The Matter of the Midlands

Poor Stoke. The town probably demonstrates as well as any other the scale of the challenge the government has set itself in levelling up the economy. Low skills? Check. High unemployment? Check. Historic industrial base long in decline? Check. Deprivation? Check. In fact, it’s hard to think of another place that so well encapsulates the challenges of the north-south divide. It’s also really a collection of towns, rather than a city (‘the five towns’), playing to another key policy theme for the current government.

But Stoke, it seems, is never destined to be the place civil servants, national institutions, or museums get relocated out of London to – because it is not, actually, in the official North of England. Bids for the recently announced National Infrastructure Bank, for example, will be accepted from York or Chester, but not from Stoke-on-Trent.

 The North-South divide runs roughly from the Wash to the Severn Estuary. This, obviously, includes the official regions of the North East, the North West and Yorkshire and the Humber – the official ‘north’ – but it also includes almost all of the West Midlands and most of the East Midlands too. Indeed, the West Midlands has vied with the North East as being the English region with the highest unemployment rate and the most significant skills deficit, while Birmingham now has the largest number of people out of work of any Local Authority other than Blackpool.

A quick glance at the map of the most deprived areas shows a real concentration in the West Midlands conurbation – perhaps never quite as severe in intensity as in some parts of inner city Liverpool or Manchester, but somewhat larger in extent. This is not quite the whole picture, of course; Birmingham City Centre has boomed over recent years, and both the amenities and physical fabric has improved beyond measure. My point here is not to “do down” a city that has in many ways seen a profound renaissance: it is rather to question why it never seems to catch the baubels sent north from London as much as some other places.

In other words, the unemployment and deprivation statistics suggest that the area would be one of the first in line for government and press attention. Yet this never really seems to happen. I’ve lost count of the amount of news stories that talk about the north-south divide and then provide solutions which only focus on the three northern regions. Another variety is the graph that clearly shows the Midlands among the most struggling regions – accompanied by a headline that said something like “the graph that shows how the north is missing out” and explanatory text that only talks about the North West and Yorkshire. The recently launched National Infrastructure Strategy talks about "boosting the UK's cities and towns" but shows a graph that compares London's overperformance with those of three other cities: Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds. Poor Brum, once again passed over.

Part of the reason for this is that many newspapers have a northern correspondent, but none, to my knowledge, have a Midlands correspondent. BBC Salford is a reality; BBC Pebble Mill a distant memory. There are also institutions like IPPR North, which clams itself as an authority on the north/south divide, but as it says on the tin, only represents the three northern regions. But there is a further problem: The Midlands has always had a bit of an identity crisis in a country in which the north/south divide is increasingly culturally loaded.

Part of it, surely, is that the Midlands is not that great at marketing itself and lobbying central government. Certainly I've heard this argument from Mancunians in particular, when I've compared Central Government's largesse in funding the Metrolink, or providing national museums at Salford Quays or Castlefield, to its tight purse strings when, in the nineties, aspirations for a comprehensive Midland Metro were denied. But given complaints about underfunding in other areas, this argument can sometimes ring hollow: as if the proposer is suggesting that failures by the North to secure appropriate funding or support is because Whitehall is terribly mean to it, whereas if the Midlands fails, then it is, quite frankly, its own bloody fault. But the problem is also to do with the dominance – and the growing importance – of the north-south divide in English life.

For a start, understatement runs in the DNA; there is another North-South divide work at here, a cultural one. As Jonathan Meades points out, Birmingham is south of what he calls "the irony curtain". This curtain, he says, "represents a sort of cultural divide- north of it they tend towards a boastful sort of local supremacism.... but in Birmingham, the characteristic is one of self-deprecation, saying the opposite of what you mean." (He goes on to say it is "in the middle of England, it is Middle England, is hyperbolically typical of England, yet at the same time it is hermetic, an ignored void at the heart of the country.”) You could try a recent essay on the topic here (apologies for his slurs on Yorkshire, a place I actually rather like): https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/november-2020/in-praise-of-the-midlands/.

I grew up in the West Midlands too, albeit quite a long way south of Stoke, on the southern fringes of Birmingham. Driving north, Stoke felt like the place where you really entered a different England – partly because the bleak, rocky Staffordshire Moorlands, the destination for a not insignificant number of our geography field trips, were just beyond. I certainly didn’t think of where I grew up as in any way “the North”, and was surprised at university, in Leeds, at being called a ‘northerner’ by those from places as exotic as Swindon or Watford. (Indeed, when I was selecting universities, my father, who has never lived outside the Midlands, said: “Why do you want to go up north? It’s grim.”) Family day trips inevitably involved a short drive south, to Stratford-on-Avon, Worcester or Malvern, or to the Cotswolds (under an hour away) or perhaps Oxford. One of my first memories is the model village at Bourton-on-the-Water. Longer family holidays began with a trip on the M5 to Somerset or Devon.

It's pretty clear that apart from an industrial history (which is, on inspection, quite different from that of the northern cities, except perhaps Sheffield) and a much more recent shared urban deprivation, there's not much that's really "northern" about Birmingham. Furthermore, unlike the North, the Midlands doesn’t have quite the same identity as something separate and distinct from Englishness. I was once told by a Welsh twentysomething, who had moved from Leeds to Birmingham, that as she had a slight problem with Englishness, she felt more at home in the North as it had a similar antagonistic relationship to this concept as her homeland. The fact she was comparing the place with Leeds, a much more middle class and comfortable city than Birmingham - and indeed any other large city outside the South - seemed not to be an issue.

Indeed, one of the state schools near where I grew up was simply called “Heart of England”. The counties just to the south of Birmingham contain some of the great touch points of English identity: the birthplaces of Shakespeare and Elgar, AE Housman’s poetry, the grave of the singer-songwriter Nick Drake, the village where the Archers is supposed to be set (Inkberrow, about 20 miles due south of the Bull Ring), JRR Tolkien in Hall Green – then a rural village - or Madresfield, the inspiration for Brideshead Revisited. Worcestershire, with its hop yards, orchards and bumpy countryside, resembles Kent or Sussex – or perhaps even rural France – more than anywhere ‘up north’. Birmingham’s outer suburbs, green, spacious and full of high-quality 1930s dunroamin’ – a vestige of inter-war prosperity - probably has more in common with London’s Surrey suburbs than anywhere else (indeed, the late Roy Jenkins, a resident when an MP in Birmingham, describes Solihull in his biography as "Esher in Warwickshire").

So, perhaps in many ways the Midlands is just ‘English’ – an identity that is (unfairly) seen by many as, let's be honest, a bit dodgy, and one that has become dodgier given the identification with Brexit. This may explain why 'northern' has moved from being an important, if peripheral, component of Englishness, to something increasingly seen as separate. It must also be a reaction to more assertive Scottish and Welsh identities, and the sense of London as a world city whose tentacles reach throughout the south-east (although I partly also blame Game of Thrones too).This leaves little space for a non-home-countries English identity, a concept that a hundred years ago Worcestershire and Warwickshire were thought to thoroughly embody. And of course there are other areas of the country which are similar in this: much of the West Country, the more remote parts of East Anglia, for example – but neither have both the population and the deprivation that the Midlands, particularly the West Midlands, has.

To some extent, this has always been true: back in Victorian times, Birmingham was always struggling to get itself heard nationally given the dominance of, what were then, the twin pillars of the Establishment: the City of London and the great cotton-shipping nexus of Lancashire, or more specifically, Manchester and Liverpool. Somehow, it did manage to do this. In Thomas Attwood, it led the way for the first electoral reforms; in Joseph Sturge, it gave impetus to the drive to abolish slavery; in Collings, it led the drive for the introduction of compulsory education for all children; and was instrumental in the first attempts at town planning, old age pensions and much more. But those old pillars – Lancashire and London – are once again the two that dominate English life. This may well be why, today, so few outside the city and the wider West Midlands are aware of its vast influence on the British nation, or its long list of industrial and scientific achievements, from the first factories, chemical plants and steam engines to the first plastics and the modern bicycle.

Nevertheless, I am aware that, to most in London and surrounds, most people don’t have any idea of these regional distinctions, or the where the North proper starts. I’d say that for most non-specialists in London, when ministers talk about supporting the North, they assume it includes my part of the world too. I will never forget visiting a university friend in Bromley, whose Dad, when I told him I was from Birmingham, replied with: “I was near there recently… Sheffield?” . I remember the incredulity among some at university when I explained that I could cycle to the edge of the Cotswolds from my house in a couple of hours. I think the confusion stems from the fact that this is, or rather was, an industrial region, or perhaps it's to do with, as Londoners say, people "talking funny", but I still imagine when most in the capital read about institutions or civil servants being moved north, they think it includes my home city.

Meanwhile, from a northern perspective, it seems pretty apparent to me that the area I’ve been talking about is not part of their emerging demos. Admittedly my evidence for this is anecdotal, and based on comments about HS2 or the unsuccessful, but much covered, bid to host Channel 4 in Birmingham. Reading below newspaper stories is an idiotic pursuit, but when it looked like the city might have a chance, I do remember seeing comments such as “why move it to a city so close to London” and “if they want to improve the north, why move it to somewhere you can commute to from London?” and so on. In other words, looking south from the Pennines, Brum doesn't count as a place that deserves or needs help, well not like the North anyway. By this I mean no minister feels there is great emotional traction in announcing that the north-south divide will be addressed by moving an institution to Birmingham, Coventry or Stoke. This explains why unlike most of the big northern cities, it doesn’t have a branch of a national museum – although luckily the city’s vast and underappreciated heritage, from the City Museum & Art Gallery and the Barber Collection to the Ikon and the Shakespeare Collection, makes up for it.

I am not at all a fan of the late Roger Scruton, but he was on to something when in his book England, an Elegy, he wrote: "the division between north and south was moderated by the peculiar position of Birmingham....where the suburbs were opulent but more grimy than those of Kent, and the factories modest but more leafy than those of Manchester". If Scotland and Wales increasingly diverge, and we want an England that is not simply divided into two parts, perhaps that means Brum is actually the logical place to relocate national institutions to - galleries, museums, parliament, the capital. After all, it has, in Edgbaston, the most obvious diplomatic quarter of any large city outside London. That way it might also get the metro system that should have been built in the 1990s.

This probably won't happen, of course. Almost forty years ago one act to emerge from the city's multicultural stew, UB40 – then a more credible band than they later became – released a hit single called “One in Ten”. A reference to the unemployment figures in the West Midlands, a region that ten years previously had been the richest outside London, it seems more apt than ever to describe the city at the heart of that conurbation, which now has exactly that rate of worklessness again.

I am the one in ten

A number on a list

I am the one in ten

Even though I don't exist

Nobody Knows me

Even though I'm always there

A statistic, a reminder

Of a world that doesn't care