the kind of history which sets out to compare.’ But he was writing from a new billet at the University of Sussex, and founder editor Gordon Forster instead aimed for a balance between comparative analysis and more conventional town and county history. Forster’s own interests were weighted towards the latter: he contributed well-rounded pieces on early modern Beverley, Hull and York to the famously antiquarian Victoria County History series.19 In the event, Northern History’s publication record has favoured local and discrete studies – the evolution of the Doncaster corn market, burial practices in the northern Danelaw – over wide-angled or unorthodox perspectives. Comparative pieces
