Each bloc had a distinct pattern of money making, lifestyle and culture. They amounted, in these matters, to separate countries:
One England in which the well-to-do classes, from their numbers, wealth, leisure and influence, mould the external character of the civilisation and determine the habits, feelings and opinions of the people, the other England in which the structure and activities of large organised industries, carried on by great associated masses of artisans, factory hands and miners, are the dominating facts and forces.33
The distinction between an industrial North and genteel– commercial South persisted in the interwar period. Even though the South East had by this point amassed more manufacturing jobs than the North West, as new consumer industries clustered around the enormous London market, there still wasn’t much of an industrial stamp about the Home Counties, which continued to function as a pleasure park for the moneyed classes despite the wealth-sapping effects of the war and a bumpy world economy. ‘There is at least a tinge of truth in that picture of southern England as one enormous Brighton inhabited by lounge-lizards,’ commented Orwell.
For climatic reasons the parasitic dividend-drawing class tend to settle in the South. In a Lancashire cotton-town you could probably go for months on end without once hearing an ‘educated’ accent, whereas there can hardly be a town in the South of England where you could throw a brick without hitting the niece of a bishop.
The North, by contrast, remained home to most of the coal industry and other Victorian staples, and therefore also to ‘the most typical section of the English working class’. The region had become a byword, however, not for earnest industry – Hobson’s phrase – but for mass industrial unemployment. ‘To study unemployment and its effects you have got to go to the industrial areas,’ wrote Orwell. ‘In the South unemployment exists, but it is scattered and queerly unobtrusive. There are plenty of rural districts where a man out of work is almost unheard-of, and you don’t anywhere see the spectacle of whole blocks of cities living on the dole and the [Public Assistance Committee].’34
The North reflated during the Second World War, but in the post-1945 period its smokestack industries were no match for the newer manufacturing plant and bustling service economy of the South, which soon began to pull away again. To deflect criticism over this discrepancy, Labour and the Conservatives between them extended a modest state-aid regime across the whole of northern England, Scotland and Wales. Private-sector manufacturers were cajoled, but not directed, into siting overspill plant in the former depressed areas. ‘To the southerner, the North, like the poor, is “always with us”: and to assist the unluckier half of this island is a work of expensive charity,’ observed Neil Ascherson in 1962.35 Drifting into difficulty a decade later, British capitalism threw the burden of provincial manufacturing overboard. The real value of regional industrial assistance fell by two-thirds between 1975 and 1985.36
Industrial decline, retrenchment of the state’s social functions and, latterly, market-driven urban redevelopment have combined to blight large swathes of the North. ‘Staring out the window, the strangest thing I saw was how desolate and empty the streets are now. We would drive for minutes without seeing anyone,’ remarked journalist Stephen Armstrong, surveying the legacy of New Labour’s urban-regeneration programme in bulldozed east Manchester in 2011. ‘Instead of dirty, closely packed housing there were acres and acres of desolate ground all grassed over. You could still see the outline of streets, where houses used to be – but now, nothing. It was as if the Triffids had arrived.’ Armstrong’s previous work, The Super-Rich Shall Inherit the Earth (2010), had given an ambivalent assessment of the doings of the global economic elite on the British scene. The UK had become ‘a kind of damp Monte Carlo’, the world-financial hub of London attracting billionaires from around the world on account of its money-laundering facilities, property portfolios and enviable lifestyle options. Just as J. A. Hobson had written a century earlier, south-east England remains, for the privileged classes, ‘a place of residence and a playground’.37
Deindustrialisation has meant that contemporary regional disparities are characterised less by industry versus finance than by the positional superiority of London in a services-dominated national economic space – the northern rustbelt acting, in effect, as senior representative of left-behind England. However, since the North has never achieved the escape velocity needed to free itself from its industrial past, we may have licence to approach the region by way of the original sites of the manufacturing revolution, in order to see how they have fared. So defined, the North centres on the old Lancashire–Yorkshire textile belt, flanked by the ports of Liverpool and Hull; the former heavy-industrial zones of west Lancashire, west Cumberland, south Yorkshire and the North East coast; and the abandoned coalfields these conurbations grew up on and around. This North encompasses the major urban areas of the official North East, North West and Yorkshire– Humber regions while also taking in High Peak textile towns such as Glossop and New Mills as well as the north Derbyshire coalfield, which ‘looked to Sheffield as a natural centre’.38
On a statistical basis, much more of the Midlands belongs on the northern side of the regional divide. The aggregated socioeconomic indicators point to a fissure running east to west between the Humber and Severn estuaries, stranding not just the northern regions but also the West Midlands except Warwickshire and the East Midland counties of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire in the zone of relative economic disadvantage.39 In the aftermath of the deep industrial recession inflicted by the first Thatcher administration, Beatrix Campbell penned Wigan Pier Revisited (1984) in dialogue with Orwell’s original commentary. ‘The crisis of the eighties occasions a return visit,’ she explained. But Wigan, shorn of its cotton and coal, was now a town ‘much like anywhere else, with a bit of light engineering and service industries’. Campbell therefore extended her remit to the recession-blighted West Midlands. Its auto trade had been one of the twentieth century’s major growth industries; the car worker, not the coal miner, was ‘the modern paradigm of the working class’. When this industry hit the buffers in the seventies, it supplanted Lancashire cotton as the emblem of British manufacturing decline. To study mass unemployment and its effects, you didn’t any more need to travel further north than Coventry, where ‘on whole housing estates half the population are on the dole.’40
Crucially, though, the Midlands arrived at this sorry pass via a different route. Until the eighteenth century it had been
bound into a nexus of economic and social values which connected it to the prevailing county interests of the South. Anglican, Tory, protectionist, this ‘estate’ culture was inimical even to the pre-industrial values of the less heavily ‘countified’ North … Later, the eclipse of the [rural] Warwickshire interest and the rise of industry in the Midland towns appears to re-centre the region in the general scheme of things, bringing its character (if not its exact structure) more into line with the North and causing some renegotiation of its currency.41
Closer to the North, but still structurally distinct, the Midlands hosted some notable early experiments in factory production: Boulton’s Soho manufactory near Birmingham, Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, Wedgwood’s Staffordshire pottery works. But once Manchester had cornered the steam-powered cotton trade, the East Midlands was relegated to also-ran status – busy in the manufacture of hosiery and lace, boots and shoes, and subsequently also of locomotives, but no industrial behemoth – while Birmingham and the Black Country met the booming demand for a miscellany of domestic metal goods (pots and pans, locks, light arms, etc.) by multiplying the number of workshops and sweatshops instead of concentrating production in big factories. What the Industrial Revolution required, wrote Hobsbawm, was ‘the special kind of expansion which produced Manchester rather than Birmingham’.42 When J. A. Hobson in 1910 accused Birmingham of severing itself from the bulk of industrial Britain through its defection from Liberalism to Unionism, he explained this shift not only in terms of the charisma and political machine of former mayor Joseph Chamberlain, but also by reference to the city’s peculiar industrial structure: ‘small factories or workshops which do not favour effective
