Describing The North - for Literary Lancashire

Everyone knows, up to a point, what you are referring to when you say 'the north', especially when it's clear that what you are talking about is the north of England. The north of England is a very real thing, separated from the very real south for all manner of solid and imagined reasons, and it's easy to list a few objects, people, sights, disputes, scandals, reports, buildings, clichés, poets, comedians and references and come up with an image of the north that does the job. The north all wrapped up and firmly in its place as a combination of nostalgia and obedience to the no-notion that the north is summed up by a cloth cap, an Eccles cake, a bangin' tune, a witty catchphrase, a no-nonsense hard man, a once-vital political struggle, a stick of rock, a vast ocean of coal under the ground, a stagnant canal, meandering backstreets clinging on to a narrow layout first established in mediaeval times, the careful brick detailing on an everyday railway tunnel, a comedy double act, an outside toilet, a deep gorge, a rags-to-riches story, a situation comedy, ghosts forever rehearsing the same futile rigmarole, a smoking chimney in a pre-clean-air-act sky.

But the north is also not so easy to find. There is an invisible, a less stable north co-existing with the flat tempered same old north that we think we know from that book, that song, punchline, landmark, anniversary or accent. There is the north that is the result of a series of communal decisions, collected wisdom and general understandings that we can be very comfortable with even if it annoys us with its simplicity or predictability. Then there is another north, still made up of the usual names, achievements and history, but one that might perhaps be a little truer – to a certain something, to a sense of how the north actually came to be so fixed even as it was resisting being fixed and controlled and organised by indifferent, or all too attentive, outside forces. A north that routinely emerges from the geography, the weather, the landscape, the humour and the settled patterns of behaviour. But a north that also emerges from the shadows, from its own mysterious position as something that contains such tradition and militancy, brilliance and persistence, acceptance and slyness, dirt and glamour, and from the fact that in the end the north is made up of lots of norths, all of them containing their own invisible north.

These different norths, these norths within the north – clear, obscure, competing and overlapping with each other inside such a short cramped enclosed space – are all very different, to the extent that the only thing they have in common is that they happen to be a few miles apart, just across the river, over the hills, down the road, the other side of the island. Perhaps all that submerged, simmering tension between one coast and the other, between one county and another, between this city and that city, that valley and this gorge, village versus village, neighbour against neighbour, has compressed into a tart, brittle togetherness connected only to their shared position of not being in the south. The beauty of the north is that it is all about difference and a refusal to sacrifice a pungent hard-won sense of difference. This difference, from the south, from those close by, explicitly represents an independence that has been difficult to officially, formally achieve, and this difference, this abstract independence of thought, is loudly, boldly, brazenly, excessively, romantically and sometimes subtly represented through the walk and talk that the classic northerner uses even when it appears to confirm and clarify the cold, simple and undermining stereotyping that the northerner traditionally – and yet radically – despises.

Paul Morley, The North

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