North West England

• 1. Introduction

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  North West England holds an unusual electoral record. In a 2012 by-election, Manchester Central posted a turnout of just 18 percent, the lowest ever recorded in the United Kingdom.

  The same region also produced one of Britain's most lopsided results. In the 2017 general election, Liverpool Walton returned Labour's Dan Carden with 85.7 percent of the vote. The Conservatives placed a distant second with just 8.6 percent.

  How does a region built on rugged hills and rainy coastlines come to invent the modern computer, the crossword puzzle and the hip replacement? And why does a place with some of England's strongest economic output also carry some of its deepest poverty? Those questions start with the land itself, long before the region ever had a name.

• 2. Land and Water

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  Windermere, set within the Lake District, is the largest natural lake in England. Nearby, on Broad Crag, sits Broad Crag Tarn, officially England's highest lake. To the south, Wast Water plunges 74 metres, making it the country's deepest lake.

  The region is bounded to the east by the Pennines and to the west by the Irish Sea. Its landscape mixes two large conurbations, centred on Liverpool and Manchester, with wide rural stretches beyond them. Cumbria and northern Lancashire remain largely rural, as does the southern edge along the Cheshire Plain and the Peak District.

  Three National Parks reach into the region: the whole of the Lake District, plus small parts of the Peak District and the Yorkshire Dales. Three Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty lie within its borders too, all of Arnside and Silverdale, all of the Solway Coast, and almost all of the Forest of Bowland.

  Average annual precipitation across the region ranges from roughly 800 millimetres to 1,400 millimetres. Cumbria typically sees the most severe weather, with heavy rainfall concentrated in the mountainous Lake District and the Pennines. The same high, exposed ground also bears the worst of the region's winter storms.

  Centuries later, one of Cumbria's back lanes, the former A6293 near Milburn, would become the highest road in the UK, reaching 2,780 feet.

• 3. A Region of Many Peoples

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  According to the 2021 census, 85.6 percent of the region's population identified as White, with 81.2 percent specifically as White British. During the Industrial Revolution, hundreds of thousands of Welsh migrants arrived to work the coal mines, leaving lasting Welsh ancestry in Liverpool, Chester, Skelmersdale, Widnes, Halewood, Wallasey, Ashton-in-Makerfield and Birkenhead.

  In Blackburn with Darwen, 19.4 percent of residents are Muslim, the third-highest share among all UK local authorities and the highest outside London. Moss Side, in Greater Manchester, is home to a Black British population exceeding 30 percent. St Helens, in Merseyside, sits at the opposite extreme, with 98 percent of residents identifying as White British, an unusually low level of diversity for a town of its size.

  Liverpool, more than 800 years old, holds one of Britain's few ethnic-minority populations traceable back dozens of generations. Its closeness to Ireland gave it a substantial ethnic Irish community, alongside one of the UK's first Afro-Caribbean communities and Europe's oldest Chinatown.

  By 2021-52.5 percent of the region described themselves as Christian, down from 78 percent in 2001. Meanwhile 32.6 percent reported no religion at all, and Islam accounted for 7.6 percent of the population, up from 3 percent two decades earlier. One in five people in the North West is Catholic, a legacy of large-scale Irish immigration in the nineteenth century and a long history of English recusants in Lancashire.

  By 2021-11.7 percent of the region's residents had been born outside the UK, up from just 5.1 percent in 2001. Poland supplied the largest single group, with 125,110 people born there living in the region.

• 4. Accents and Tongues

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  Brythonic, a Celtic tongue spoken across ancient Britain, reached North West England by at least the Iron Age. In Cumbria, this speech developed into Cumbric, a language that may have survived into the 12th century. Its Celtic legacy still lives in place names such as Carlisle, Penrith and Eccles, and in river names including the Cocker, the Kent and the Eden.

  From the ninth to the eleventh centuries, Danes and Norsemen settled across the region, the only significant Norse settlement area in England. Words like fell, thwaite and tarn, all common in Cumbria, come from Old Norse, as do place names ending in holm and dale and the numerous towns named Kirkby.

  Scouse, the accent native to Liverpool, and Manc, native to central Manchester, both descend from the older Lancashire dialect, though Scouse has drifted furthest from it.

  Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi are widely spoken today, concentrated in Preston, Blackburn and Manchester. Since the European Union's enlargement, over one million Poles have settled in the UK, many of them in the North West, prompting towns such as Crewe to publish public information in Polish.

  In Manchester and Liverpool, schools now teach Urdu and Mandarin alongside French and Spanish, keeping pace with communities that trace their roots back generations.

• 5. Discoveries at the Bench

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  In 1909, Ernest Marsden of Blackburn and Hans Geiger carried out the Geiger-Marsden experiment at the University of Manchester, inventing the Geiger counter and revealing the existence of the atomic nucleus.

  J. J. Thomson of Cheetham Hill discovered the electron in April 1897 and won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906. His son, George Paget Thomson, won his own Nobel Prize in Physics in 1937 for discovering electron diffraction.

  John Dalton, born in Cumbria before moving to Manchester, developed atomic theory. Decades later, in 2004, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov isolated graphene at that same University of Manchester.

  On the 27th of March 1933, Eric Fawcett and Reginald Gibson discovered polythene at an ICI laboratory in Northwich, reacting benzaldehyde with ethene under 2,000 atmospheres of pressure. Eight years later, at the Calico Printers' Association in Manchester in 1941, John Rex Whinfield and James Tennant Dickson discovered PET, the plastic used in bottles.

  In 1962, John Charnley of Bury invented the hip replacement at Wrightington Hospital in Lancashire. That same year, at ICI, Dora Richardson discovered tamoxifen, while James Black discovered the beta blocker propranolol at Alderley Park, sold under the brand name Inderal.

  Charles Suckling of Wallasey discovered halothane, the world's first synthetic inhalation anaesthetic, in 1951 at ICI's Widnes laboratory. It was first tested on a patient in Manchester in 1956.

  In 1973, Clifford Cocks and James Ellis, both from Cheshire, worked with Malcolm Williamson at GCHQ to invent the RSA algorithm for public-key cryptography.

  In 1930, mathematician Sydney Chapman of Eccles explained the ozone-oxygen cycle in the stratosphere, work that would later underpin our understanding of the ozone layer.

• 6. Forging an Industrial World

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  In 1830, the Liverpool & Manchester Railway became the world's first passenger inter-city railway. Manchester's Liverpool Road station, which opened on the 15th of September 1830, remains the world's oldest surviving railway station.

  The Bridgewater Canal, designed by James Brindley and built in 1761 for Francis Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater, is considered the first canal of the modern era. Its water supply came from John Gilbert's idea to reuse water pumped from the Duke's coal mines at Worsley.

  On the 21st of June 1948, the University of Manchester ran the Manchester Baby, the world's first programmable computer, built from 550 Mullard valves. Its Williams-Kilburn tube became the world's first computer memory, the ancestor of modern random-access memory.

  In 1974, Robert Mais built the Works Record System at ICI in Northwich, a spreadsheet running on an IBM 3270 roughly four years before VisiCalc. Manchester also gave rise to Trafford Park, the world's first planned industrial estate, and was once, by itself, the world's richest city.

  In 1957, Alastair Pilkington invented the float glass process at St Helens, a method later used to make about 80 percent of the world's glass. Pears soap, first made at Port Sunlight, stands as the world's first registered brand and its oldest surviving one.

  Ford went on to build five million Escorts at its Halewood plant, the model remaining in production there until the 21st of July 2000.

• 7. Politics and Division

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  In the 2024 general election, the Labour Party won 63 of the North West's 73 constituencies, extending its long dominance of the region.

  In the 2019 general election, the Conservatives gained ten seats from Labour, lifting their total to 27 against Labour's 42. Five years earlier, in the 2017 election, Labour had held 54 seats to the Conservatives' 20 and the Liberal Democrats' 1.

  Of England's nine regions, the North West has the fourth-highest GVA per capita, the strongest outside southern England. Despite this, the region carries above-average deprivation, with wealth concentrated in affluent pockets such as rural Cheshire, rural Lancashire and south Cumbria.

  Liverpool, Manchester and Knowsley top the list of the region's most deprived local authority areas. By contrast, Congleton, Ribble Valley, Macclesfield and South Lakeland ranked as the least deprived council districts in 2007.

  In March 2011, the region's overall unemployment claimant count stood at 4.2 percent. Liverpool recorded the highest rate at 6.8 percent, while Eden and Ribble Valley shared the lowest, at 1.3 percent each.

  In the region's final European Parliament election in 2019, the Brexit Party topped the poll with 31.23 percent of the vote, ahead of Labour on 21.91 percent, the Liberal Democrats on 17.15 percent and the Greens on 12.48 percent.

• 8. Culture and Everyday Life

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  Arthur Wynne, born in Liverpool, invented the crossword puzzle in December 1913.

  The Suffragette movement, in the form of the Women's Social and Political Union, began in Manchester. On the 21st of December 1844, the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers opened Britain's first co-operative outlet.

  Liverpool and Manchester gave rise to beat music, known as Merseybeat, during the 1960s and 1970s. Manchester followed with the Madchester music scene in the 1980s and 1990s.

  Joseph Livesey of Preston founded Britain's temperance movement, and the word teetotal was first coined in Preston in 1833. Jelly Babies were invented at Fryers of Lancashire in Lancaster in 1864, while the first UK KFC outlet opened on Fishergate in Preston in May 1965, launched by the entrepreneur Ray Allen.

  On the 1st of October 1987, IKEA opened its first UK store in Warrington, at the time only the company's 20th country worldwide.