Northern England

• 1. Introduction

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  Northern England holds a paradox at its heart. With a combined population of 15.5 million people spread across 37,331 square kilometres, it is home to nearly a quarter of the entire United Kingdom's population. Yet the question of what exactly constitutes the North, where it begins and where it ends, has never been fully settled. Southerners tend to draw the dividing line further south than Northerners do. Some place the border at the Watford Gap, a stretch of motorway between Northampton and Leicester, which would pull much of the Midlands into the North's orbit. The poet Simon Armitage, himself a Northerner, suggests the North only truly begins around Thirsk, Northallerton or Richmond in North Yorkshire, which would leave cities like Manchester and Leeds on the outside looking in.

  What is less debatable is that the North's character was forged in circumstances unlike anywhere else in England. The Pennines, the upland range sometimes called the backbone of England, run through the heart of the region. Five of England's ten national parks lie partly or entirely within its bounds. Its cities were not ancient market towns that grew slowly over centuries. They were, uniquely for such a large urban belt in Europe, almost entirely products of the Industrial Revolution. The questions worth asking about Northern England are not simply geographic. They are questions about identity, inequality, invention, and survival, and the answers stretch from the ice ages to the present day.

• 2. Deep Time and Ancient Peoples

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  Creswell Crags in northern Derbyshire, near present-day Sheffield, contains the northernmost cave art in Europe. Neanderthals sheltered there between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago, and a later culture, named the Creswellian after the site, occupied it around 12,000 years ago. Kirkwell Cave in Lower Allithwaite, Cumbria, was home to the Federmesser people of the Paleolithic sometime between 13,400 and 12,800 years ago. Before these moments, the land was buried under ice sheets that reached as far south as the Midlands, scrubbing away most evidence of earlier habitation.

  Star Carr in North Yorkshire is widely considered the most significant monument of the Mesolithic era in Britain. The site includes what is currently recognized as the oldest known house in Britain, built around 9000 BC, and the earliest evidence of carpentry in the form of a carved tree trunk dating to 11000 BC. The Lincolnshire and Yorkshire Wolds around the Humber Estuary were settled and farmed in the Bronze Age, and the Ferriby Boats, among the best-preserved finds of that era, were discovered near Hull in 1937.

  By the time the Romans arrived, the dominant Celtic tribe across most of Northern England was the Brigantes, a name that likely translates as Highlanders. Whether they were a unified people or a loose federation around the Pennines is still debated. The Brigantes initially allied with Rome, and the historian Tacitus records that they handed the resistance leader Caratacus over to the Empire in 51. When internal power struggles unsettled the relationship, a Roman war against them began in the 70s under the governor Quintus Petillius Cerialis. The Romans established the province of Britannia Inferior, ruled from Eboracum, the city now called York, and their northern limit was Hadrian's Wall, the edge of the known empire.

• 3. Kingdoms, Conquest, and Catastrophe

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  After Roman rule collapsed and the Angles arrived, the old Celtic north fragmented into rival kingdoms: Bernicia, Deira, Rheged and Elmet. Bernicia covered the lands north of the Tees; Deira corresponded roughly to eastern Yorkshire; Rheged to Cumbria; Elmet to the western half of Yorkshire. A king of Bernicia named Aethelfrith conquered Deira around the year 604 and united them as Northumbria. A Golden Age followed, built on cultural and monastic activity centred on Lindisfarne and fed by Irish monks. The north-west retained a Celtic language called Cumbric, spoken predominantly in Cumbria until around the 12th century.

  The Vikings reshaped the region again. Their influence is written permanently into the landscape: the thorpe in Cleethorpes and Scunthorpe, the kirk in Kirklees and Ormskirk, the by in Whitby and Grimsby all carry Norse roots. Monasteries were largely wiped out under Viking pressure, and evidence from Northern churchyards suggests Norse funeral rites replaced Christian ones for a time.

  The Norman Conquest brought a different kind of devastation. After Northumbrian and Danish nobles resisted William the Conqueror, he ordered what became known as the Harrying of the North. In the winter of 1069-1070, towns, villages and farms were systematically destroyed across much of Yorkshire, northern Lancashire and County Durham. Chroniclers reported a hundred thousand deaths; modern estimates place the toll somewhere in the tens of thousands, against a total population of about two million. When the Domesday Book was compiled in 1086, much of Northern England was still recorded as wasteland.

  Monastic orders moved back in after the conquest, missionaries framing their mission as settling the desert. The Cistercian Fountains Abbey in North Yorkshire became the largest and richest of the Northern abbeys, a status it held until the Dissolution of the Monasteries. In the Anarchy of the 12th century, Scotland invaded and took much of the land north of the Tees. The town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, now the northernmost town in England, changed hands more than a dozen times in just 400 years of Anglo-Scottish conflict.

• 4. The Industrial Crucible

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  At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Northern England offered something rare: abundant coal, water power, and labour made cheap by poor upland agriculture. Mining and milling that had operated on a small scale for generations began to grow and centralise rapidly. The damp climate and soft water may have helped the textile mills work fibres more easily, though no single cause explains their success. Coal and large iron deposits in Cumbria and Cleveland allowed ironmaking to take root, and the invention of the Bessemer process brought steelmaking, which in turn fed the shipyards opening along Tyneside and at Barrow-in-Furness.

  The Great Famine in Ireland in the 1840s sent waves of migrants across the Irish Sea. At the 1851 census, 13% of the population of Manchester and Salford were Irish-born; in Liverpool the figure was 22%. Anti-Catholic riots followed, and Protestant Orange Orders spread across Lancashire and beyond. By 1881 there were 374 Orange organisations in Lancashire alone, 71 in the North East, and 42 in Yorkshire. Immigration also arrived from Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia and Scandinavia, drawing industrialists, workers fleeing poverty, sailors, and Jews escaping continental pogroms.

  The wealth and social upheaval of the Industrial Revolution produced political movements that reshaped Britain as a whole. Trade unionism took root in Northern cities. Manchester Liberalism, the political philosophy associated with free trade and laissez-faire economics, emerged from the same soil. By 2006, analysis by The Northern Way found that 90% of the North's population lived in and around just seven conurbations: Liverpool, Central Lancashire, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, Hull and Humber Ports, and Tees Valley and Tyne and Wear. An almost continuous urban belt ran from the Wirral Peninsula to Doncaster, home to at least 7.6 million people.

• 5. Decline, Conflict, and Regeneration

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  The First World War marked the turning point for the Northern economy. In 1913-1914, unemployment in the North, Scotland and Wales combined stood at 2.6%, while the rate in Southern England was more than double that, at 5.5%. By 1937, during the Great Depression, those figures had inverted: outer Britain's unemployment rate had risen to 16.1%, while the South's had fallen to 7.1%. The weakness was structural. Northern factories were still largely running on 19th-century technology. As the electric grid expanded, the North's advantage in power generation vanished, and it became cheaper to build new factories in the Midlands or South.

  The Second World War brought a different kind of ruin. The Blitz of 1940-1941 saw major raids on Barrow-in-Furness, Hull, Leeds, Manchester, Merseyside, Newcastle and Sheffield. Liverpool was the most bombed city in the UK outside London and Hull, with around 4,000 deaths across Merseyside and most of the city centre destroyed. Hull suffered damage to 98% of all its buildings, the highest percentage of any town or city in Britain. The rebuilding that followed, combined with slum clearance, transformed the physical face of Northern cities.

  Deindustrialisation continued through the second half of the 20th century and intensified under Margaret Thatcher's government, which chose, according to the source, not to encourage growth in the North if it risked growth in the South. The 1984-85 miners' strike brought hardship to many Northern mining communities. Northern metropolitan county councils, often Labour-controlled with very left-wing leadership, including Militant-dominated Liverpool and the so-called People's Republic of South Yorkshire, had high-profile conflicts with the national government.

  A bomb attack in Manchester in 1996 became, counterintuitively, a catalyst for renewal. It was the largest bomb detonation in Great Britain since the end of the Second World War. The destruction of ageing infrastructure forced a modernisation of the city centre that made Manchester a leading example of post-industrial redevelopment. The pattern was eventually followed by other cities across the region.

• 6. Language, Culture, and Identity

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  Northern English accents carry the sediment of centuries. Old Norse left its traces in dialects that retain features inherited from the language. Linguists trace a broad Northern dialect area from the Humber estuary, up the River Wharfe and across to the River Lune in north Lancashire, corresponding roughly to the old Northumbrian dialect zone. Key markers have shifted over time: pronunciations such as doon for down and lang for long, once widespread, are now found mainly in the far north of the region.

  One of the most discussed features of Northern English speech is the absence of the TRAP-BATH split. A Northerner says the word bath with a short a, rhyming with the vowel in cat, while a Southerner uses a longer sound. Other features common across many Northern accents include the absence of the FOOT-STRUT split, which makes put and putt homophones, and the reduction of the definite article the to a glottal stop, sometimes written as t. Second-person plural pronouns survive in forms that have largely disappeared in Southern English: ye in the North East, and yous in areas with historical Irish communities.

  Northern identity began to solidify as a distinct cultural force through the upheavals of industrialisation. Elizabeth Gaskell's 1855 novel North and South depicted the North as dirty, wild and uncultured, even in a sympathetic treatment. The stereotypes the novel reflected were eventually turned around. Traits stereotypically associated with Northern England became, for many Northerners, points of pride: straight-talking, grit, warmheartedness. Northern England, especially Lancashire, also developed a strong tradition of matriarchal families. When mills offered well-paid work for women and demand for coal and steel was low, women were frequently the main breadwinners. Northern women became stereotyped as strong-willed and independent, a characterisation that persists in popular culture.

  The 1991 song by The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, also known as The KLF, adopted the phrase it's grim up north, listing places in Cheshire, Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Merseyside and Yorkshire. The Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, has since quoted the phrase while suggesting grimness is not the same as failure. The flat cap, once universal working-class wear, has staged a comeback in the 21st century.

• 7. Art, Music, and Letters

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  William Wordsworth's poetry and the novels of the Bronte sisters stand as the most famous examples of writing drawn from Northern landscapes, but the tradition they represent runs deep and forward in time. Classics of children's literature such as The Railway Children in 1906, The Secret Garden in 1911, and Swallows and Amazons in 1930 all portray Northern landscapes as places of adventure and freedom. The Poets Laureate Ted Hughes and Simon Armitage both found inspiration in the Northern countryside, using the sounds and rhythms of Northern English dialects in their work.

  The industrialising cities of the North produced a parallel tradition of social realism. Elizabeth Gaskell was the first in a lineage of female realist writers that later included Winifred Holtby, Catherine Cookson, Beryl Bainbridge and Jeanette Winterson. Post-war novels such as Room at the Top in 1959, Billy Liar in 1959, This Sporting Life in 1960 and A Kestrel for a Knave in 1968 depicted working-class life and deindustrialisation with a directness that became a recognisable mode.

  In music, the North's influence on British popular culture has been enormous. Merseybeat from the Liverpool area produced The Beatles. Northern soul brought Motown to England. Madchester became the precursor to the rave scene. Sheffield gave rise to Cabaret Voltaire and Pulp, and later the Arctic Monkeys and the Kaiser Chiefs. The press repeatedly framed these movements in terms of North-South cultural rivalry, most famously in the 1960s between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and again in the 1990s Battle of Britpop between Oasis and Blur.

  British brass bands trace their origins to Northern England as well. After the Napoleonic Wars, Cheshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire military bands were disbanded. Industrial communities, seeking self-improvement, founded their own civilian bands. These ensembles played at community events and led protest marches during the era of radical agitation. The Whit Friday brass band contests still draw hundreds of bands from across the UK and beyond.

• 8. Economy and the North-South Divide

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  In 2015, the gross value added of the Northern English economy was £316 billion, large enough that, as a standalone nation, it would rank as the tenth largest economy in Europe. Yet the region's productivity and growth rates lag behind Southern England, and the five most deprived districts in England are all located in the North. Unemployment in Northern England runs at 5.3%, compared to an England-wide average of 4.8%, and the North East has the highest unemployment rate in the UK.

  The North-South divide is not only economic. Blackpool had the lowest male life expectancy at birth in England between 2012 and 2014, at 74.7 years, against an England-wide average of 79.5. The majority of English districts in the bottom 50 for life expectancy are in the North East or the North West. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the infection rate in Northern England was nearly double that in London by June 2020, and five of the six worst-affected areas in England were located in the North.

  The picture contains sharp contrasts within the region itself. Yorkshire's Golden Triangle, extending from north Leeds to Harrogate and across to York, is among the wealthiest areas in England. Sheffield Hallam is described as the richest constituency outside London and the South East, while Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough, on the other side of the same city, is one of the most deprived in the country. The decline of coal mining and manufacturing has drawn comparisons to the Rust Belt in the United States.

  Science and technology offer a different angle on the North's economic future. The University of Manchester's discovery of graphene produced the National Graphene Institute and the Sir Henry Royce Institute for Advanced Materials. Robotics research at the University of Sheffield led to the development of the Advanced Manufacturing Park. Eleven high-tech firms worth over one billion dollars each are based in the region, and digital industries support around 300,000 jobs. The N8 research universities together have over 190,000 students and contribute more to the Northern economy in GVA terms than agriculture, car manufacturing or the media industry combined.