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‘Who wants to barf?’ A couple of dozen thrill-seekers, encased behind an ominous-looking grille, gamely raise their hands in response to the MC’s taunting question, and the ride – one of those terrifying lurching contraptions designed to toss you around like an old pair of jeans in a tumble dryer – suddenly comes to life, whipping its human cargo screaming into the air.

You can hear the low rumble of Goose Fair as you walk towards it from Nottingham city centre and cross Forest Road, home to my alma mater, Nottingham High School, and the city’s red-light district. (My mother told me a joke when I first came to school here: One day Thor is walking along Forest Road when he bumps into a young woman in torn stockings with a big smile on her face. ‘I am Thor, god of thunder!’ the Norse deity booms. ‘Well, I’m thor too but I’m thatithfied,’ lisps back the young woman. Eleven years of age and not exactly worldly, I had no idea at the time why it was supposed to be funny. Mother, what were you thinking?) The fair’s current home, the Forest Recreation Ground, lies about fifteen miles south of Edwinstowe and the Major Oak, but it too used to be part of Sherwood Forest. In the nineteenth century, as urbanisation gripped, this particular stretch was known as the ‘Wastes’, and there was a grandstand to accommodate spectators who gathered to watch horse racing and the other entertainments held here. Today, for the fifty-one and a half weeks a year when the fair isn’t in town, the Rec is used for sports and as a car park for Park-and-Riders.

The origins of Goose Fair’s name are lost in the mists of time. The annual gathering, for a long period the largest in Europe, was first held around 1284. Geese obviously played a part – it’s been suggested that they were brought over from Lincolnshire and even Norfolk in their thousands, their feet coated with tar and sand to help them survive the journey, to be sold in Nottingham at the onset of autumn. The fair may have begun with fowl – it’s always been held at the beginning of October around Michaelmas, when geese are a traditional treat – but by the eighteenth century it was most renowned for its cheese. There was even a cheese riot in Nottingham in the 1760s, with discontented locals bowling the overpriced produce, conveniently supplied in wheel-like units, down the hills leading out of the Market Place, where the fair was held until 1928. The mayor, protesting against the rioters, is said to have been knocked off his feet by one of the cheesy missiles and to have landed, with severe consequences for his dignity, in the mud of Wheeler Gate.

There’s not much in the way of cheese or geese on view nowadays – apart, that is, from the large plastic goose that sits proudly on the Gregory Boulevard roundabout for the fair’s duration every year. The character of the gathering definitively changed with the advent of the railways. Improved transportation made the year-round supply of food more dependable and reduced the need to stock up on provisions before the coming of winter. As such, Goose Fair began to be viewed simply as an opportunity to have a good time – not that all that cheese rolling hadn’t been entertainment of a sort – and there was a sudden invasion of five-footed sheep and men on stilts, not to mention a big hand-turned roundabout, Twigdon’s Riding Machine. Madame Tussaud was so impressed by the fair’s drawing power that she was twice tempted to bring her collection of life-size wax figures, in 1819 and 1829.

Since then, of course, it’s all got a big more high-tech. Some of the food – hog roast, hot peas, candyfloss – has its roots in tradition, but flashing lights, blaring music (‘We will – we will – ROCK YOU!’) and sulphurous smoke bathe proceedings in a deep sensory smog of modernity. A rodent-themed rollercoaster shakes punters up and down, then, for good measure, whirls them round and round as well, to make doubly sure they achieve that freshly eviscerated/post-sickbag look just in time for their free souvenir exit portrait. Over at another ride two lone teenage girls are being strapped into their seats, ready for lift-off. A crowd of onlookers has gathered to watch the torture as a voice on the seemingly never-ending warm-up tape intones, in exaggeratedly precise Euro-English: ‘Are you ready? Are you R-R-READY?!?’ A safety cage descends over the youngsters, one of whom is busy flicking her middle finger at a laughing woman – her mother? Her sister? – who stands filming them on her phone; her mate meanwhile is making hot eyes at the ride attendant. ‘In the interests of safety,’ the voice on the tape continues, growing shriller for the killer punchline, ‘… HOLD ON TO YOUR PANTS!’ And then the music starts – the inevitable ‘O Fortuna’ from Nazi favourite Carmina Burana, heard everywhere these days from Old Spice ads to The X Factor pre-title sequence – and the girls are whipped up into the stratosphere. The crowd cheers as a garland of vomit loops its way back down to earth and the cage continues its vertiginous ascent.

* * *

Goose Fair is the setting for one of the most iconic scenes in Alan Sillitoe’s great Angry Young Man novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), where anti-hero Arthur Seaton gets his comeuppance for messing around with another man’s wife and is beaten up by a group of squaddies. Ironically, given that it’s set in Nottingham, aka the Queen of the Midlands, Sillitoe’s classic novel – along with Czech director Karel Reisz’s no-less-classic film adaptation (1960) – helped to launch the phrase ‘It’s grim up North’.

Lots of people get the story’s setting wrong, some unwittingly – for instance, in his Hope and Glory: Britain 1900–1990 (2004), the distinguished Cambridge historian Peter Clarke describes the novel as a ‘class-conscious account of the industrial north’. Others, however, do it quite deliberately. A notable representative of the latter tendency is Stuart Maconie in his popular paean to the North, Pies and Prejudice, where he discusses the late Fifties/early Sixties British cinematic New Wave, describing it as that ‘glorious swathe of films about the experience of love, sex, work and struggle among the working classes of the industrial north’. In this category he includes the film of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning starring Albert Finney. ‘I know Sillitoe’s book … is set in Nottingham,’ opines Maconie, a Northern exile who actually admits to living in the Midlands, for god’s sake, ‘but Finney and his film are indisputably northern.’ Given that all the key scenes in both book and film take place at Nottingham landmarks, this is a distinctly odd thing to say. Maconie apparently feels he has the right to claim Seaton for the North merely because, as he argues, he has ‘provided me [i.e. Maconie] with some of my favourite catch-phrases … That’s the truth, as Albert Finney as Arthur Seaton would say. The rest is propaganda.’ The problem is, to anyone with ears attuned to the speech patterns of Nottingham and its environs, anti-Establishment rebel Seaton sounds exactly like what he is: a Midlander, not a Northerner. Now that’s the truth, and what Maconie writes is classic cocky Northern propaganda. (The Arctic Monkeys, those musical darlings of the North, adopted another of Seaton’s most resonant phrases for the title of their debut album: Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not.)

We shouldn’t be too surprised by Maconie’s act of cultural appropriation: after all, Northerners have been nicking bits of Midland heritage and claiming them as their own for centuries – since the Northumbrian monk the Venerable Bede, the so-called ‘father of English history’, set the pattern with his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in about AD 731, in fact. And as the instance cited above suggests, it’s more than just a matter of poor geography – Maconie knows Nottingham isn’t in the North; he actually says as much. It’s actually part of a conspiracy to strip the Midlands of its identity and claim the most distinctive elements for the North instead. As Maconie says, he likes the way Seaton talks and feels a kinship with him, which means – in the wonderful logic of Northern appropriationism – that Seaton must therefore be a Northerner like him.

Midlanders have traditionally been slow to react to such acts of daylight robbery. I once asked Alan Sillitoe about the wavering accents in the film version of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, for which he wrote the screenplay, and he explained that the problem was that they simply hadn’t been able to find ‘a clutch of actors who all came from Nottingham’. As a result, it ended up ‘a kind of mish-mash of South Yorkshire and Scouse and this, that and the other’. Didn’t it worry Sillitoe – the late twentieth-century Bard of Nottingham – that his works could so easily be claimed for the North? ‘That’s other people’s problem. Who cares about the North, or indeed about the South?’ he told me. For him, the Midlands was a place of ‘illimitable frontiers’. Then, after a pause, he added, ‘Bugger the North!’ and excused himself as his tea was waiting for him in the other room. Where uppity Northerners rage and bluster for attention, stoical Midlanders just shrug and concentrate on more important matters – buttered toast, for instance.

The cinema has never been particularly helpful where Midland identity is concerned. Take the more recent example of Shane Meadows’s Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (2002). With a title like that, you’d think that Meadows’s starrily cast modern spaghetti western would deliver a firmer, more differentiating picture of life as it is lived between North and South. Indeed, with a title like that, you might even think that that was one of its principal raisons d’être – especially as Meadows is himself a Midlander. So it’s curious that there’s no attempt to make the setting of the film identifiably Midland – the locations are all anonymous, unromanticised suburbs of the kind that can be found anywhere in the UK – or even to make the characters sound like Midlanders. Rhys Ifans speaks with a Welsh accent, Ricky Tomlinson – who plays ‘the Midlands cowboy’ – is audibly Scouse, while Kathy Burke, though she does use the very North Notts term of endearment ‘mi duck’ when talking to her brother (a very Scottish-sounding Robert Carlyle), is her usual salt-of-the-earth, Norf Lunnon self. So there you have it: a drama that announces boldly that it’s about the Midlands, but that then goes on to look and sound anything and everything but. Go figure.

* * *

The day after my visit to Goose Fair I’ve arranged to meet a friend for lunch. Elizabeth spent her childhood just up the road from me in Chesterfield, home of the not-much-vaunted Crooked Spire. Like me, she now lives in London but makes regular jaunts to Nottingham to visit family. We’re due to meet outside the Victoria Centre, one of the two big shopping malls that sandwich the city centre. So long as I pay for lunch, she’s agreed to answer my questions about her impressions of the region.

When she arrives, she looks quite flustered. Apparently she’s just had a nasty experience in the Nottingham Poundland (what she was doing there I can’t imagine as she’s only really comfortable antiquing in Notting Hill). I’d been hoping to lure her for a boutique burger around the corner at groovy ‘eatery and funhouse’ Spanky Van Dyke’s, which captures Nottingham’s youthful spirit so well (this is a big student city). But after her budget-store trauma she insists on a cup of Earl Grey and a prawn sandwich in the more reassuring surroundings of John Lewis, which just happens to occupy a large portion of the Vicky Centre.

Elizabeth looks like a classic Twenties flapper and holds down a very serious job. Given her general profile, you might expect her to speak with an RP accent. And for the most part she does – middling aristocracy, I’d say she sounds – until she pronounces one of those great North/South divide words, like ‘laugh’ or ‘bath’, when her vowels suddenly become as flat as those of any no-nonsense muck-and-brass Northern industrialist. This peculiarity in her pronunciation reflects the influence of her father, who grew up in Barnsley and, in the best Yorkshire tradition, ‘is very clear what he thinks about things and very blunt when he speaks about them’ (Elizabeth’s own description).

Duly settled in a corner of JL’s ‘Place to Eat’, I press the button on my recording device and begin my interrogation.

‘Right, Elizabeth. Question one: What’s the best thing ever to come out of the Midlands?’

She raises a hand to stop me.

‘Can I ask a question? Are you counting Staffordshire as being in the Midlands?’

‘Obviously. Because it is.’

‘Good … And how about Birmingham? I hope Lincolnshire isn’t on your list, because I know that isn’t the Midlands …’

I think I’ve already mentioned that a lot of people don’t know where the Midlands begins and ends, including Midlanders. Well, Elizabeth falls into that category.

‘Anyway,’ she goes on, ‘if Staffordshire’s in, lots of brilliant things like trains and bridges were invented there. But I don’t know much about them.’

Oh well, I comfort myself, I can deal with the genius of Staffordshire folk later on in my tour.

‘I’ll tell you one of the worst things to come out of the Midlands,’ she announces with sudden and excessive passion, ‘and that’s a little tea shop I went to last time I was here. What was its name? Anyway it’s over near the Lace Market. I ordered a scone with jam and some special blend of tea they were promoting. And do you know how they served it?’

She stops and looks at me, as if I am actually going to attempt to answer her plainly rhetorical question.

‘No, Elizabeth, I don’t,’ I say after a pause. ‘How did they serve it?’

‘They brought the tea leaves separately, exposed on a saucer! When I asked why they did it that way the girl said: “Customers like to be able to see them.” Apparently in Nottingham people go into tea shops just to stare at the leaves.’

Interesting as this phenomenon is (although I hasten to add that I’ve been unable to find any other references to it – to the best of my knowledge, Elizabeth is the only person to have experienced it), I decide to change the subject by mentioning Jilly Cooper’s injurious declaration that, for the grander sort of people, ‘The Midlands are beyond the pale’. ‘What do you think she meant by that, Elizabeth?’ I ask.

‘Perhaps she’d just been to that tea shop. It is beyond the pale.’

‘No, seriously,’ I encourage her.

After a pause, she shakes her head. ‘I can’t comment on that because, you see, I don’t actually come from the Midlands. Chesterfield is really the North. I think you’d class the Peak District as the North, because there’s an association of the word “Midlands” with the idea of industry, and particularly deprived Victorian-style industry. And although Chesterfield has a bit of that, it’s mostly a Northern market town on the edge of a hilly area.’

I’ve known Elizabeth a long time and have heard her say many extraordinary things over the years (don’t get her started on the Moon landings – faked, obviously), but I’m genuinely taken aback by this. Elizabeth, it turns out, is a Midlands-denier.

‘Okay, your father’s a Yorkshireman, but you were born and bred in Chesterfield. Elizabeth, are you seriously telling me that you’re not a Midlander?’ I fix her with a searching look.

‘That’s right,’ she says, holding my gaze and flattening her vowels with classic Northern vehemence. ‘I’m sorry, Robert, but Chesterfield is in the hills, and hills are Northern.’

‘All of them? Exclusively?’

‘All the proper ones, yes. I’m not including those slopes you go up and down when you’re coming into Nottingham, obviously. Sherwood Rise, ha!’

‘I’m sure if you asked anyone on Derbyshire County Council they’d tell you Chesterfield was part of the East Midlands.’

‘Oh what do they know, silly people!’ she says, agitatedly putting down her teacup and rooting fruitlessly through her handbag. When she looks up again, her cheeks have turned quite red.

‘I know, for instance,’ I go on, wanting to press my point home and show off a little of my research at the same time, ‘that Derbyshire County Council are dependent on the East Midlands Development Agency here in Nottingham for various kinds of funding. Which would appear to confirm that Derbyshire is in the East Midlands.’

Elizabeth looks briefly crestfallen.

‘Well, that’s very interesting,’ she says with a mildly hysterical laugh. ‘I accept, then, if I must, that I am by some definition a Midlander and that Derbyshire is, again by some definition, in the Midlands. But I would say that it is a border area, in the same way that Belarus and the Ukraine are … Is Warwickshire in the Midlands? It’s an interesting thing but I think the general perception is that rural counties aren’t in the Midlands.’

‘I’m getting the impression that you wouldn’t want to live in Nottingham, then?’

‘I wouldn’t want to live in a city anywhere, if I’m honest, although I have to say I’d rather live in Leeds than Nottingham.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Because Leeds has got a fresh Northern feel, whereas Nottingham just feels a bit depressed. It does! It’s like that everywhere in the Midlands. I took a train from Birmingham to Nottingham a few weeks ago and it nearly undermined my will to live. Go to Wilkos here and I challenge you not to be depressed!’

Poundland, Wilkinsons – it sounds an improbable itinerary for a woman like Elizabeth. But it’s telling that she seems to think her misadventures uniquely expressive of life as it is lived in the Midlands.

* * *

Can you locate Nottingham on a map of the UK? Probably not, at least if Private Eye is to be believed. The London-based satirical magazine marked the recent, much-trumpeted opening of a major new art gallery in the city with a Young British Artists comic strip by illustrator Birch.

‘It all sounds very exciting!’ says one metropolitan YBA enthusiastically of the inaugural exhibition, which was designed to put Nottingham on the art map.

‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ replies his pal.

‘No, nor would I. Near Liverpool, isn’t it?’ rejoins the first YBA, returning to his senses and moving from the figurative to the straightforwardly geographical.

‘Even further, I think,’ concludes his sceptical mate. (Just in case you’re unsure: Nottingham is 120 miles from London, Liverpool is 200.)

The message being: Nottingham, like the Midlands generally, is even more alien to the Southern media than the North, and nothing the city does – not even the brilliant Nottingham Contemporary art gallery – is going to tempt the Establishment to reconsider its attitude.

When they do manage to locate it, outsiders often find it hard to take Nottingham seriously; respect can be hard to come by when you used to be known by the name of ‘Snottingham’. That was in the Middle Ages, when it was settled by Saxons led by or descended from a chap named Snot. In more recent times, Nottingham has been no less unglamorously known to millions as ‘Dottingham’, the go-to railway destination for all cold-sufferers, thanks to that bloody ad for Tunes cough sweets. Condescension is thus the preferred mode when metropolitans deign to notice the Queen of the East Midlands. For instance, when another London-based publication, briefly warming to the charms of its chic Lace Market district (once the centre of the nation’s fashion industry – while we’re on the subject, Sir Paul Smith, the classic-with-a-twist design guru, is Nottingham born-and-bred and still has a flagship store in a beautiful Grade II-listed town house in the centre of town), recommended the city as a weekend getaway destination, it couldn’t help adding patronisingly: ‘Sales of tights can’t be high in Nottingham. Or coats, for that matter. This is the kind of town where outfits start low and end high, and the fine art of going out has been honed to perfection. Don’t knock it, they have a style of their own – it’s just not style as we know it.’ How we laughed.

Still, at least the magazine’s assessors claim to have enjoyed themselves in Nottingham. One of the great heroes of the Golden Age of British detective fiction, Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, hailed from the Midlands. But when, in the 1929 mystery The Man in the Queue, an investigation carries him from the metropolis to Nottingham, his heart sinks: ‘Grant came out of the station into the drone and clamour of trams. If he had been asked what represented the Midlands in his mind, he would unhesitatingly have said trams … Grant never heard the far-away peculiar sing of an approaching tramcar without finding himself back in the dead, airless atmosphere of the Midland town where he had been born.’ ‘Dead’, ‘airless’: sounds irresistible, doesn’t it? You’ll be glad to know that, after doing without one for several decades, Nottingham has recently reinstituted a tram service – you can catch it from the Forest Recreation Ground when Goose Fair isn’t on. Inspector Grant would be pleased.

Anyway, if, despite the best efforts of journalists and that Tunes ad, you are planning a visit – and until the arrival of the gangs and guns and the Channel 4 programme The Best and Worst Places to Live in the UK, Nottingham was regularly cited as one of the nicest, most welcoming places in Britain – here are a few local highlights to look out for:

1 The vast Market Square is the largest (about 22,000 m²) in the country. It’s also rather dull.

2 The tallest freestanding work of art in the UK, Ken Shuttleworth’s Aspire, is here. You almost certainly won’t have heard of it before, although you will definitely have heard of the much-photographed, much-publicised – and much smaller – Angel of the North by Antony Gormley. Gormless’s Gateshead icon gets written about and photographed a lot more because it’s self-advertisingly Northern. By contrast, Shuttleworth’s much more ambitious structure has a lame pun for a title (it’s like a spire, see, and it’s on a university campus, where the students presumably aspire to reach new intellectual heights). It should have been called Midland Thrust or something like that instead, but, as we’ve already seen, the Midlands doesn’t go in for that kind of self-promotion.

3 The castle. William the Conqueror was responsible for the original building, which quickly became the chief royal fortress in the Midlands. Crusading King Richard had to lay siege to it to reclaim it from his wicked, Robin Hood-bothering brother, John, in 1194. Most of the original structure has been destroyed; the Italianate building that has replaced it is rather anaemic.

4 There’s a statue of Robin Hood – did I mention that he was a local? – at the foot of the castle. The most important ’Oodie-related site, however, is the Major Oak out in Edwinstowe. Robin’s paramour has her principal incarnation in the form of a ring road that encircles Nottingham city centre, Maid Marian Way. Romantic, like.

5 The pubs. Like Mansfield, Nottingham takes its drinking seriously. You can tell because a lot of the local hostelries claim the distinction of age. The Bell Inn on Angel Row, running along the bottom side of the Market Square, says it’s the oldest in Nottingham, although its purported foundation date (c. 1437) pales besides that of Ye Olde Salutation Inn, which traces its origins to around 1240. Nestling in a half-timbered building beneath the castle, Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem goes one better and claims to be the oldest inn in the whole of England. It’s said to date from 1189, the year Nottingham-loving monarch Richard the Lionheart ascended the throne. Legend has it that when old Dickie Coeur de Lion announced his intention to lead a crusade against the Saracens, the king’s followers had a swift one at the inn before setting off on their journey to Jerusalem – hence the name. So if you find Nottingham a bit characterless and try-hard, you can at least rest assured that it’s a great place to get smashed.

After lunch with Elizabeth, I wander away from the city’s busy commercial centre, up past the curved Newton and Arkwright Building of Nottingham University – named for two Midlanders who helped shape the modern world, I note in passing – and plunge into the manicured calm of the Arboretum, the first public park to be opened in the city, back in 1852, when industrialisation had begun to impact on the environment and the authorities judged it politic to provide locals with a little green breathing space. Today leaves carpet the ground in a rich tapestry of autumnal colours, while the foliage overhead offers a rich mix – a symphony, no less – of russets and greens. I can see that lots of different types of tree are involved in creating this eye-catching effect – it’s obviously all been planned with loving care by the landscapers – but I’m a city boy and so am completely incapable of telling you what they are, for which I apologise. What I can tell you is that, in the heart of this green oasis, there’s a little bridge that lovers usually find romantic and under which they pause to kiss. Personally, as a schoolboy I always found it rather sinister and fully expected to be knifed to death whenever I had to pass through it after dusk. My fantasies of murder aside, this is a nice place. ‘Thank you for visiting the Arboretum,’ says a notice as you exit, extending various options to those who might like to leave feedback on their park experience. Yes, it’s a very polite place these days, is Nottingham.

Not bland, though. Nottingham stands on the river Trent, which is often taken as the line separating North from South. Certainly, it’s often served as a national dividing line: this is where Charles I raised his standard on 22 August 1642 to signal the beginning of the Civil War. The award-winning Galleries of Justice Museum characterise Nottingham as a ‘rebel city’, and it’s a title the city well deserves. The spirit of Arthur Seaton – that emblematic Nottingham Man, pace Stuart Maconie – runs deep in the city’s history.

Nottingham sport has had its fair share of nonconformist Seatons. The county’s cricketing history is full of rebels, eccentric individualists for whom conformity was never an option. ‘Clown prince’ Derek Randall is a classic example. When Dennis Lillee tossed a bouncer down at the Nottinghamshire and England batsman’s head in an Ashes Test in 1977, Randall whipped off his cap and reputedly called out: ‘No good hitting me there, mate. There’s nothing to damage.’ When he was finally out – for 174; Randall may have been a bit of a joker but he was no clown with the bat – he exited the playing area by the wrong gate and found himself climbing the steps towards the royal enclosure. ‘[The Queen] was very nice about it,’ Randall reported. ‘She smiled. Someone else quickly put me right.’ The spirit of Sir John Cockle lives on, it would appear.

Randall is part of a fine tradition of local cricketing unorthodoxy. In May 1930 the whole of the Nottinghamshire side famously took to the field in lounge suits on the final day of their match against Hampshire in Southampton. The previous day’s play had ended with the home side requiring just a single run for victory. The Notts captain, Arthur Carr, didn’t think it was worth the trouble of putting on whites the following morning: opening bowler Bill Voce actually wore an overcoat. His second ball yielded the necessary run.

A couple of years later Voce was back in the headlines, albeit in a less whimsical context. It was the Nottinghamshire pacemen Voce and ‘bloody frighteningly fast’ Harold Larwood who led the England attack on the infamous Bodyline tour of Australia in 1932–33, when the visitors caused uproar by their use of so-called ‘fast-leg theory’. The latter – which involved bowling at the batsman’s leg stump and getting the ball to rise into his ribs – had been devised by the respective captains of Notts and England, Arthur Carr and Douglas Jardine, to neutralise the threat posed by the great Australian player Don Bradman, who at the time boasted a surreal batting average of around 100. The strategy worked so well that it nearly caused a riot in the Third Test at Adelaide, when deliveries by Larwood hit Australian captain Bill Woodfull above the heart and fractured Bert Oldfield’s skull – police had to intervene to stop angry Australian spectators from attacking the England team. We tend to think of Aussies as tough, but Nottingham Man is an altogether steelier proposition. When the Australian cricketing board accused the tourists of using ‘unsportsmanlike’ tactics, the English team threatened to withdraw from the remaining matches.

In the event the series went ahead, and England claimed the Ashes by a 4–1 margin. The row reignited the following summer, though, when the governing body of English cricket, the Board of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), which had dismissed the Aussies as ‘squealers’ the previous winter, had a chance to witness ‘fast-leg theory’ in action at home, this time against the West Indies. Suddenly the powers-that-be decided that Bodyline was indeed a mite unsporting, and so demanded that Larwood make a personal apology to the Australians. If he refused, the MCC said, he would forfeit his England place. The furious Nottingham man, feeling that he was being scapegoated, pointed out that the tactic had actually been the idea of his Oxford-educated captain – the plot having notoriously been hatched in the sumptuous surroundings of the Piccadilly Club in London. Why should he, a working-class pro who had previously been employed down t’pit, shoulder the blame for the supremely well-connected ‘gentleman amateur’ Jardine?

Larwood refused to back down and as a result never played for England again. Ironically, having been vilified in his own country, he decided to emigrate to Australia. A sad fate, but Midlanders are natural outsiders: like Larwood, they generally accept their lot graciously. The great working-class fast bowler’s refusal to accept the blame for his officer-class captain’s tactics has since come to be seen as a key event in breaking down class distinctions in English cricket. All that stuff about working-class rebellion being a distinctively Northern phenomenon just isn’t true, you know.

Sport is one of the major reasons why the Midlands lacks much in the way of national profile: the perennial footballing giants Manchester United and Liverpool are two of the biggest reasons why everyone knows where the North is. By contrast, no one outside Nottinghamshire takes the sport played here very seriously. Trent Bridge, the home of the County Cricket team, regularly hosts Tests, but its international matches rarely generate the excitement of the equivalent games played at Lord’s (the home of Southern cricket) or Headingley (the home of cricket in the North).

Just around the corner from Trent Bridge is Meadow Lane, which hosts the oldest – and one of the least celebrated – of all professional football teams in the country, Notts County. They’re not very good at the game, of course, but that’s not the point – they’ve been not very good at it for longer than anyone else, and that’s what really matters. County scored major back-page headlines a few years ago when former England coach Sven-Göran Eriksson was appointed as their new director of football as a result of the club securing fresh financial backing from a Middle Eastern consortium called Munto Finance. Amidst feverish talk of an ambitious ‘project’ to get the Division 2 stragglers into the Premiership, the super-Swede was treated to a typically eccentric welcome on his arrival at Meadow Lane. ‘I had a wheelbarrow, the wheel fell off,’ a hundred or so supporters serenaded Svennis, much to the bafflement of national sports writers and presumably the Magpies’ new director of football himself. Shortly afterwards Munto pulled out and Eriksson resigned after the club was sold for a pound to former Lincoln chairman Ray Trew. Though obscure in utterance, the County fans’ prophecy proved correct: the wheel did well and truly fall off the barrow.

Which brings us to County’s local rivals, Nottingham Forest, and another great Midland eccentric: Brian Clough. Strictly speaking, Ol’ Big ’Ead, as Clough was affectionately known, was raised in the North-East but as local sports writer Al Needham has put it: ‘Cloughie … was pure Nottingham. Chelpy as you like, stubborn as anything, gobby enough to have a go at Muhammad Ali on Parkinson, and he chinned Roy Keane. He was Nottingham’s surrogate Dad, and we were his lairy, sometimes bemused but always fiercely loyal kids.’ That loyalty was displayed after Clough’s death in 2004, when thousands of fans turned out in the Market Square to mourn his passing.

It’s interesting that Clough, one of the most successful football managers of all time, should only ever have triumphed at unfashionable Midland clubs: before their world-beating reign at Forest, he and his long-term managerial partner, Peter Taylor, led the no less unheralded Derby County to the league title in 1972. But when Clough then took over an already successful, bona-fide Northern club, Leeds United, he was an abject failure, and his gobby, stubborn, chelpy (it’s not just the North that has dialect, tha knows) managerial style so displeased the Yorkshire club’s spoiled superstars that he lasted just forty-four days in office. When Clough went south to Brighton there was a similar cultural misunderstanding. Only Midland clubs were equal to Ol’ Big ’Ead’s idiosyncratic and abrasive style of management.

Forest were a terminally unglamorous outfit when Clough and Taylor took over in 1976. The duo gained the club promotion to the top table in 1977, then won the championship at the first attempt in 1978. The European Cup was secured for the Midlands the following year, and again in 1980. (Every year, when the last club from the metropolis was knocked out of the Champions League, Forest fans held a special ‘Nottingham 2 London 0 Day’ to mark the fact that Clough’s team secured the top European prize twice while no London outfit had ever won it. What a pity Chelsea triumphed in 2012 – although the score remains Nottingham 2 London 1. Actually, make that 9–1, since a homesick Nottingham lacemaker named Herbert Kilpin was responsible for creating Italian footballing giants AC Milan, who have won the biggest European prize seven times.) And then there was the little matter of the League Cup in 1978, 1979, 1989 and 1990 – an astonishing record when you consider that it was achieved without major financial backing. Clough wasn’t generally interested in making star signings (Trevor Francis being the exception that proves the rule): in fact, that’s probably why he was cold-shouldered by the North and South big-money boys. Only in the Midlands was success possible on Clough’s terms.

It wasn’t only in his ability to pick up key players for peanuts that Clough’s managerial style was unique. There’s also the matter of his celebrated bons mots. ‘At last England have appointed a manager who speaks English better than the players,’ he noted sardonically on the appointment of Sven-Göran Eriksson as national manager. Which Liverpool or Manchester United manager has ever matched Clough for wit? And it wasn’t only Clough’s words that were memorable. After Forest supporters mounted a pitch invasion at the conclusion of a League Cup victory over Queen’s Park Rangers in 1989, an appalled Clough took to the field himself and punched a number of errant Forest fans; he was fined £5,000 for his trouble, and banned from the touchline for the rest of the season. The attacked supporters refused to press charges, however, and when they realised who their aggressor was begged his forgiveness. What a strange incident that was. But life under Clough was full of such curious, heart-gladdening spectacles. He was famous for reprimanding his players – telling star striker Trevor Francis to take his hands out of his pockets as he was presenting him with an award on one occasion – and he had a similar authority when it came to handling crowds. As a boy, I remember watching as a sign was hauled out and placed in front of the Trent End terrace. It read: ‘Gentlemen, No Swearing Please – Brian.’ The famously foul-mouthed Trent Enders got the point – and the joke. Afterwards away supporters were routinely greeted with chants of ‘You’re gonna get your flipping head kicked in’, while on-field officials who made decisions that disappointed the Forest faithful were treated to a chorus of ‘The referee’s a naughty’. Only in the Midlands.

As Brian Glanville observed in an obituary of the Forest manager: ‘Clough’s methods were unique. He was essentially a dictator, and not always a benevolent one.’ Given his much-quoted pronouncements on his dealings with his players, Clough could hardly have disagreed with this assessment. ‘We talk about it for twenty minutes and then we decide I was right’ was how he once explained his manner of dealing with team members who questioned his tactics. He rarely indulged in self-doubt: ‘I wouldn’t say I was the best manager in the business. But I was in the top one,’ he famously opined. Yet despite (or perhaps even because of) that, when the end came for him professionally – Forest relegated, Clough battling alcoholism – he cut a peculiarly pathetic figure. And, of course, he never made English football’s top job – manager of the national team – a failure he deeply regretted. ‘I’m sure the England selectors thought if they took me on and gave me the job, I’d want to run the show. They were shrewd, because that’s exactly what I would have done,’ he commented. For all his successes, Clough remains the archetypal Midland tragic hero.

There’s also a more serious, socially engaged side to this eccentric, rebellious Nottingham spirit. It’s a tradition that begins with the Gest of Robin Hood, written in about 1500 – ‘For he was a good outlaw, / And did poor men much good’ – and finds particularly strong expression in the region’s line of Nonconformist (i.e. dissenting from the Church of England) religious radicals. It strikes me that there’s more than enough matter here for a Midland foundation myth or two.

If you head south-east from Nottingham city centre, you find yourself climbing out of the Trent valley and up Sneinton Hill. Here, outside 12 Notintone Place, stands a weathered statue of a preacher with arm upraised in full oratorical flow. This is William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, and the building he guards is the William Booth Birthplace Museum.

Like his fellow Midlander Margaret Thatcher, Booth (1829–1912) was a Methodist with an extraordinary zeal for his chosen line of work. ‘His spirit was like a white flame … There was nothing of the gentle saint about him,’ a journalist named Philip Gibbs reported in 1902.

On the day I went to see him, on behalf of the Daily Mail, he started by being angry, and then softened. Presently he seized me by the wrist and dragged me down to my knees beside him. ‘Let us pray for Alfred Harmsworth [the great press baron and owner of the Mail],’ he said. He prayed long and earnestly for Harmsworth, and Fleet Street, and the newspaper Press that it might be inspired by the love of truth and charity and the Spirit of the Lord.

Amen to that – but did Booth intend this little performance to be at least semi-humorous? Certainly Gibbs paints the scene comically, and there is evidence elsewhere that, for all his spiritual dedication and blood-and-thunder rhetoric, Booth had a splendid sense of the absurd. For instance, the early Salvation Army was a notable equal-opportunities employer, a progressive idea to which Booth gave memorable verbal form when he exclaimed: ‘My best men are women!’

Indeed, Booth’s heady strain of Midland eccentricity was his greatest spiritual weapon, and it was only when he began to give full vent to it, in 1878, that he really found his feet as a preacher. It was at this time that Booth literalised the notion of Christian soldiers fighting sin by reorganising his Christian Mission along quasi-military lines and renaming it the Salvation Army. Booth himself took the title of ‘General’, with his ministers also being accorded military ranks, and all now began to ‘put on the armour’ (the Salvation Army’s own uniform) for their ministry work. It was a daring, potentially silly idea – but it captured the public imagination: within four years, one London survey estimated that on a particular weeknight the Salvation Army attracted 17,000 worshippers while the Church of England got only 11,000 through its doors.

Booth’s influence as a reformer extended well beyond purely spiritual matters. His bestselling book In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890) in many respects served as the blueprint for the British welfare state in 1948. Booth compared industrialised England with ‘Darkest Africa’ and found the former wanting. In ‘The Cab-Horse Charter’ he wrote: ‘when a horse is down he is helped up, and while he lives he has food, shelter and work’; the same basic level of social assistance, he suggested, should be extended to humans too. The rest of the book is concerned with various schemes to improve the living standards of millions of poor and homeless people in Britain.

Booth was no Northern socialist, though. Rather, it’s the Midland spirit of self-sufficiency, or the yeoman ideal, as it’s sometimes called, that underpins his thinking. Where the state would not or could not act, the individual must step into the breach, Booth believed. Thus when the General and his wife, the redoubtable Catherine, discovered the national shame that was ‘Phossy Jaw’ (a condition caused by the toxic fumes given off by yellow phosphorus which caused the premature deaths of innumerable female match-factory workers by destroying their faces), the Booths’ response was simple: they opened their own factory, using only harmless red phosphorus in their manufacturing process and paying their workforce twice as much as traditional employers such as Bryant & May. Booth was justly proud of his achievement and organised tours of his ‘model’ factory for MPs and journalists.

Despite his extraordinary influence, Booth struggled to find favour with the Establishment. Actually, that’s not quite true – like all true Midlanders, he never even tried to curry favour with the Establishment. If Lord Shaftesbury chose to brand him the ‘Anti-Christ’, so be it. If others were outraged by his ‘elevation of women to men’s status’, let them complain: time would prove him right. And indeed, as the tide of opinion shifted, Booth found himself granted audiences with kings, emperors and presidents. When he died – or was ‘promoted to Glory’, as the organisation’s own terminology has it – in 1912, the Salvation Army was at work in fifty-eight countries; 150,000 mourners attended his funeral. As even the archbishop of York came to acknowledge, the distinctively unconventional flavour of the Army’s meetings and services – characterised by joyous singing and a Midland informality – allowed Booth and his followers to get their message across to people whom the Anglican Church had traditionally been powerless to reach.

* * *

It’s getting late so I drive north out of Nottingham, through the suburban sprawl of Sherwood Rise and Arnold, into the rolling farmland around Papplewick, on through leafy, wealthy Ravenshead with its Byronic ruins, and back to the ‘once-romantic, now utterly disheartening colliery town’, as local literary celeb D.H. Lawrence characterised Mansfield in his infamous dirty book Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence made this pronouncement eighty-odd years ago and, though it’s still a disheartening place, Mansfield is no longer a colliery town. Thereby hangs a tale, and perhaps a key to unlocking the character of Mansfield folk, and of Midlanders more generally.

In common with the rest of the country, most of the collieries in the Mansfield area closed in the wake of the miners’ strike of 1984–85. The fabled industrial dispute has often been portrayed as a good-versus-evil struggle pitting ordinary working people, mostly in the North, against an uncomprehending and vengeful government, entirely in the South. Thus, when Channel 4 commissioned an artist (from London) to create a work commemorating the strike, it was an event in South Yorkshire – ‘The Battle of Orgreave’, a confrontation between police and picketing miners at a British Steel coking plant – that the artist in question, Jeremy Deller, chose to focus on. ‘On 18 June 1984 I was watching the evening news and saw footage of a picket at the Orgreave coking plant in South Yorkshire in which thousands of men were chased up a field by mounted police,’ Deller has written. ‘It seemed a civil war between the North and the South of the country was taking place in all but name.’ That last sentence is quite wrong – the strike affected the whole of the UK – but it fits nicely with the mythology of the North/South divide so it’s unlikely to raise many eyebrows. But were events in Yorkshire and the North, and the stand-off between police and striking miners, the only or even the main ‘story’ of the strike? If they were, it’s hard to understand Mansfield’s role in it, or why chants of ‘scab’ – meaning someone who refuses to join a strike – ring out from the terraces whenever Mansfield Town Football Club plays against its South Yorkshire soccer rivals.

The strike was a very emotive business: lives were destroyed and even lost as attitudes grew increasingly polarised. As I said just now, it’s been mythologised as a struggle between the right-wing government (and its puppet police force) and the traditional working classes. But though it’s certainly true that Margaret Thatcher had unfinished business with the unions when she came to power, the strike was more complicated than that. For one thing, it was also a matter of miners against miners.

The catalyst for the initial walkout was the announcement on 6 March 1984 by the National Coal Board (NCB) that it intended to close twenty pits with the loss of 20,000 jobs. Six days later Arthur Scargill, the Barnsley-born former Young Communist president of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), called a national strike. Colliers in Scargill’s own county, Yorkshire, and Kent were the first to heed their master’s voice, followed by pit employees in Scotland, South Wales and Durham. Others, meanwhile, refused to strike. These ‘scabs’ – you might alternatively call them courageous independents: given the physical threats and actual violence offered in the subsequent struggle, continuing to work was certainly not a coward’s option – were led by the Nottinghamshire miners, with Mansfield men in the vanguard.

In fact, you could say that the strike’s great fault line ran straight through Mansfield: one of the great mass marches was held here in May 1984, when dockers and railways workers made common cause with colliery workers; and it was here that the breakaway union, the Union of Democratic Mineworkers (UDM), was eventually set up. Note the name: democracy was at the heart of the Nottinghamshire miners’ resistance to the NUM’s strike declaration. Looking back years later, Roy Lynk, the founder of the UDM, insisted that it was Scargill’s refusal to hold a national ballot of his members – rendering the strike technically illegal – that led to the bitter division among miners and the break-up of the NUM.

When an area ballot was held during the early part of the strike, Nottinghamshire miners voted to carry on working. They were far from alone in rejecting strike action, but the NUM’s use of flying pickets intimidated most of the initial refuseniks into joining the strike willy-nilly. The Nottinghamshire men showed particular resolve, then, in standing firm against the bullying of Yorkshireman Scargill and his militant cohorts. ‘In a sense sending pickets was a self-defeating exercise. The more they picketed the more people would keep going [to work]. No one wanted to back down from what they were doing,’ Lynk told the Chad, the local Mansfield newspaper, two decades later. ‘A lot of people resent being told what to do and go against it if it’s being forced down their throats.’

I come from a mining family. My maternal grandfather spent his whole life ‘wokkin’ in wattah fah two tiddlahs’, as the local dialect has it. (Roughly translated, that means he laboured hard in extremely damp conditions in return for a bit of extra money, or overtime.) He died in 1980 – he had long suffered problems with his breathing; that’s what a lifetime on the coalface does for you – but my Uncle Jimmy was still employed as a pit engineer at the time of the strike and vividly remembers the hail of bricks that greeted him and his fellow workers on their path into work or the sound of battering at the door as wild-cat strikers tried to smash their way into the pit workshop. The fact that he disobeyed Comrade Arthur and continued working meant there was little tension between him and my Auntie Hilda’s husband, Alf, who was a policeman and consequently very unpopular with NUM loyalists. Of course, some local miners did go on strike and there were plenty of striking non-locals who were in the habit of hanging around town at the time too, which put an extra crackle of electricity in the air – not to mention long scratches down the sides of parked cars whenever there was a show of militant unionist strength locally.

Alf is dead now, but my father used to go down the pub with him on a Friday night. ‘When the strike was on, you’d get all the NUM supporters on one side of the pub, and all the UDM people on the other,’ he recounts. ‘There would always be friction across the bar, and at some point during the evening a member of the NUM lot would approach Alf looking for a fight, and there’d often be a bit of nonsense between the NUM and UDM factions outside. Every Friday without fail someone wanted to take Alf on.’

A friend recently reminded me of an incident that reflected the general atmosphere at the time. ‘We’d thrown a party at my parents’ house and some kids we hadn’t invited had turned up and were wrecking things. It was really getting out of hand,’ he says. ‘The neighbours noticed and called the police, and because of all the aggro in the area from the miners’ strike the riot squad turned up! That sorted them out, I can tell you.’ There were moments when you were grateful for all that added police presence. As Jimmy remembers, without it, ‘There’d have been a piggin’ bloodbath.’

Naturally, the harsh realities of Midlanders’ experience of the strike are ignored or dismissed in the film of Deller’s ‘The Battle of Orgreave’. Instead, we get references to wealthy Notts colliers airily driving around in Range Rovers, Mercedes and BMWs. ‘They’re just a bunch of scabbing bastards’ is the documentary’s verdict on their role in the affair. And that’s just not true.

The Notts men knew that the strike was futile, if not positively damaging to the industry’s chances of survival. As another ex-miner tells me: ‘The government wanted a fracas like that so they’d got a damn good excuse to shut the mines.’ Modernisation was inevitable, as was restructuring. ‘Without a strike they wouldn’t have shut all the pits, but they’d certainly have thinned them out. There were too many around here. Blidworth, Rufford, Sherwood, they were all about two miles apart. With the new equipment that had been introduced since the pits were first sunk, you could go underground and travel six, eight, ten miles on the trains to your work real quick, like. You didn’t need all this “one pit here, one pit there” business.’

It’s too easy to caricature the non-strikers as cash-grabbing ‘scabs’. The decision to go on working wasn’t just about money. It was about democracy; it was also about realism. Pragmatism is less sexy than heroism, but sometimes it’s more progressive. It’s time we rethought that idea of the miners’ strike as a civil war between North and South.

The nation’s great individualists, Midlanders are above kneejerk class-based political loyalties. The Mansfield-led Nottinghamshire miners were accused of being Thatcherite stooges, but name calling, and actual violence, made no difference to their resistance to Scargillite coercion. Truculent independence of mind is a very Midland attitude: we’re used to our outsider status. Perhaps it’s because of this – and because we’re excluded from the lazy black-and-white cultural distinctions inherent in the idea of the North/South divide – that Midlanders are able to take a more nuanced view of life’s little complexities. It is, if you like, a mark of our civilisation. And that means I’m proud to come from a scab – or, if you wanted to make it sound more romantic, you might instead say an outlaw – town.