Sunday,
October 28, 2007
The
ANNOTICO Report
This
report is rather long and comprehensive, which is informative but tiring.
But it does make us realize
Focus:
Changing
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
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
'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
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
'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
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
It also separates
the neighbouring East Midlands towns of Nottingham -
which finds itself in the north - and
'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
Over recent years,
areas of
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
'I have lived
through a changing history in
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
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
'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
'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
When, four years
ago, East Midlands airport was renamed Nottingham airport, despite being closer
to Leicester, there was such an outcry from
The two cities
have long enjoyed a healthy rivalry that seems mostly to stem from
'If you ask
people from Leicester or
'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
'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
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
'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
The multicultural
ethnic mix in this corner of
'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
'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
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,
10 years Boys born in
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
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