Where would you be without the North?

By Robert Colls. Professor of History at De Montfort University.

"Good Evening. Here's an important announcement for our northern listeners: Sorry. It must be awful for you." (Victoria Wood show)

Where would you be without the north of England? Well, for a start, you wouldn’t know if you were living the right way up. And, without the North, we’d all be living in the South which would never do because it’s crowded enough already.

Note the common southern English assumption here that whoever 'you' are, you aren’t a Northerner yourself. But the fact is, England is not England without the North.

Let’s start with the look of the place. The North has England’s most beautiful hills and lakes and, in the Pennines, its last wild refuge.

Start at Edale in Derbyshire and keep walking until you come to the Cheviots shouldering their way into Scotland. Or head west into the Lake District where on a milky blue day you can see across the sea to Ireland.

Listen: The Power of Northern Landscapes

The Industrial Revolution happened in the North first. Manchester was the world’s first modern city. Tyneside was the world’s first industrial society.

Wallsend 'best round coals' kept London warm for over 300 years and northern England mass-produced commodities on such a scale that everyone came to know Lancashire by its cottons, Yorkshire by its woollens and Sheffield by its steel.

Turing built the first computer at Manchester University, not Cambridge, and Reyrolles at Hebburn made the world’s most advanced switchgear.

Merz at Newcastle electrified Chicago’s transportation, Parsons invented turbines and Vickers Armstrong at Elswick made everything from bikes to battleships.

George and Robert Stephenson were genuinely world-class Geordies (even more so than Ant and Dec) whose railways changed our sense of time and place every bit as decisively as a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs in our own day.

Listen: The Birth of the Industrial Revolution

It wasn’t all muck and brass. The North was also home to some of England's best ideas.

Free trade and John Bright liberalism were northern English gifts to the world; so was cooperation, mutuality, and democratic socialism. The Rochdale Pioneers opened the first cooperative store in 1844. The Labour Party was founded at Bradford in 1893. In 1903, the Pankhursts founded the Women's Social and Political Union in Manchester.

The factory system was invented in places like Blackburn but so was football, made mass and modern with the formation of the Football League by six Lancashire (and six Midland) clubs, including Blackburn Rovers, in 1888. Just some years before that, the world's most famous football team had been founded by the Carriage and Wagon section of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway depot at Newton Heath. (Hint: they play in red).

Listen: The Radical North

Marx and Engels did their best grim reaper, class struggle stuff in the North it is true, but Lennon and McCartney rocked the same streets. Popular music was re-invented in the North. Try thinking of England without The Beatles or the Black Dyke Mills brass band.

Stand-up comedy was born in the northern clubs and music halls. Imagine England without Steve Coogan, Victoria Wood, Caroline Ahearn or a whole stage door queue of Lancashire comedians before them including Ken Dodd, Thora Hird and Morecambe and Wise.

Try thinking of England without LS Lowry or David Hockney, Auden or Hughes, William Wordsworth striding out of Dove Cottage to lead the Romantic Movement or the Brontë sisters fast in their moorland rectory thinking of love and redemption in ways perhaps that only northern girls could. Or would.

Listen: The 20th-Century North

It's worth bearing in mind that the first history of the English was written in the North. Bede’s History is older even than England itself.

But the North is not just a piece of the main. It was also England’s first 'other', the place where the English have thought differently about who they are.

The South, and London in particular, has always dominated our politics and taxes. But the North, in turn, has always dominated our imagination. Orwell only got it about the South when he went north into Wigan. David Storey only got it about the North when he fled south into Camden.

The North has long offered England another voice, another tone, another temper. It is People’s History, not Imperial History. It’s Emmerdale, not EastEnders. It’s League not Union, life not ‘literature’, Cilla not Sandie, Oasis not Blur, Morrisey not Bowie, Vimto not Vino.

Hear about England’s other half in Melvyn Bragg's The Matter of the North.