A Word from the North….Why?

Looking North

The BBC’s latest blockbuster drama is called The North Water. It’s an appropriate name for a tale of hard seafaring men, battling with the ice in their 19th century whaling ship.

But what if the action in the TV series, based on a book by Ian McGuire, had been located in the South Pole near the Antarctic Ocean, where climate conditions are equally grim and challenging for human survival? They would have had to find a different title entirely. The South Water would not have conjured the right sense of danger and derring-do. The South, as we all know, is a place of sunshine and warm seas, brilliant beaches and gentle breezes.  Our whalers would be basking under the palm trees, not freezing on an ice floe. Never mind that the further south you go, these benign conditions gradually cease to apply. Think of the Falklands, for example, still more popular with sheep than sunseekers. But, regardless, the Far North appears to have the monopoly on inhospitable, teeth-clenching weather.

Our culture is studded with references to the North as a place of mystery and danger. The Narnia Chronicles, Tolkien’s tales, even Game of Thrones and His Dark Materials feature the North as the scary, forbidding part of the fantasy map. Here, writers as different as CS Lewis and Philip Pullman insist that their heroes and heroines must face terrible foes and great peril before reaching the end of the quests.

Much of this sensibility stems from the industrial revolution, when a generation of writers and thinkers instilled the idea of the ’dark satanic mills’ in the public imagination. The Northern factories and foundries were contrasted with the homely weavers’ cottages and pastoral acres, from which the workforce had been propelled, Rose-tinted glasses fixed the perception of the North as a place of Gormenghast grimness. Even Dickens was at it, describing Coketown, the northern mill town of Hard Times as bleak and degrading.  JB Priestly didn’t help either, coining the phrase ‘It’s Grim Up North’. It was meant in jest, but few people saw the joke. 

More recently, the 1960s ushered in an era of social realism, which once again depicted Northern towns and cities as benighted, smoke-ridden and ugly environments, which oppressed the heroes of novels like Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, This Sporting Life, Room at the Top, Billy Liar etc, No matter that this was not the intention of the writers, who were hoping to present a more nuanced view of their lives. By the time these novels had been filmed, televised and otherwise mulched in the soil of popular culture, the message was ‘get out while you can’.

This injunction was intensified by the growing economic disparity between the north and south as the decline of the northern industrial base inevitably led to poorer housing, health and education. This economic gap was accelerated by a ‘political’ gap as power became increasingly centralised in London.

As wealth and power gravitated to the capital city, so did our cultural institutions, our newspapers and broadcasting media – all of which has served to underline the gap between North and South. Making a mark in the cultural or media world means making it in London, thereby draining the North of its talent, innovation and vibrancy.

At least, that’s the theory.

I’m a Northerner by birth.  Not the North of England – where I now live and work. But Northern Ireland. Leaving aside the particular historical context of Ireland’s own North vs South debate, similar cultural distinctions are made here too. ‘The Black North’ is a phrase often used in the Republic of Ireland (otherwise known as the South – though the northernmost part of the island – Donegal – is actually in the South!). The suggestion is that nothing good can come out of such a place and speaks of a centuries-long superiority complex developed in Dublin about the industrial north. It was in Belfast that Ireland’s major industries developed – shipbuilding, linen and ropemaking. But Dublin, the capital of Ireland, was the administrative and cultural heart of the island and liked to revel in its position as ‘second city of Empire’.  Belfast, despite its sizeable population and prosperity, as far as the Irish elite were concerned, was a backwater.

As a young man growing up in Belfast, I came to believe this too. Whether it was music, media, theatre or literature, the South had everything to offer and my own backyard had little or nothing. It was only later in life that I began to realise the cultural riches that had lain under my nose. The world’s best-known poet, Seamus Heaney, came from Northern Ireland. One of the 20th century’s most acclaimed novelists, Brian Moore, was Belfast-born.  CS Lewis, the inventor of Narnia, one of my favourite childhood reads, was an Ulsterman. And then there was Brian Friel and Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon, and John Hewitt and Louis MacNiece… the list could go on for some time. A ridiculous number of talented writers from such a small place. They are joined today by Booker award winners like Anna Burns, garlanded musicians like Sir James Galway, feted actors like Sir Kenneth Branagh, Stephen Rea and Liam Neeson, award winning artists like Willie Doherty and Rita Duffy. A pretty good return from a cultural backwater.

And a similar list in Northern England would run not only from the Brontes to Ted Hughes, but from Lowry to Leonora Carrington, from the Beatles to Dame Janet Baker, from Auden to Armitage.

The point is not to make endless lists but to demonstrate that cultural riches can be found in any part of these islands.  East and West, North and South, a cartographer could quickly run up a map studded with cultural landmarks whether the starting point was Liverpool Street or Lime Street.

The truth is and has always been that there is no shortage of innovation, talent, ideas and inspiration in the North. What is missing is the spotlight, the glare of media attention that illuminates the reality of our shared cultural wealth. As long as our newspapers, television and radio channels are still fixated on London and its doings, the North will lose out. As long as the so-called ‘national’ media sees the ‘nation’ as effectively ending at the M25, the north will not get the attention it deserves. While the publishing industry, art salerooms and music and theatre critics stay anchored to the capital, then the amazing achievements of the North will remain partially hidden from view.

This website aims to do its very little bit to redress the balance. Here – in A Word from the North, you will find stories about the north (both fact and fiction) – tales told from a northern point of view, a northern sensibility, if you like. Articles will cover arts and culture, mainly – but there will also be material on local government, on architecture, on politics. Anything with a northern slant and which demonstrate why this North – England’s and Ireland’s – is so special.