The North

by Paul Morley

I began to write the book, even if just to see whether such a book could be written, a book that would perhaps finish with the words:

  The Lighthouse at Berwick-upon-Tweed

  (a) Liverpool, trendy renovated docks. Liverpool, city centre regeneration. Liverpool, supposed city centre regeneration. Liverpool, where every acre of space in the inner city must be turned into a source of income, and outside the centre the bricks are fixed, the streets unmoved, the world artificially closer, but farther away, moving elsewhere, on to screens, into phones, behind now, within the present, but on the outside, into another dimension altogether. Liverpool, the glazed buildings and top-class design are meant to evoke a combination of eighteenth-century splendour and twenty-first-century vision. Liverpool, 143 new shops, 360 apartments, non-distinct executive office space and new bars and restaurants buzzing with reality-television-inspired energy. Liverpool has always been about the future, seeing it first, digging it up out of nowhere, grasping its potential, exploiting the results. The future that is now being glossily layered over the city is a cosmetic one, a commercially contrived one, an illusion that does not necessarily represent the essential foreignness of the city, the rampant alien vigour. The awkwardly misaligned staid glass windows, chain stores, coffee shops, waterfront apartments, architectural flourishes, tourist trails, heritage points seem all imported from the bland, paved and lacklustre England that has ignored the city for so long. The modernisation seems processed and gift-wrapped and liable to rub away the urgent, chaotic but ultimately grand and unifying elements that have made Liverpool so different, so aggressively outside, a place that helped make England, and Britain, and Europe, a better, stranger, lovelier and more hopeful place than it might otherwise have been. The refurbishment seems not to have come from the city’s people, from its thriving, maddening history, its fundamental commitment to invention and innovation, but to have been merely dropped in place, as ordered by glib, dreamless business, as designed by faceless committee.

  This alluring, cheerless invasion of the artificially manufactured is maybe the latest threat to a city that in the end has become what it is because of its ability to somehow survive any direct or indirect attempts to undermine its natural resilience. The regeneration does not represent, except superficially, the radical pioneering nature of the city, the way it has changed with the times sometimes by being the place those changes happened first. The rebuilding and cleaning-up is all second hand and selective, and borrowed from other regions and other redevelopments, but Liverpool’s battling, roguish history suggests that its radicalism will not be destroyed. The city, uniquely capable of somehow acting collectively, to represent an inner will, a common appetite, will find other ways to maintain the aura of otherness and togetherness that is the heart of its scandalous, edgy specialness. Liverpool, relax, don’t do it. Liverpool, an interview in Nerve magazine with Alan Bleasdale, in which he says, ‘I have occasionally a serious ear infection, and so I go down to the Royal Hospital, say, three times a week – Monday, Wednesday, Friday – get up first thing in the morning to get my ears sorted, and I have to go through Kensington – which is where I used to live, in the seventies with my wife and children – and in Kensington – you’d find this in a lot of other places around Liverpool – it has declined. As much as there are the bright lights and luxury apartments and the wine bars, in the centre of Liverpool, there is also a decline, in places like Bootle, Old Swan and Kensington and areas outside of the city. What I’m trying to say is, I would hope that – in the year 2008 – if I’m still going to the bloody hospital, that Kensington will look a damn sight better than it does now because its . . . by culture you’d still mean poets, and artists, and musicians, and actors, and singers, these are cultural – it should be for the cultural benefit of everyone in this city. And culture includes your culture – how you live. And it will have failed if there’s still areas in Liverpool that have just got worse. And I know when I went to Glasgow after the city of culture you could see the amazing effect it had on so many parts of the city, I think it was a great success. I think the people who are organising this have to be aware it’s for all the people of Liverpool.’

  1552

  In the reign of Edward VI Lancashire was described in a government report as ‘wyld savage contry ferre from any habitacon’. Its boggy moors and rock-strewn green hills remained forbidding and remote. The land was inhospitable to large farms: sheep roamed fields divided by stone fences, many of which still stand. Its inhabitants made their living largely by harvesting and converting the local wool into yarn, then cloth. Women spun, men wove.

  The right of sanctuary – a criminal’s right to gain time for a legal defence or passage to exile by reaching a certain place, a Catholic continuation of an Anglo-Saxon tradition – had been granted to Manchester in 1540 but was taken away twelve years later because of the damage done to the textile trade by criminals coming to Manchester to avoid arrest.

  By the 1530s and 1540s Lancashire’s overwhelmingly agrarian society was becoming more complex. The rise of the textile industries enabled many yeomen and smaller farmers, especially in the south-east of the county, to augment their family income by joining the manufacturing process, preparing raw material, spinning and weaving, although the finishing of cloth remained in the hands of specialist fullers and dyers.

  1538

  ‘Coals to Newcastle’, meaning a pointless pursuit, was first recorded as a contextualised saying in 1538. The counties of Northumberland and Durham supported a biannual fair in Newcastle, where peddlers sold their goods. The phrase perhaps arose as advice between peddlers from outlying districts not to try to sell coal at the market.

  During the Middle Ages the south-east of England – in particular the triangular area between London, Oxford and Cambridge – became a region of special social and economic influence. Social change always has linguistic consequences. It was inevitable that the English of those south-easterners in routine contact with the worlds of courtly culture, commerce and learning would increase in prestige and come to be regarded as more polished, elegant and altogether more desirable than the varieties available elsewhere. The stage was set for the emergence of a standard language.

  1537

  Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries provoked a rebellion in Lincolnshire and the northern counties in the autumn of 1536 and early 1537. For a short time Henry VIII lost control of the north of England and there was the very real possibility of civil war.

  1530

  ‘Though betwixt Cawood and Rotherham be good plenty of wood, yet the people burn much earth coal, because it is plentifully round there, and sold good cheap. A mile from Rotherham be very good pits of coal . . . Hallamshire hath plenty of wood, and yet there is burned much sea coal . . . there be plenty of veins of sea coal in the quarters about Wakefield . . . the easterly parts of Richmondshire burn much sea coals brought out of Durhamshire.’ John Leland reporting on his travels through Yorkshire in the 1530s.

  1515

  Lancashire was one of the least affluent English counties in the early sixteenth century. Indeed it had been for some time, and was to remain so for well over a century. In the tax assessments for the lay subsidy of 1515, Lancashire came last of the thirty-eight counties assessed in terms of pounds levied per thousand acres, although four of the very poorest counties, Cumberland, Westmorland, Northumberland and Durham, were exempted. The north was extremely poor and to some extent it was a border province, with sympathies more likely to be with the previously exiled Celtic people who found their land under pressure in Wales and Scotland. Also, it had very limited parliamentary representation, with only ten seats: two for the county and two each for the townships of Preston, Liverpool, Wigan and Lancaster. By the early sixteenth century the county had not actually sent representatives to Parliament for over 200 years.

  (b) I visited Reddish for the first time in over thirty years since the day we moved out in 1970, and walked the same streets between North Reddish Junior School,
my house and Houldsworth Square that I had walked as an eight-year-old, almost catching sight of my sixties self setting off looking for freedom towards the flowery nooks, leaf-crowned crannies and insect-shrouded woodland trails of Reddish Vale.

  I looked at the house where I lived on Westbourne Grove, up at the small window at the front that had been my bedroom, containing the painted wooden capsule where I learned to think for myself. I wondered whether, in the back garden, the crippled little tree still stood that I once climbed on the way to discovering myself. There is a world where I could still live in this house, having got stuck in a family that got stuck, where I stayed put, because everything I needed was nearby, at one end or another of the Gorton Road. I wondered what would have become of me if I had stayed there, in that house, for all the time that I had not been in that house. If I had stayed where I was . . . I would never have known where I was.

  The house now was like a re-enactment of something that might not have taken place, and I stared at it as if for inspiration, as if the meek and mild bricks might whisper something significant about the family that once lived there, and the little boy who learned so much about who and where he was without knowing it for years. The bricks were as quiet as dust as silent as yesterday, and there was no reason for me to linger for long. The little boy might still be inside, surrounded by the enchanting shadows of Alan Garner’s mind. Or he might have become the middle-aged man who was now looking on and marvelling how that little boy, stuck in a cupboard in the dark, had imagined a reality that eventually became a book that would tell him a lot about what he needed to know about where and who he actually was.

  I stood outside my old school, and because there was no one else around, no one in sight, no sound of anything else, no movement behind the limp Victorian lace curtains that had made it into the twenty-first century, I could be a ghost, of no one in particular, haunting the place where I first became someone for real. I stared through the railings at the playground where I queued up for class in the morning, kicked grubby tennis balls against sturdy, docile brick walls, scuffled with classmates, and poked around in brick-shaped corners to escape the alert but passive gaze of monitoring teachers who once had such high hopes.

  The place seemed to have got on nicely without me, forgetting me as soon as I left, busy with the next children, who would dissolve into the next children, and the next, as teachers came and went and every year was the same but different, the same dates and routines, different faces, different dreams. I wondered where the children in my class had ended up – still living around the corner, never moving far from the school, feeling safe where they were; or was this just, as it was for me, an early territory to inhabit that encouraged a desire to keep exploring new territory, to move further away until there was no way back, unless you needed to remind yourself of where you’d been, to retrace your steps for the sake of a book? I had got to know Reddish so well, I would know it for ever, even though I had forgotten all about it for years.

  Everything around Reddish did indeed seem smaller and humbler, and less packed with mint-condition mysteries, than it had seemed to an eight-year-old, and so little had changed other than signs of wear, tear and modifications in decoration and new front doors, the erratic appearance of satellite dishes, spruced-up pubs making more of an outdoor show of themselves, and the vehicles on the Gorton Road, speeding with tempting colours never known in the 1960s, that it could be claimed that nothing had changed.

  Quiet, tree-trapped Reddish North station with its ghostly ticket office and its modest unadorned platforms still seemed set in ways more suited to steam trains, nestled between at one end the big worked-up local city that sent unassuming two-carriage trains trundling its way and politely welcomed them back, and at the other hills, valleys and bridges unchanged for centuries. Smooth, solid rails still four feet eight inches apart just as George Stephenson decided 180 years ago in the coalfields of Durham and Northumberland and used on the world-changing Liverpool to Manchester line, becoming standard in 1845, used by Sir Bernard Lovell to move his great dish around the edge of the cosmos, looking up to date in the twenty-first century, the most modern-looking structure for miles around, flowed through Reddish North on the way to crossing the backbone of the country, towards other counties, featuring other barely-there districts arranged around modest platforms, ghostly spaces and unvaried routine.

  The local accents were a little broader, even a little more self-conscious, mirroring and exaggerating their increased use on television and radio, as if the thickening popularity of agreeably blunt, attractively mischievous northern celebrities, actors and pop stars had encouraged an extrovert looseness of the tongue, sometimes to the point of parody, to the point of competing with Scouse, in the way that ostentatious Scouse had chased the warm Lancashire, the softer, more measured Yorkshire, the unembellished Cheshire out of the mellow, mid-range Manc accent, sharp up into the nose, into the heart of the ego.

  (In 2011 another Stockport tennis player, teenager Liam Broady, was causing commotion among those counting the years since Fred Perry last won Wimbledon. He had reached the final of the boys’ junior singles tournament, and even though he eventually lost, here was a legitimate young candidate to finally end the long wait for a British champion. Wimbledon champions such as Björn Bjorg, Ivan Lendl and Roger Federer had all previously made the boys’ junior singles final. Not only that; Broady was from Heaton Chapel, north of the Mersey but emphatically Stockport, a few miles from where Fred Perry was born and, more personally, a few miles from the last Morley family home in Stockport. The arrival of Broady as a serious candidate for tennis greatness meant that newspaper articles could begin ‘Where would English tennis be without Stockport?’

  Broady, though, was managed by his father, Simon, purposely outside the rigid tennis establishment, which still seemed as elitist and intolerant as in the 1930s. Simon Broady complained that the All England Club was still as hostile to a Stockport accent as it had been in Perry’s era – that flat, sardonic Stockport vowels still marked a player out as difficult to control with too much of an independent agenda. There had been northern prime ministers, northern pop stars, northern sporting superstars, northern scientific, technical, social, cultural geniuses, influential northern philosophers, transcendentally romantic and psychedelically perceptive northern writers, poets, artists and film makers, fashion designers, classical music titans, and northern clothing brand names, and computers taking over the world, or at least its reflection, had first thought their first thoughts in the north, but still, far enough into the twenty-first century to consider that the twentieth century was truly over, prejudices reaching back in time about how a so-called provincial accent represented a blunt, uncouth attitude that was somehow fundamentally unschooled and trouble-making were still entrenched.)

  The idle supersized mills had been converted into flats and workshops, following the fashion in Manchester city centre for turning immense Victorian warehouses into loft apartments and art spaces, as part of another project to modernise, remake history, renovate the traditions of enterprise, and keep up with the fame and appearance of other driven, yearning cities – as if tarting up these deadlocked mills might confirm they were distant cousins of those charismatic twenty-first-century edifices drawn out of the ground and propelled onto a stage, celebrities as much as buildings, by Reddish lad done good Norman Foster. No signs in Reddish of new versions of the particularly ambitious buildings there had been at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The industrialised energy that took some time to reach Reddish and covered the ground with streets and houses had long since diminished.

  The mill-shocked layout of the streets was exactly the same under the same granite sky, and if you went that way, there was still Denton, still gnawing at the edges of Gorton, and the other way, still, there was Stockport, its mid-nineteenth-century viaduct now split asunder by a late-twentieth-century motorway, both standing up for their respective centuries with undim
med mettle, and, another way, there was Longsight, and then Levenshulme, and then Ardwick, and then Manchester, forever fiddling with its appearance, plucking this, boosting that, expanding the other. Look, over there, at the view, the strapping Pennines, as for ever as ever and ever. Reddish looked as if it had not been built but had simply grown, covering the ground like moss. Would it look this way in 200 years, a little more petrified, but with the same markings, in the same order, or look as different then as it looked now from how it would have been 200 years ago?

  It could be claimed that Reddish was a classic example of how the social and cultural patterns destroyed by the Industrial Revolution, which had led to a build-up of housing and people in the years that followed and a rush of happening followed by general stagnation, had created a new set of patterns that seem deeply settled, but so settled they were surely coming to an end. People were getting on with their lives, still moving this way and that from here to there, accumulating possessions, looking after their gardens, filling dustbins, watching TV, raising families, facing problems, fixing roofs, losing their grip, going on holiday, but amid the ashes of the Industrial Revolution, of the British Empire, of events in time and space that had happened a long time ago.

  The steadiness, the modesty, the secrecy and passive acceptance of the place was a reflection of the shock of how the Industrial Revolution changed everything, and then there was no plan, or system, or conceptual thinking about what would happen next. There was just an aftershock. It carries on.

  There had been a material improvement in people’s lives, an invention of new traditions, a creation of relative comfort, but there was also a cost, a kind of imprisonment in a mental and physical landscape that was now feeling old and drained, with the only signs of modernisation emerging from inside the houses, and cars, and buildings, from inside the screens that were being carried around by people.