The North

Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Simon silverdollarcircle said:
Laura Barton once wrote a piece about the north that seems to made up entirely of lines for private eye's Pseuds Corner. Trigger warning: it's almost unreadable

www.theguardian.com

Laura Barton: My north-south divide

Ten years after defecting from her native Wigan, Laura Barton's not going back!
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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My favorite thing in the North-South discourse is the way that the people writing these articles always bang on about how no-one in The South understands The North in all its variety and diversity and geographical range, and then part way through it becomes obvious that they're treating "The South" as being synonymous with "London".
 
Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
My second favorite is the way that people always illustrate regional bias in public spending by happening to pick transport spending for London vs "North East England" and "North West England" as an example and trumpeting the disparity as being about London vs the provinces rather than just relative population density.
 
C

catalog

Well-known member
Reading this Jeff Nuttall book, a biography of Frank Randle, sort of music hall comedy contemporary of George Formby


Weird book, as much about Nuttall as it is about Randle, but in a good way.

Anyway, this is his conception of the UK as a body and the North as the arse of that body (in a chapter called "A Jewel on the Nation's arse")

The nation organises its functioning into its separate areas. London and the South East form the head. Here are the offices and the council chambers, the counting houses and the libraries, the two great universities, the face to be presented to strangers.

The dancing extremities are the Celtic hinterlands. Here is the folklore and the idiosyncrasy and the poetry.

The throbbing, loamish heart is rural. The West Country, East Anglia, North Yorkshire. Here are the finest cathedrals, the wheat, the livestock, the best soil.

And the tripes, the guts, the root body functions are in the Industrial North. It is an endearing characteristic of the nation in its nineteenth-century structure that it is frank with its functioning. Like the hidden back alleys of Leeds, it lets its plumbing show. The difference between the rash of railways, cheap terrace housing, arrogant chimneys, mills and sweat-shops, stations and wreckage yards, warehouses and sewerage beds that covers most of Lancashire and half Yorkshire, the
difference between that rash and the encroaching layer of concrete, is that one is a boastful disporting of the nation's crude workshops and the other is a bureaucratic cosmetic, the uncluttered face presented by a business world in which the board of directors never sees the factory and the money is shuttled into a Swiss vault by computer.

This rash, then, this ostentatious defilement of the landscape, is the cradle of English politics, where the boss was a face not a trade mark and the extent of his wealth could be gauged by the length of his excretory chimney.

The nation's digestive system and anal tract is coiled across the Pennines and dredges down across the desolate plain of West Lancashire to the Irish Sea.
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Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
That said, Meades wouldn't omit which part of the country corresponded to the greasy, pungent genitals. He'd probably say Birmingham, because I know he really likes Birmingham.
 
WashYourHands

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
A52 passes Nottingham, Derby, Stoke. If you look at the map, everything south of it is essentially Midlands and everything north of it is just that. One of the few easy routes east to west too, discounting M6 overflow

Weird one, a lad I know from Coventry uses oop and despite its southerly jurisdiction, you can sense the old Danelaw inflectional system in east Mids accents
 
WashYourHands

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
avoid Doncaster at all costs

linguistically intriguing given the name of the river Don and the plethora of Dons across the Black Sea, see the Yamnaya Bronze Age and migration
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
WashYourHands said:
avoid Doncaster at all costs

linguistically intriguing given the name of the river Don and the plethora of Dons across the Black Sea, see the Yamnaya Bronze Age and migration
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No, visit Doncaster at any cost: the incredible hubbub from the drag of bars in town on a Saturday night is one of the wonders of modern Britain; it's not just the sheer mass of people but that every demographic seems to be equally represented.
 
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