London? Scotland? No, it’s the North that has given the most to art, literature, language and comedy  

Heroes of the North: clockwise from left, St Hilda, The Beatles, Alan Bennett, Whitby Abbey and Victoria Wood 
Heroes of the North: clockwise from left, St Hilda, The Beatles, Alan Bennett, Whitby Abbey and Victoria Wood  

The North of England is its own country in all but name. With no official boundaries, no flag, no anthem and no pomp, it stands sure of itself despite pitiless devastation from the South, harassment from Scotland over the centuries, and the envied peril of unique success. 

Were it a country in its own right, it would be the eighth-biggest economy in Europe. And yet all we hear about is the strength of London and the power of Scotland. So, as a born-and-bred Northerner who has written about the region for more than 50 years and roved all over it, I thought it was time the North had its shout.

The 10-part series I have made for Radio 4 – The Matter of the North – with the producer Faith Lawrence, begins in AD412 when the Romans withdrew back to the mainland of Europe and ends today when the British have just left it.

In our map of northern England, Hadrian’s Wall is the northern boundary; to the west it’s the coastline down to Liverpool. We then track across country to the Humber and back up the east coast. 

The Romans left a patchwork inheritance, much of it still unexcavated. We start on an archaeological site at Maryport in Cumbria, which has already yielded more altars than anywhere outside Italy. The Romans left a vacuum of tribes and their battles were not fully resolved for almost 200 years. Then the kingdom of Northumbria emerged and set up what eventually became England.

Ruins of Whitby Abbey on a hill above the seaport in North Yorkshire
Ruins of Whitby Abbey on a hill above the seaport in North Yorkshire Credit: Alamy

Northumbria was a most remarkable power – a warrior state which at one stage had conquered or won allegiance from England and much of Scotland. York could have become the capital of Britain – a wonderful prospect.

This kingdom was the centre of exceptional creativity. There was Bede’s defining book of English history which set up the English as one of God’s chosen people; the Lindisfarne Gospels which put us on the road to scholarship and art; and the multicultural Ruthwell Cross, 18ft high, carrying the world’s oldest surviving text of English poetry.

Add to that the spiritual zeal of the Celtic monks from Iona and the double Abbey at Whitby, a centuries-long example of a woman (Saint Hilda, the founding abbess of the monastery) in power – with all of these we already have the ingredients from which we became us.

A couple of centuries later, the Vikings sailed up the rivers of Yorkshire and Cumbria, and after some looting settled down to enrich the language – scree, fell, gable, gill, tarn, horse, house, husband, wife, egg and hundreds of other words entered the mix and hardened into dialects still loved and guarded. 

In the 14th century, Chaucer began the long tradition of mocking Northern speech. But Northerners have turned it to their advantage in their humour – Peter Kay, Victoria Wood, Alan Bennett, Sarah Millican… Its impenetrability to Southerners became a source of pride.

Comedian Peter Kay
Comedian Peter Kay Credit: Rex Features

Later, the dramatic, bony, ice-gauged grandeur of the landscape in the North began to inspire writers – Wordsworth, the Brontës, Ted Hughes, Simon Armitage – and artists who came to paint this unlikely paradise, from Turner up to Julian Cooper today. The Lake District was the cradle of what became an overwhelming Romantic movement.

And out of that Wordsworthian North came the most profound challenge to reason and religion in four of the simplest lines in the language:

“One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man

Of moral evil and of good

Than all the sages can”.

Nature was us. It was the enemy no longer, nor was it a mere backdrop. It infused and shaped our lives, and what a flood has followed from that insight.

Again and again, the North was attacked by a fearful South. The worst of these was the first in the 11th century by William the Bastard (as Tom Paine named the so-called conqueror). He is said to have wept on his deathbed for his brutal genocidal wasting or harrowing of the obstinate North. The crying of bullies to get sympathy on their deathbeds is one of the more disgusting aspects of their behaviour.

Henry VIII, another Norman vandal, repeated his ancestor’s attack and so it went on until quite recently when an estimated three million mostly skilled jobs were lost in the Eighties and world industries were destroyed. Ghost towns still shadow the North.

William Wordsworth was inspired by the grandeur of the landscape in the North
William Wordsworth was inspired by the grandeur of the landscape in the North Credit: Alamy

By then, the North had long been the key to unlocking the biggest revolution in history. When George Stephenson’s train the Rocket made its game-changing outing at Rainhill at Liverpool, it signalled the end of an old world and the arrival of the new. The idea of distance was changed, and so was speed and the carriage of people and goods. The Rocket’s progeny opened up the American plains, criss-crossed Asia and China, and the inventions and engineering of the North remodelled the working culture, the economies and the capacity for technical innovations.

And then there is Northern radicalism. Manchester became the first industrial city in the world and used its power to change the way the world thought and behaved. Dissent, nurtured by Northern nonconformism itself, nurtured the suffragette movement most strongly in Manchester and the campaign to abolish slavery and Chartism, the foundation of the Independent Labour Party, the growth of public education, of public parks and public sports, and was a great force in the development of trade unionism.

This was a seismic change in a country so long moribund and in the grip of medieval practices. The North led Britain and one could argue, the rest of the world, in wrenching society out of an entitled rural hierarchy into a demanding urban democracy. Possibly this is its greatest achievement. 

It was no wonderland. There was the Peterloo massacre and nearly two centuries later there was the unforgivable behaviour of the 27-year cover-up of the South Yorkshire police over Hillsborough, with more like that and more to come. But the Peterloo massacre paved the way for the first Reform Act and Liverpool’s victory over Hillsborough may pave the way for a de-corruption of the police and the general cover-up mentality now suffocating decency.

Timeless: The Beatles
Timeless: The Beatles Credit: Film Stills

It is characteristic of the North, I think, that a writer in Liverpool, Jimmy McGovern, wrote a play early on that nailed the truth two decades before it was publicly admitted. The North has a reputation for being tough and gritty, and its inhabitants are not afraid to tell the truth about life.

And so to pop culture. Technology has given this once-transient area of our lives access to posterity through videos and CDs and DVDs.

The music of the Beatles will live as long as any British music written in their day. Television was seized by the working class who poured in and saw it as a place to make their mark in a form outside the ancient gates of privilege. From Coronation Street to Billy Elliot, from Sally Wainwright to Maxine Peake, the North has grasped the opportunity and David Hockney has shown from the Bradford beginning of his career that the North can make it universal as well as sticking to its own country – in his case, the landscape of East Yorkshire.

The North has been and can again be rich in everything that matters. Perhaps it’s time to cut loose. Anyone for Nexit?

The Matter of the North starts on Monday at 9am on BBC Radio 4 

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