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The Northern Question
A History of aDivided Country
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Industrial decline, retrenchment of the state’s social functions and, latterly, market-driven urban redevelopment have combined to blight large swathes of the North. ‘Staring out the window, the strangest thing I saw was how desolate and empty the streets are now. We would drive for minutes without seeing anyone,’ remarked journalist Stephen Armstrong, surveying the legacy of New Labour’s urban-regeneration programme in bulldozed east Manchester in 2011. ‘Instead of dirty, closely packed housing there were acres and acres of desolate ground all grassed over. You could still see the outline of streets, where houses used to be – but now, nothing. It was as if the Triffids had arrived.’ Armstrong’s previous work, The Super-Rich Shall Inherit the Earth (2010), had given an ambivalent assessment of the doings of the global economic elite on the British scene. The UK had become ‘a kind of damp Monte Carlo’, the world-financial hub of London attracting billionaires from around the world on account of its money-laundering facilities, property portfolios and enviable lifestyle options. Just as J. A. Hobson had written a century earlier, south-east England remains, for the privileged classes, ‘a place of residence and a playground’.37
Deindustrialisation has meant that contemporary regional disparities are characterised less by industry versus finance than by the positional superiority of London in a services-dominated national economic space – the northern rustbelt acting, in effect, as senior representative of left-behind England. However, since the North has never achieved the escape velocity needed to free itself from its industrial past, we may have licence to approach the region by way of the original sites of the manufacturing revolution, in order to see how they have fared. So defined, the North centres on the old Lancashire–Yorkshire textile belt, flanked by the ports of Liverpool and Hull; the former heavy-industrial zones of west Lancashire, west Cumberland, south Yorkshire and the North East coast; and the abandoned coalfields these conurbations grew up on and around. This North encompasses the major urban areas of the official North East, North West and Yorkshire– Humber regions while also taking in High Peak textile towns such as Glossop and New Mills as well as the north Derbyshire coalfield, which ‘looked to Sheffield as a natural centre’.38
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