Hello,hello,hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Mines by LeonardoEnglish, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving yourEnglish.
I'm AlistairBudge, and today we are going to be talking about the North-Southdivide.
One way of dividing England is by whether you are a northera or asouthern, whether you come from the north or the south of thecountry.
But as you willsee, it is notsimple, not simple atall, and this story will touch on Britishhistory,economics,politics,society,culture, andmore.
It isalso, I shouldadd, part of a three-part mini-series we are making on Britishdivisions.
In partone, we talked about the thousand year rivalry between Scotland andEngland, and in partthree, we talked about the wars of theroses.
Those are both member-onlyepisodes, so now is the time for me to remind you that if you like to unlock all of our bonus member-onlycontent, interactivetranscripts, study packs andmore, as well as support the work that my team and Ido, then you can do that over on thewebsite, which is LeonardoEnglish.com.
Okthen, let's get started and talk about the great Britishdivide.
In2008, a professor at the University of Sheffield published a startlingdiscovery.
Professor Danny Dalling haddrawn, he had mapped out from west toeast, a line that dividedEngland, to the north of the line was thenorth, to the south of the line thesouth.
Now this wasn't a revolutionarydivision, it wasn't a division that Professor Dalling createdhimself.
Forcenturies, people in England had referred to themselves as either southerners ornortherners, but nobody could quite agree on where the line that divided one from the otherwas.
It probably started somewhere close to southernWales, and then went east andnorth.
It was afuzzy, unclear line in people's minds atleast, but some cities were unanimously agreed to be southern ornorthern.
London wassouthern,Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle werenorthern.
But there was no definingline, there was no geographicalline, like a river or a range ofmountains, no political line where one part started and anotherended, nothing that clearly marked where the north ended and the southstarted.
Whatever this linewas, it was also not a straightline, but one that went north east at an almost 45 degreeangle.
So strangelyenough, some northern cities were further south than southerncities.
Plus, there was the complication that there is a region of the country called theMidlands, which insisted it was its ownregion, but was often called south by northerners and north bysoutherners.
Anyway, the point is that anyline, any division wasfuzzy,unclear.
Where there was unanimousagreements,however, was that there was adivision, the north was not the same as thesouth.
Life wasdifferent. The people weredifferent, people spoke with differentaccents, they used differentwords, they did differentjobs, they drank different types ofbeer, they wore differentclothes, they had differentlives.
Northerners and southerners were bothEnglish, but they were very differentpeople.
So in thisepisode, we will explore the question of bothwhat, where andwhy.
What are some common differences between people from the south and thenorth?
How many of these are juststereotypes?
And how many are reallytrue?
Where does this divisionlie?
And how can you tell whether you are in the north or the south of thecountry?
And why do these divisionsexist?
Let's start with some common differences between northerners andsoutherners.
And forthis, we are actually going to turn to the words of GeorgeOrwell, in his book The Road to Wig andPier.
A Yorkshireman in the south will always take care to let you know that he regards you as aninferior.
If you ask himwhy, he will explain that it is only in the north that life is reallife, that the industrial work done in the north is the only realwork, that the north is inhabited by realpeople, the south merely by rentiers and theirparasites.
The northerner hasgrit, he isgrim,dour,plucky, warm-hearted anddemocratic.
The southerner issnobbish, effeminate andlazy, that at any rate is thetheory.
Hence the southerner goesnorth, at any rate for the firsttime, with the vague inferiority complex of a civilised man venturing amongsavages, while theYorkshireman, like theScotsman, comes to London in the spirit of a barbarian out forloot.
In otherwords, the northern man considers himself to be a real man doing real industrialwork, and he considers southern men to be snobs doing easywork.
And the southern man looks down on his northern counterpart as something of a savage and uncivilisedbarbarian.
They are bothBritish, both Englisheven, but they feel little sense of kinship given theirdifferences.
This was written in1937, and this broad theme has continued to this veryday.
There was a really good BBC documentary from1970, with an interview of a southern woman who married a northernman.
She talks about her experience living in thenorth, and how none of the women cooked their children any properfood, they would either give themmoney, for fish andchips, or cook them something all in onepan.
And then the poor children would have to eat out of thepan, they would have noplates.
And then the BBC journalist went to the north to ask the northerners about their view of thesouth, and they responded that the southerners aresnobs.
They got to eat at restaurants because they can't cook forthemselves, and that they wouldn't even dream of living in the south because it sounds soawful.
And even to this veryday, you can find videos on YouTube where people go to the streets of London orManchester, or Leeds orNewcastle, and ask people what they think of their southern or northerncounterparts.
And you will hear very similarthings.
So where does this comefrom?
Well, to understandthis, we need to have a brief historylesson.
For the purposes of thisepisode, we need to go back to the industrialrevolution, which started in Britain in the mid-18thcentury.
Long storyshort, people from the countryside flocked to the cities to work infactories, producing everything from textiles to tools toiron.
Britain transitioned from an agrarian farming based economy to an industrialone.
Although the capital and dominant city wasLondon, the industrial revolution led to huge growth of cities outside thecapital.
And particularlyso, in the north of thecountry, which had better access to naturalresources, better rivers to power the mills and later transportgoods, and better access toports.
Birmingham, forexample, went from a population of 15,000 in 1700 to 75,000 a hundred yearslater, and over half a million a hundred years afterthat.
Manchester, Liverpool andNewcastle.
These were all cities at the heart of the industrialrevolution.
Cities which grew both in size and wealth during the 18th and 19thcenturies.
The north wasindustrial.
Factories, mines dominated by manuallabour.
Life wastough, long hours doing often dangerous work in a factory or down a coalmine.
But at least it waspredictable.
Once you had ajob, it would be a job forlife.
But moving into the 20thcentury, especially after World WarI, the industries that had powered the north were indecline.
Coalmining, steelproduction,shipbuilding, these were industries that Britain had excelled in in the 19th century and had been able to sell its products around theworld.
But in the 20thcentury, British products were no longer socompetitive.
Cities invested in their own steel and coalindustries, and there was a diminishing need for Britishproducts.
Initially, these British industries were supported financially by thegovernment.
If they went out ofbusiness, millions of jobs would be atrisk.
So the government continued to prop up these strugglingindustries.
The south ofEngland, on the otherhand, which had never been so dominated byindustry, transitioned into a more service-basedeconomy.
Finance,law,technology, professionalservices, all sectors of the economy that were more profitable and more competitive in a globalisingworld.
Then in the late1970s, Britain got a new PrimeMinister, MargaretThatcher.
She was aconservative, both by political allegiance and in her fiscalbeliefs.
In otherwords, she represented the Conservative Party and she believed in small governments that individuals and businesses should be responsible forthemselves.
The government should not support them by subsidising their life orbusiness.
And you may know what happenednext.
Margaret Thatcher started the process of closing the coalmines, which were mostly found in the north of thecountry.
There was a large battle between Thatcher and the coalminers.
Andeventually, after almost a year ofstrikes, Thatcherwon.
A men embarked on a series of privatisationmeasures, shutting down unprofitable mines andfactories, and selling off everything from railroads to utility companies to privateinvestors.
The result was a huge loss of jobs in theseindustries, which were concentrated in thenorth.
Unemployment shot up reaching13% across theUK, as 2 million people in the UK were out ofwork.
And this was particularly concentrated in towns andcities, which had been dominated by coalmines, which were predominantly found in the north of England and in southernWales.
And in manycases, these areas have never recoveredeconomically.
They arestark, wage and productivity gaps between the north and thesouth, with people in London earning an average of a third more than their northerncounterparts, and productivity of workers in London being40% higher than those in thenorth.
We talked a bit in the previous episode about the resentment felt by some scots towards the English for the perceived control that Westminster has overScotland.
But it is exactly the same in the north ofEngland.
The seat of political power isLondon, and people in the north often complain that politicians in Westminster do not care aboutthem, and that there is inadequate investment in the north ofEngland.
They have apoint. The north of England is poorly connected from a public transportperspective, especially in smaller towns andcities.
In thenorth, the south tends to be lower than in thenorth.
And as you mightexpect, this has a real knock oneffect.
Salaries arelower. There are fewer jobopportunities, fewer opportunities for investment or grants for starting newbusinesses.
And there is a large gap between north andsouth, not just in economic and educationalopportunities, but in lifeexpectancy.
In the south east of thecountry, the most prosperous region ofEngland, the life expectancy at birth is80.1, whereas in the northeast, where it islowest, it is77.2.
And if we drill down evenfurther, the differences are evengreater.
InBlackpool, which is instantly where my father wasborn, the life expectancy at birth is73.
But inCambridgeshire, in thesoutheast, it is83.
It is quite horrific to put it likethat.
But the average child in Blackpool will live 10 fewer years than one born inCambridgeshire.
Now you might be listening to thisthinking,well, my country has divisionstoo.
The north versus south of Italy or east versus westGermany, forexample.
But neither of those are as extreme as in theUK.
According to one report from2019, the UK is more regionally divided than any comparable advancedeconomy.
In thisreport, the researchers found rates of mortality vary more within the UK than in the majority of developednations.
And that there are some places in theUK, like Blackpool andManchester, which have mortality rates that are worse than those in parts ofTurkey, Slovakia andRomania.
Now, no offense to any wonderful people living inTurkey, Slovakia orRomania.
But the GDP per capita of the UK is more than double that ofSlovakia, triple that of Romania and four times that ofTurkey.
So given the wealth that exists in thecountry, the health outcomes for citizens should bebetter.
There have been various government initiatives to try to fix this disparity and reduce the economic gap between north andsouth.
Mostrecently, the former Prime Minister Boris Johnson campaigned on a message of leveling up and increasing government spending in the north of thecountry.
But according to most northerncommentators, very little real progress has beenmade.
Now, we must move on to talk about language andculture, because I think this will be more interesting for you than me reciting figures about mortality rates or productivitystatistics.
I mentioned at the start of the episode that a university professor had produced a paper where he diligently mapped out the exact division between north andsouth, which was based on a complicated set ofcriteria.
A polling company called Yugav once tried to draw the line based on a simplequestion.
It asked people what they call the meal that they have at the end of theday.
If they called itdinner, they were from thesouth, and if they called ittea, they were from thenorth.
The polling company surveyed 42,000 people and split the country based on whether people were more likely to call it dinner ortea, and the result was pretty similar to the map that the university professor had presumably spent thousands of hours carefullycrafting.
And this is just one vocabularyexample.
Accents aredifferent, with southern accents typically having a long A in words like bath orlaugh, and northern accents shortening them like bath andlaugh.
In several northerndialects, speakers drop the direct article or just shorten it totip.
So instead of saying in thebath, they might say inbath.
What'smore, in several northerndialects, people will drop the H at the start of aword,saying, have instead ofhave, or art instead ofheart, and soon.
Now these are just a fewexamples.
There is a huge variety of different vocabulary used not just in the south versus thenorth, but a variety within both regionsthemselves.
And one of the reasons that some northerners feel animosity towards their southern counterparts was because of a presumed institutional prejudice that speaking with a northern accent and using northern vocabulary was somehow inferior to speaking with a southernaccent.
For a longtime, until really the early 21stcentury, theBBC, the country's nationalbroadcaster, required all of its broadcasters to speak in a certainway, in a southernway, similar to the accent that Ihave, as I'm from the south of thecountry.
Northern journalists knew that they needed to adjust theiraccents, to softenit, to sound lessnorthern, in order to get ahead in theircareers.
This,thankfully, has nowchanged.
The BBC encourages a variety ofaccents, and it now has a headquarters inManchester.
But while I was growing up atleast, everyone you heard on the BBC spoke in a particularway.
They spoke like asoutherner.
Now everycountry, no matter how big orsmall, has itsdivisions, friendly rivalries between people from differentregions.
England is noexception.
Although the line between north and south is not nearly as clear as some people might think itis.
There are no signs saying welcome to thenorth, or welcome to thesouth.
No river youcross, or mountain range you need to gothrough.
If you are travelling inEngland, and you are unsure whether you are in the north orsouth, let me suggest to you a foolproofway.
Take out a piece ofpaper, and draw a picture of someone eating fish andchips, in that white porcelain thing you wash yourselfin, and ask a passerby what is goingon.
If they say that someone is having their dinner in theirbath, you are probably in thesouth.
If they say they are having tea inbath, you are probably in thenorth.
Okaythen, that is it for today's episode on the north south divide ofEngland.
I hope it has been an interestingone, and that you have learned somethingnew.
Asalways, I would love to know what you thought about thisepisode, what areas of England have you beento, were you aware of the north southdivide?
What divisions are there in yourcountry, ifany?
I would love toknow, so let's get this discussionstarted.
For the members amongyou, you can head right into our communityforum, which is ourcommunity.
anotherenglish.com, and get chatting away to other curiousminds.
And as a finalreminder, if you enjoyed thisepisode, and you are wondering where to get all of our bonusepisodes, plus the interactivetranscripts, subtitles and keyboardcabri, then the place to go for thatisleanadoenglish.com.
You've been listening to English learning for curious minds by LeonardoEnglish.
