UNIVERSITY NEWS LAST UPDATED : 20 MARCH 2012
Writer, broadcaster and lecturer in Creative Writing at Birmingham City University, Ian Marchant presents the first of a two-part series on BBC Radio Four about Great Britain's North-South divide. “Is there such a thing - and if so, where is it?”
Ian, a lecturer at Birmingham City University’s School of English, is due to present the first of his two-part series on BBC Radio 4, entitled North and South: Across the Great Divide from 11am tomorrow (Wednesday 21 March).
“When human geographers look at information relating to housing prices, employment, educational opportunities and health care - in every case the North is more impoverished than the South. In the North, for example, people die on average a year earlier than people in the South.” said Ian.
However, where do we draw the North/South divide. Ian explains: “Londoners say that it’s anything ‘north of Watford.’ This used to mean the Watford Gap, in Northamptonshire, but increasingly it’s taken to mean the town of Watford, which is where the Tube stops. In Manchester, they say the divide is anything south of the Mersey. In North Lancashire, they say it is anything south of the Ribble. There are those who say the real North/South divide is traced by the M25. And there are those who say that it is a myth.
“Geographers argue that the north/south divide really exists, and has done since the Iron Age. It’s a line that divides upland from lowland, arable from pastoral farming, nuclear villages from scattered townships.
“This line runs south of Cleethorpes on the Humber estuary diagonally across England to the river Severn, somewhere just north of Gloucester. Lincolnshire is therefore in the South; as is Leicester. Birmingham is in the north, though only just: Coventry is in the North, whilst Warwick is just in the South. All of Wales is in the north. Some geographers insist that the line should continue south-west along the Bristol Channel, and then across the West Country peninsula from Minehead until it meets the Exe, and that Devon and Cornwall are effectively in the North. Or, to put it more clearly, the true divide is between the north and west; and the south and east. Geographers call this ‘The Humber-Exe Divide.’
In the two-part series Marchant travels from Cleethorpes to Coventry and on to Cinderford in the Forest of Dean asking people who live close to the line whether they feel Northern or Southern, whether or not Northerners really are more friendly, and whether or not they feel the line has any meaning today. Along the way he meets poets, dog walkers, the ex-CEO of Greggs, Britain’s chief estate agent Peter Bolton King and light entertainment legend John Shuttleworth.