Sunday, October 28, 2007

England has Similar North /South Quandry as Italy

The ANNOTICO Report

 

This report is rather long and comprehensive, which is informative but tiring.  But it does make us realize Italy is not singular in it's divisiveness.   It also makes many of us realize a division in England we were not aware of before.  There are divisions like this in every country; it just seems that Italy receives almost exclusive attention.

 

Focus: Changing Britain

North v South

The imaginary social barrier crossing the country was redrawn in a controversial new study last week. But how do Britons feel as they contemplate the new dividing line?

Guardian Unlimited, UK

The Observer 

Elizabeth Day
Sunday October 28, 2007

 

It's not that Andrew Lepreux hates southerners, it's just that he thinks their beer tastes a bit funny and that they say 'bath' oddly. 'I'm Leicester born and bred and I think of myself as a northerner.' He breaks off to rearrange the small plastic punnets of cherry tomatoes on his market stall, his red anorak zipped up to protect against the drizzle. 'I have a northern perspective on things and by that I mean that I think we're maybe a bit more friendly, a bit more down to earth than the South.'

 

So what does Lepreux, 40, make of the academic study released last week that drew a new north-south dividing line across the country, placing the East Midlands city of Leicester firmly in England's southern realms, the land of metropolitan unease, high house prices and unfriendliness on public transport?

'Rubbish,' he says, with admirable straightforwardness. 'It doesn't make any difference to how I think of myself.'

Yet for all that he might dismiss the categorisation, culturally, socially and politically, the North-South divide has existed in our national psychology since the Industrial Revolution as a sort of informal border between the economically prosperous metropolises of the South and the provincial, industrial cities of the North.

The new line, devised by Danny Dorling, professor of human geography at the University of Sheffield, is based on a number of more recent socio-economic developments, including rising house prices, increased life expectancy and voting patterns.

Instead of starting at the Watford Gap as many Londoners believe, Dorling's line says the North begins at the Severn estuary and heads up towards the Humber, hitting the coast in a higgledy piggledy diagonal south of Grimsby. The Midlands was brutally dismissed as 'adding more confusion than light' to the country's geographical makeup.

'There is a missing year of life expectancy north of this line,' says Dorling, who was asked to devise the map for a new exhibition at the Lowry arts centre in Salford entitled 'The Myth of the North'. 'Children south of the line are much more likely to attend Russell Group universities [an association of many the country's best universities], a house price cliff now runs along much of the line and, on the voting map, the line still often separates red from blue.'

It is impossible to talk in terms of average figures covering areas such as house prices and incomes, says Dorling. 'The South has a few pockets of poverty in a sea of affluence, whereas the North has a few pockets of affluence in a sea of poverty. The two are opposed, but the average figure would be misleading because the divide is much bigger than any average would suggest.

'Beneath this line is where you start worrying about inheritance tax - above it, you should be worried about people being let off inheritance tax in the South, explains Dorling. 'In terms of life chances, the only line within another European country that is comparable to the North-South divide is that which used to separate East and West Germany.'

It also separates the neighbouring East Midlands towns of Nottingham - which finds itself in the north - and Leicester, which is deemed to meet the criteria necessary to shed the flat caps and release the whippets into the wild.

'I thought it was an interesting decision to put us south of the line,' says Margaret Draycott, a Labour councillor in Leicester, 'but I'm going to take it as a compliment because it's based on the fact that Leicester has a lot of good things going for it.'

The figures, certainly, are in Leicester's favour. There has been a recent commercial boom, with businesses attracted by the close rail links to London and the comparatively cheap office space. The average house price here is #145,000 compared to Nottingham's #127,000. A Leicester local can expect to live to an average age of 77, while 30 miles north, the average life expectancy in Nottingham is just 72.

Over recent years, areas of Nottingham have been hit by spates of gun crime - including when 14-year-old Danielle Beccan was fatally shot in the crossfire between rival gangs three years ago. GCSE attainment is below par; teenage pregnancies are substantially above the England average; a third of adults smoke and one in five is obese.

Do the statistics translate to a tangible difference in cultural identity? Or is the divide increasingly irrelevant in an area almost synonymous with immigration? Leicester's 289,700 population is almost 30 per cent Asian and the Commission for Racial Equality estimates that it will have a 50 per cent ethnic population by 2011, making it the first UK city where whites are a minority.

Pravin Dattani, 53, understands only too well the mercurial nature of cultural identity. He runs a business selling fabrics in Leicester. He was one of the 80,000 Asians expelled from his native Uganda by Idi Amin in 1972. Asking him to define himself as northern or southern seems absurd and he greets all such questions with a sanguine smile, a half-closing of the eyes and a measured exhalation of breath.

'I have lived through a changing history in Leicester,' he says, as he rolls up reams of brightly coloured cotton. 'We are more multicultural than anything else now. When I first arrived with my family, we weren't welcomed by Leicester City Council - even though we had British passports, so we had a right to be here. They told us they didn't want Ugandan Asians taking white jobs and they didn't give us housing. So we set up our own business selling textiles. We ended up thriving and there are millions of us here now. I have three boys and one girl and they were all born and raised here and they are completely English. To me, it doesn't matter where we are on the map. It just matters that we are here.'

Clearly, it seems that the traditional stereotypes of North and South engendered by this divide are, at best, meaningless and at worst, deeply patronising. The caricature of the hearty northern pigeon fancier with a taste for bread and dripping holds no more true than the stereotyped notion of a flashy southerner who wears chinos, works in banking and calls his children after Old Testament prophets. Still, it doesn't mean that we don't enjoy poking fun at each other.

'I'd prefer to be classed as a northerner. Down south, it's all offices, expensive prices and miserable people,' says Keith Williams, 53, the chair of the Leicester branch for the Campaign for Real Ale. 'The North has a better range of beers, it's more normal, more friendly. We've been down to London a few times for the Great British Beer Festival and that's such a dismal place. The closer you get to London, the higher the house prices and the worse the beer.'

Most of the people The Observer spoke to on either side of the divide believe the line is too simplistically drawn to convey the economic mosaic of our modern British cities, all of which contain a coexistence of deprivation and wealth.

Graham Allen, the Labour MP for Nottingham North, believes that Nottingham epitomises 'a tale of two cities'. There is, he says, a prosperous, urban nucleus with two highly regarded universities and a thriving shopping centre. Then there are the working-class estates that used to feed the coalmines, the pockets of poverty, disillusionment and a chronic lack of education.

'Most of the kids on my patch arrive at school unable to speak a sentence or recognise a number,' he said. 'One of my key initiatives is to ensure, through early intervention, that these children are school-ready, so they can then be life-ready. Nottingham is sadly the UK city that gets the fewest kids into university.

'That is not a tale of North or South. The line doesn't reflect daily reality and I don't think it's a helpful thing. I'm looking for answers, for solutions, for something that attacks the inter-generational nature of these problems, whether that's in the North or the South is irrelevant: it's wherever there's deprivation. Just to say that one side of the line is deprived and one isn't... well, it might make a nice graphic, but it doesn't help me to get one more kid into school.'

If anything, it seems that, north of London, our notion of identity has retained its distinctly local flavour. The inhabitants of Leicester and Nottingham are far more likely to think of themselves in relation to their home towns than their regional origins.

When, four years ago, East Midlands airport was renamed Nottingham airport, despite being closer to Leicester, there was such an outcry from Leicester residents that managers were forced to drop any city's name from the title.

The two cities have long enjoyed a healthy rivalry that seems mostly to stem from Nottingham's appropriation of the Robin Hood legend. Leicester's most famous sons include the somewhat less dashing Engelbert Humperdinck (the singer, not the composer) and an 18th-century prison warder called Daniel Lambert who bears the dubious distinction of being one of the most obese men in history. He weighed 50 stone when he died in 1809 and the circumference of his waist measured 9ft 4in. Several residents tell me his story with barely concealed civic pride. Items of Lambert's clothing are still displayed as star exhibits in the local museums.

'If you ask people from Leicester or Nottingham where they feel they're from, it's much more rooted in communities, in a mixture of localities and ethnicities,' says John Heeley, the chief executive of the Experience Nottinghamshire tourist board. He sits in a purpose-built conference room in his offices, the walls hung with a series of photographs depicting glossy, happy, shining scenes of Nottinghamshire life.

'For some people, that identity may be a football ground where it all comes together, past and present, at 3pm on a Saturday but it's certainly not a regional identity,' he says. 'I don't think regional identity exists beyond being useful for bureaucratic, administrative reasons.

'The North-South divide is and always has been less than useful and the reason for that, I think, is that it camouflages a much more important and meaningful divide between what is basically London and the Home Counties versus the provincial, former industrial cities. It seems to be an arbitrarily drawn line.'

For Heeley, the placing of Leicester and Nottingham on opposite sides of the divide highlights the weakness of the concept. The two cities, he contends, are vastly similar. Both are forging new identities, having lost the industries that once defined them. In Leicester, the old hosiery and footwear factories have been bought up by property developers. In Nottingham, the famed Raleigh bicycle factory was demolished in 2003 to make way for a university campus extension. The coalmines were closed by the bruising and bloody battles of the 1980s. Their fates, and those of countless other post-industrial enclaves across the country, are almost interchangeable.

'It's a city that's finding its way,' says Roger Coulter, a 61-year-old restaurateur and retired estate agent. 'The old industries - the lace makers, the cigarette manufacturers - have all largely disappeared and now we're searching for things to replace them, whether that be through the development of office space or residential flats.

'One of the most celebrated descriptions of an industrial city in the 1960s was in [Alan Sillitoe's] Saturday Night and Sunday Morning which was written by a Nottingham author. It was grimy, black and summed up what life was like, but it could have just as well been set in Bristol, in Glasgow or in Derby. But it couldn't have been set in London. The Full Monty was filmed in Sheffield, but it was based on a story of unemployed car-workers from Coventry.'

Although most locals would admit to a certain tribal delight in describing themselves as northerners or southerners, it seems to be accompanied by a tacit acknowledgement that such distinctions are retrograde, to be treated with a dose of humour rather than further dignified by academic study.

Underneath the strip-lit awnings of Leicester market, Janet Bass, 67, says that the dividing line is 'a bit old-fashioned'. She has lived in Leicester since 1946, after moving from London with her family to seek a better quality of life after the Blitz.

'It's divisive isn't it?' she says, standing by a stall selling bird seed and disparate household items. 'It conjures up all sorts of cultural differences and encourages people to think of themselves as separate places, rather than just as England or Britain. If you're going to move it at all, why not get rid of it altogether?'

The multicultural ethnic mix in this corner of England brings with it a sense of being part of a broader global community. Just as the advent of the railways in the 19th century seemed to create a single nation out of a hundred localities, so the growth of cheap flights in the 21st century and the spreading tentacles of the internet, appear to have fostered a greater sense of global belonging.

'There is an awareness of the wider world,' says Heeley. 'But the more you expand your consciousness globally, the more another part of you will seek refuge in your home, in those locally rooted symbols and past-times.'

Inside the raucous Globe pub on Silver Street in the centre of Leicester, the regulars are not too fussed whether they find themselves in the North, the South or the Midlands.

'I was born in Scotland, so everything seems south to me and it doesn't really mean much,' says the landlady Janet Kerr, 45, a diminutive blonde who struggles to make her voice heard over the good-humoured din. 'But I have noticed a difference in how people drink their beer. In the South, they like their beer flat, without a head. In the North, they like it with a bit of sparkle and we pull it with a head. In Leicester, our regulars want a head on their ale, so I would say that makes them northerners.'

It seems that this is just as good a demarcation line as any. By closing time, no one really cares where they find themselves. They just want to find their way home.

Counting the cost

#265,000 Average cost of a house on the South coast compared with #159,000 in the North.

54.9 Average healthy life expectancy - the age at which ill-health sets in - in Middlehaven, Middlesbrough, against 86 years in Didcot, Oxfordshire.

10 years Boys born in Manchester likely to die this much younger than those in Kensington and Chelsea.

90 per cent of areas with highest rates of emergency hospital admissions due to alcohol are in the North.

75 per cent of NHS trusts in the north east were rated excellent or good, but three-quarters were rated fair or weak in the south east.
Rowan Walker

 

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