Table of Contents
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
Prologue
The Beautiful South
All Change
Scally, Scally, Pride of Our Alley
So Much To Answer For. . .
Mills and Bhuna
Cardboard Box? You Were Lucky
Fur Coat and No Knickers
Beside the Seaside
The Great North
Epilogue
Extract: Cider With Roadies Introduction
1 With The Beatles
Pies and Prejudice
Pies and Prejudice
In Search of the North
STUART MACONIE
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ISBN 9780091930301
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This edition published 2008
First published in 2007 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing A Random House Group Company
Copyright © Stuart Maconie 2007
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For The Angels Of The North
Acknowledgements
For their help, encouragement, advice, love and hospitality, my heartfelt thanks to Eleanor, Bridget, John, Steph, Eddie, Suzanne, Martin, Kate (The Great Haldini), Lesley Douglas, Mark Byford, Paula Rogers, Rhys Hughes, John Leonard, Andrew Harrison, Peter Kay, Paul Rodgers, Judith Holder, my ever-patient editor Andrew Goodfellow, Mum and Dad, and of course Kirsty and Greggs the bakers.
'If you're an alien, how come you sound like you come from the north?'
'Lots of planets have a north.'
Doctor Who, 2005
Prologue
A few years ago, I was standing in my kitchen, rustling up a Sunday brunch for some very hungover, very northern mates who were 'down' for the weekend. One of them was helping me out, finding essential ingredients like paracetamol and orange juice, and asked me, 'Where are the sun-dried tomatoes?'
'They're next to the cappuccino maker,' I replied.
A ghastly, pregnant silence fell. Slowly, we turned to meet each other's gaze. We didn't say anything. We didn't need to. Each read the other's unspoken thought; we had changed. We had become the kind of people who rustled up brunch on Sundays, passed around sections of the Sunday papers, popped down to little bakeries; the kind of people who had sun-dried tomatoes and cappuccino makers.
Southerners, I suppose.
Now before readers from Godalming and Sidcup, Aylesbury and Exeter hurl this book across the non-fiction section enraged, before they chuck it in the bin cursing the waste of a good book token when they could have got a nice Danielle Steel or Sven Hassel, let me explain. I don't like thinking this way, like a Pict in an animal pelt, face blue with woad. I'd rather be cosmopolitan, suave, displaying an easy confidence with pesto and fish knives and the Hammersmith and City Line. I have tried to change, really I have. I say 'lunch'. I say 'book' with an 'uh' not an 'oooh'. Though I draw the line at 'supper' and 'barth'.
But then again... Then again, I do have a cappuccino maker and some sun-dried tomatoes. Actually, moving with the times, of course, it's now some sun-blushed tomatoes (so much juicier, don't you think, and lovely tossed in with balsamic and feta). But on some level, I feel it should be a plate of tripe and a pound of lard, the sort of food you want after a hard day digging coal from a three-foot seam or riveting steel plates – proper jobs, in fact, as opposed to tapping effeminately at a keyboard for hours on end or talking to yourself in a radio studio.
This book, then, is an attempt to rediscover both the north itself and my own inner northerner. Does the north still exist? Are the hand-wringing cultural theorists right when they talk of a Britain of identikit prefab towns each with a Body Shop, Costa Coffee and Waterstones? Or is the north still more likely to rejoice in a flagship Cash Converters than a flagship Harvey Nicks, whatever the fashionistas of Leeds might think?
The north. What is it? Where is it? Where does it begin and end, what does it mean to be northern and why, in a country that you could drop and easily lose in one of the American Great Lakes, does that two and a half hour journey from London to Manchester or Leeds still feel like crossing time zones, political borders and linguistic and cultural frontiers?
When we say the north, what do we really mean? It's something both powerful (like Newcastle Brown) and attractively vague (like most Oasis lyrics). The north means the Lake Poets and Lindisfarne Island and at the same time sink estates, ASBOs and the AIDS capital of Britain (Doncaster, if you're interested). The north is big and complicated. Square metres of it are crowded, square miles of it are almost deserted. Surprisingly for an area so well covered by CCTV, it still says 'Here Be Dragons' on the Daily Telegraph and Radio 4's map of Britain.
And so, by supersaver and service station, by West Coast Main Line and M6, I began the journey back home. 'Home is the place,' wrote Robert Frost, 'where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.' But would it still feel like home? Would they have to take me back? Would I want them to?
What kind of book is this that you have in your hand? I guess it's a travel book of sorts though it has little in common with many modern travel books. If you hang around the travel section of your local bookshop for a while you will notice how many modern travel books have titles that sing out with brisk and slightly wacky jauntiness: Mind My Nose Flute! Bhutan on Three Dong a Day, To Tierra Del Fuego by Cement Mixer or Around. Khazakstan with a Guinea Pig. You can picture the authors, scrubbed-looking, enthusiastic men and women in big shorts and headscarves, pushing back the flaps of a tent on the Hindu Kush, inhaling deeply the desert air or emerging from a dilapidated shower block in a former Soviet Gulag and flicking the border guards with a towel.
By contrast I went to Harrogate. And Bury. And Haltwhistle. And Saddleworth. And Liverpool and Manchester. I went to a great many places, covered a lot of miles, saw a lot of gift shops and tearooms and city-centre regeneration displays and, boy, oh boy, a lot of high-visibility tabards and Greggs bakeries, as we shall see.
But even by the dire, apocalyptic, randomly privatised standards of the British transport system, a system so ill thought out that it takes longer to get to Norwich from Birmingham than from Birmingham to Moscow, these aren't epic journeys, and I knew many of the places quite well already. I didn't sleep
under the stars with the Mujahedeen, I slept in quite nice hotels most of the time, and the natives were largely friendly though getting a toasted teacake in Hexham proved dauntingly difficult.
Although I'm from Lancashire and this book is primarily about the north of England, I'd like to think it can be enjoyed by the fine people of the south of England too. My publishers are understandably as keen as mustard on this as well. I really hope that it's neither puff piece nor hatchet job. I just wanted to share some thoughts about the place I come from, its people and cities and music and food and humour and landscapes and stuff and how I feel about it. It isn't a guidebook in the sense that it isn't exhaustive. You will look in vain for much about Grasmere or Grimsby. It's my north and reflects both my centres of gravity, the directions that pulled me, the places that made me think, 'I wonder what that place is like now,' at the beginning of a shiny new millennium.
I hope this book is a love letter – one that makes you laugh, the best sort – but not just flannel and boasting about how bloody marvellous and decent and rugged and down-to-earth we are. Because we're not, not all the time. Like an old friend, I love the north of England dearly while recognising its many faults and I hope I don't shy away from them. They are part of its character. It can be grim up north, and heart-stoppingly beautiful.
It isn't all football and fags. It's politics and folklore, civil war and nuclear power, heavy industry and haute couture, poetry and Pina Colada, ships and shops, chips and fish, and football and fags, come to think of it.
And, of course, pies and prejudice.
The Beautiful South
The BBC has no South of England Correspondent. I say this without malice or anger. I wouldn't want you to think that I'm eaten up with corrosive rage over it or that I'm making my way to Broadcasting House with a flaming brand even as we speak. It's just a fact of nature, like glaciers or osmosis. The BBC has no South of England Correspondent because it would be silly, like having a Correspondent for Unicorns, or Spontaneous Combustion.
Because like unicorns or spontaneous combustion, there is no south of England, if we're honest. There's a bottom half of England, naturally, otherwise the country would get all unravelled and damp around Nuneaton. But there isn't a south in the same way that there's a north. As all of my old geography teachers used to say at some point, get out your adases and turn to the page marked England and Wales.
Run your finger idly from left to right across the expanse below Birmingham and what do you find? Cardiff... Well, that's Wales, obviously; Tom Jones, Charlotte Church, the Manic Street Preachers, rugby union, miners and big hats with buckles on. Next is Bristol, home of two underachieving football teams, trustafarian DJs and the BBC Wildlife Unit. Salisbury Plain suggests bullied squaddies with tearful, boot-blacked faces and druids mooching about in Ku Klux Klan-style hoods. Oxford is Radiohead and dreaming spires. London? We'll come back to that. Basildon? Nothing. A void. Apart from Depeche Mode, of course, and then we are on to Margate and the sudden hot vinegary tang of bladder wrack and fish and chips.
Apart from disclosing my own rather juvenile frame of reference (football, bands, er, hats), this tells us nothing. It's like a coach driver's acid flashback, lurid and random. If there were a cohesive thing called the south of England, you'd expect to hear some swelling music in the back of your mind (Vera Lynn singing 'The White Cliffs Of Dover', perhaps, or one of The Wurzels' agricultural ditties) and to feel some unifying emotion. But none is forthcoming.
This is because there's no conception of the south comparable to the north. Good or bad, 'the north' means something to all English people wherever they hail from. To people from London – cheery costermonger, cravated fop or Shoreditch-based web designer on stupid scooter alike – it means desolation, arctic temperatures, mushy peas, a cultural wasteland with limited shopping opportunities and populated by aggressive trolls.
To northerners it means home, truth, beauty, valour, romance, warm and characterful people, real beer and decent chip shops. And in this we are undoubtedly biased, of course. When northerners think of the south, what do they think of? Well, let's try a little word association prompted by the word 'northern'.
OK then.
Northern . . . Soul
Northern . . . Lights
Northern . . . Rock (it's a building society) And now 'southern'. Let me see.
Southern . . . Comfort
Southern . . . Jessies
Southern . . . Fried Chicken
Far from scientific but enlightening nonetheless. Soul and Lights and Rock versus Comfort, Jessies and Chicken. Even the most sophisticated northerner harbours an inner barbarian with a molten core of prejudice.
We like to think we're different. But what makes us different? What shapes us? Well, we like to think that some of the forces are elemental. The north-south divide was illustrated by a Trog cartoon in the Observer published during Thatcher's mid-eighties pomp: two smartly dressed yuppies are drinking champagne under a cloudless southern sky while at the other side of the frame, a dour middle-aged couple, rain-sodden beneath glowering clouds, are complaining, 'They've got their prime minister, why can't we have ours?' Crucially here, the difference between them is not just political or economic. It's climatic.
There's not much point me regaling you with statistics like Leeds being drier than Barcelona or Cornwall being wetter than Manchester or Sheffield's summers being generally warmer than Newquay's, true though these all are, apparently. What matters is perception and when we think of Brighton we think of nudists going gently pink, when we think of Devon we think of cream teas in the garden and when we think of Sunderland we think of a man with rime clinging to his beard leaning into a hail-peppered gale. In May.
The writer and TV producer Judith Holder has written that it's not that we get worse weather in the north, we just sort of get, well, more weather. Winds that take slates off in the night or have you asking someone two doors down for your dustbin back. Frosts that send old ladies skittling along pavements and kids mincing gingerly onto duck ponds despite what those scary public information films say. We relish our weather up north and we relish our capacity to endure it. A few years back I was at Highbury watching Arsenal play Sunderland and the difference in the two sets of supporters' apparel was hilarious. On a cold February day, the Gooners were togged up in car coats and parkas while at the away end, Mackems gathered happily in T-shirts and Fred Perrys. Watch Middlesbrough or Newcastle on their ventures into Europe and the camera will always find a gaggle of fat blokes with their shirts off, braving the Bratislavan winter's night, waving and laughing as if to say, 'Call this cold, man. I'm finding it oppressive!'
As much as we delight in our own capacity to endure the elements, we deride the softness of southerners in this regard. When a Cornish village gets flooded and a state of emergency is declared, we tut in sympathy but secretly we think, 'What do you expect? You live on the beach,' and after looking at the TV pictures conclude that they wouldn't cancel the racing at Thirsk for that drop of rain. We reserve most of our scorn for London, where an inch of powdery snow has taxi drivers weeping and ashen-faced TV reporters telling people to stay indoors, wait for help and don't panic-buy baked beans. HELLO! IT'S DECEMBER! BUY A CAGOULE!
Weather carves the landscape to a degree. Rain and wind scour and groove the hills through waves of ice ages, green the fields, smooth the coastline. Millennia of freeze-thaw scatter splintered boulders in valleys gouged by the tides of ice. Weather acts like an artist's hand but the canvas predates it. The canvas is geology.
In this, as in so many things, the north is well hard, we think. Not for us the soft feminine allure of Downs and Wolds, the rolling pasture, the chalky uplands. No, the north is built from Skiddaw slate and Borrowdale volcanics, granite and limestone. It's only rocks but people can get very emotional and florid about them. Read the great Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson on the geology of his home town of Millom. Limestone even has its own Poet Laureate, the wonderful Wystan Hugh Auden.
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