An artisanal centre slow to switch over to the factory system, Birmingham followed its own distinct trajectory; it has a different story to tell.44
Such are the objective coordinates that have historically differentiated England’s North, Midlands and South. On the other side of the coin is the question of when, and in what ways, the North became a subjective category of widely received social or political significance. What were the stages and markers of this process? Once again, the answer appears to lie in the industrial era. Although Helen Jewell’s book The North–South Divide (1994), subtitled The Origin of Northern Consciousness in England, purports to track regional self-consciousness back to Northumbrian times, what emerges from her trawl of the archives is instead the cultural othering of a backwater region – in her rendering, ‘ferocious, obstinate and unyielding’ – within the upper ranks of southern English society. In other words, it shows the all but complete absence of regional self-consciousness in the period she covers, roughly 600–1750. What at the end she does concede, to her credit, is that in so far as there were conceptions of the ‘North’ as a separate region/culture within England, these came from the South, not the North itself. But they were themselves at most casual and sporadic.45
Genuine crystallisation of a systematic identification of the North as a region seems to date only from the 1850s, the moment of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel. For Raymond Williams, ‘the mood of England in the Industrial Revolution is a mood of contrasts’. North and South captured it best of all the industrial novels. The book is an adventure in binaries: town and country, Anglicanism and Dissent, rich and poor, paternalism and laissez-faire, even a little pride and prejudice.46 It is also the strongest dramatisation of the changed regional equation resulting from the spatial concentration of the factory system. Gaskell’s protagonist, Margaret Hale, is a young gentlewoman from Hampshire with London tastes cultivated during visits to an aunt in Harley Street. When her clerical father has Doubts, the family must relocate to Milton-Northern, a fictionalised Manchester. Unfortunately, Margaret has ‘almost a detestation for all she had ever heard of the North of England’. The Hales travel to Milton via London, where Margaret’s mother rhapsodises about the fine carriages and vast plate-glass shop windows. On arriving at Milton, a different cityscape confronts them:
Long, straight, hopeless streets of regularly built houses, all small and of brick. Here and there a great oblong many-windowed factory stood up, like a hen among her chickens, puffing out black ‘unparliamentary’ smoke, and sufficiently accounting for the cloud which Margaret had taken to foretell rain. As they drove through the larger and wider streets, from the station to the hotel, they had to stop constantly; great loaded lorries blocked up the not over-wide thoroughfares. Margaret had now and then been into the city [of London] in her drives with her aunt. But there the heavy lumbering vehicles seemed various in their purposes and intent; here every van, every wagon and truck, bore cotton, either in the raw shape in bags, or the woven shape in bales of calico. People thronged the footpaths, most of them well-dressed as regarded the material, but with a slovenly looseness which struck Margaret as different from the shabby, threadbare smartness of a similar class in London.47
Manchester versus London: a smoke-ridden monoculture dealing in a single commodity, juxtaposed with the varied commercial life of the capital, its high-end retail outlets and better-turned-out common folk. While it is possible to match up certain functionally equivalent towns on either side of the North–South divide – cathedral cities Canterbury and York; spa towns Bath and Harrogate; the ports of Bristol and Newcastle – there are no southern counterparts to the great industrial cities of the North. As Gaskell puts it, ‘Milton is a much more smoky, dirty town than you will ever meet with in the South.’48
Margaret’s impression of a difference in social mores in her new home is soon vindicated. The factory hands are brassy; the mill owners bluff. ‘One had need to learn a different language, and measure by a different standard, up here in Milton.’ Disagreements multiply about social ethics and standards of living. Margaret is appalled by the poisonous industrial relations in the town. Her paternalistic instincts are perhaps in keeping with the Hale family’s accustomed milieu of clergymen and country squires; they may also reflect Gaskell’s reading of Thomas Carlyle. But in Milton they run up against the hard-faced Manchester school of self-help. This from cotton magnate John Thornton:
I value my own independence so highly that I fancy no degradation greater than that of having another man perpetually directing and advising and lecturing me, or even planning too closely in any way about my actions. He might be the wisest of men, or the most powerful – I should equally rebel and resent his interference. I imagine this is a stronger feeling in the North of England than in the South.49
Margaret defends the southern way against Thornton but changes tack when quizzed by careworn factory hands about a land where, according to her wistful remembrances, ‘food is cheap and wages good, and all the folk, rich and poor, master and man, friendly like’. No, she insists, the South would not suit them:
You would not bear the dullness of the life; you don’t know what it is; it would eat you away like rust. Those that have lived there all their lives, are used to soaking in the stagnant waters. They labour on, from day to day, in the great solitude of steaming fields – never speaking or lifting up their poor, bent, downcast heads … You could not stir them up into any companionship, which you get in a town as plentiful as the air you breathe, whether it be good or bad.
This overcooked passage ignores a tradition of agricultural protest, most conspicuously the Swing riots of 1830–31, but serves its purpose of bringing England’s two halves back into essential balance. One of Margaret’s interlocutors obligingly concludes, ‘North an’ South have each getten their own troubles. If work’s sure and steady theer, labour’s paid at starvation prices; while here we’n rucks o’ money coming in one quarter, and ne’er a farthing th’ next.’50
Identification of the North as a society composed of just two classes, industrialists and factory workers, neither of whom existed in the South, underwent two subsequent, crucial modifications. Next came the moment when, the industrial bourgeoisie having so completely either fused with capital or the ruling class at large or just faded away, the North became identified essentially solely with the working class that remained in situ, forming anyway the great majority of the population. This wasn’t necessarily at all a negative projection. It dates from a century later, between the late 1950s and the arrival of the Beatles in 1962 – the years of Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, kitchen-sink dramas such as A Taste of Honey and Room at the Top, and the beginnings of Granada television in Lancashire and Yorkshire, whose success would force BBC output onto northern terrain (The Likely Lads, Z Cars).51 For a brief period, this heady brew took the character of a creative insurgency against the southern citadels of cultural complacency. Arguably it was ultimately incorporated (a first wave of corporate ‘diversity’) into the renewal/déclassement of the London cultural–intellectual establishment, but the work of northern novelists, film directors and television writers, as well as the music scene, asserted a preponderantly positive image of the region’s post-war working class.
Then came, in a sharp twist, crystallisation of the North’s – unequivocally negative – identity as the loser in the divide between two regions. This happened in the Thatcher years, and ironically succeeded a prior phase in which identification of the North with popular life and working-class culture in a positive register actually peaked.52 The recession of the early 1980s afforded the backdrop for Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff in high-unemployment Liverpool, with its ‘Gizza job’ refrain, complemented later in the decade by Harry Enfield’s ‘Loadsamoney’ persona on Saturday Live, a satire of the self-made Essex man.
Moral indignation at this turn of events, of the sort articulated in Mark Herman’s film Brassed Off (1996), set in a south Yorkshire colliery slated for closure, was drowned out by the feel-good musicals of
