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.