What's the difference between the North and the South of England?
And when does the "North" end and the "South" start?
In this episode, we'll explore these questions, and touch on differences in accents, lifestyles, and even what people call their evening meal.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the north/south divide.
[00:00:26] One way of dividing England is by whether you are a northerner or a southerner, whether you come from the north or the south of the country.
[00:00:35] But as you will see, it is not simple, not simple at all, and this story will touch on British history, economics, politics, society, culture and more.
[00:00:47] It is also, I should add, part of a three-part mini-series we’re making on British divisions. In part one, we talked about the thousand-year rivalry between Scotland and England, and in part three we talked about The Wars Of The Roses.
[00:01:02] OK then, let’s get started and talk about The Great British Divide.
[00:01:10] In 2008, a professor at the University of Sheffield published a startling discovery.
[00:01:18] Professor Danny Dorling had drawn, he had mapped out from west to east, a line that divided England.
[00:01:28] To the north of the line was “the North”. To the south of the line, “the South”.
[00:01:34] Now, this wasn’t a revolutionary division, it wasn’t a division that Professor Dorling created himself. For centuries people in England had referred to themselves as either Southerners or Northerners, but nobody could quite agree on where the line that divided one from the other was.
[00:01:56] It probably started somewhere close to southern Wales, and then went east and north.
[00:02:04] It was a fuzzy, unclear line, in people’s minds at least.
[00:02:09] But some cities were unanimously agreed to be southern or northern.
[00:02:15] London was southern.
[00:02:18] Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle were northern.
[00:02:22] But there was no defining line, there was no geographical line, like a river or a range of mountains, no political line where one part started and another ended, nothing that clearly marked where the north ended and the south started.
[00:02:41] Wherever this line was, it was also not a straight line but one that went northeast at an almost 45-degree angle, so, strangely enough, some “northern” cities were further south than “southern” cities.
[00:02:58] Plus, there was the complication that there is a region of the country called “The Midlands”, which insisted it was its own region but was often called south by Northerners and north by Southerners.
[00:03:14] Anyway, the point is that any line, any division, was fuzzy, unclear.
[00:03:22] Where there was unanimous agreement, however, was that there was a division.
[00:03:28] The north was not the same as the south.
[00:03:31] Life was different, the people were different, people spoke with different accents, they used different words, they did different jobs, they drank different types of beer, they wore different clothes, they had different lives.
[00:03:45] Northerners and Southerners were both English, but they were very different people.
[00:03:51] So, in this episode, we will explore the question of both what, where and why.
[00:03:59] What are some common differences between people from the south and the north, how many of these are just stereotypes, and how many are really true?
[00:04:10] Where does this division lie, and how can you tell whether you are in the north or the south of the country?
[00:04:18] And why do these divisions exist?
[00:04:22] Let’s start with some common differences between northerners and southerners, and for this we are actually going to turn to the words of George Orwell, in his book The Road to Wigan Pier.
[00:04:35] “A Yorkshireman in the South will always take care to let you know that he regards you as an inferior. If you ask him why, he will explain that it is only in the North that life is 'real' life, that the industrial work done in the North is the only 'real' work, that the North is inhabited by 'real' people, the South merely by rentiers and their parasites. The Northerner has 'grit', he is grim, 'dour', plucky, warm-hearted and democratic; the Southerner is snobbish, effeminate and lazy - that at any rate is the theory. Hence the Southerner goes north, at any rate for the first time, with the vague inferiority-complex of a civilised man venturing among savages, while the Yorkshireman, like the Scotchman, comes to London in the spirit of a barbarian out for loot.”
[00:05:26] In other words, the Northern man considers himself to be a real man doing real industrial work. And he considers Southern men to be snobs, doing easy work.
[00:05:38] And the Southern man looks down on his Northern counterpart as something of a savage, an uncivilised barbarian.
[00:05:48] They are both British, both English even, but they feel little sense of kinship, given their differences.
[00:05:58] This was written in 1937, and this broad theme has continued to this very day.
[00:06:07] There was a really good BBC documentary from 1970 with an interview of a southern woman who married a northern man. She talks about her experience living in the north, and how none of the women cooked their children any proper food; they would either give them money for fish and chips or cook them something all in one pan, and then the poor children would have to eat out of the pan, they would have no plates.
[00:06:34] And then the BBC journalist went to the north to ask the northerners about their view of the south, and they responded that Southerners are snobs, they go out to eat at restaurants because they can’t cook for themselves, and that they wouldn’t even dream of living in the south because it sounds so awful.
[00:06:55] And even to this very day, you can find videos on YouTube where people go to the streets of London or Manchester, Leeds or Newcastle and ask people what they think of their Southern or Northern counterparts and you will hear very similar things.
[00:07:14] So, where does this come from?
[00:07:17] Well, to understand this we need to have a brief history lesson.
[00:07:22] For the purposes of this episode, we need to go back to the Industrial Revolution, which started in Britain in the mid-18th century.
[00:07:32] Long story short, people from the countryside flocked to the cities to work in factories, producing everything from textiles to tools to iron.
[00:07:43] Britain transitioned from an agrarian, farming-based economy, to an industrial one.
[00:07:51] Although the capital and dominant city was London, the Industrial Revolution led to huge growth of cities outside the capital.
[00:08:01] And particularly so in the north of the country, which had better access to natural resources, better rivers to power the mills and later transport goods, and better access to ports.
[00:08:14] Birmingham, for example, went from a population of 15,000 in 1700 to 75,000 a hundred years later, and over half a million a hundred years after that.
[00:08:28] Manchester, Liverpool, and Newcastle, these were all cities at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, cities which grew both in size and wealth during the 18th and 19th centuries.
[00:08:40] The north was industrial, factories, mines, dominated by manual labour.
[00:08:47] Life was tough, long hours doing often dangerous work in a factory or down a coal mine, but at least it was predictable, once you had a job, it would be a job for life.
[00:08:59] But moving into the 20th century, especially after World War I, the industries that had powered the North were in decline.
[00:09:08] Coal mining, steel production, shipbuilding. These were industries that Britain had excelled in in the 19th century and had been able to sell its products around the world.
[00:09:20] But in the 20th century, British products were no longer so competitive. Countries invested in their own steel and coal industries, and there was a diminishing need for British products.
[00:09:34] Initially, these British industries were supported financially by the government. If they went out of business, millions of jobs would be at risk, so the government continued to prop up these struggling industries.
[00:09:48] The south of England, on the other hand, which had never been so dominated by industry, transitioned into a more service-based economy: finance, law, technology, professional services, all sectors of the economy that were more profitable, and more competitive in a globalising world.
[00:10:09] Then, in the late 1970s, Britain got a new Prime Minister: Margaret Thatcher.
[00:10:15] She was a Conservative, both by political allegiance and in her fiscal beliefs.
[00:10:21] In other words, she represented the Conservative party and she believed in small government, that individuals and businesses should be responsible for themselves; the government should not support them by subsidising their life or business.
[00:10:38] And you may know what happened next.
[00:10:41] Margaret Thatcher started the process of closing the coal mines, which were mostly found in the north of the country.
[00:10:50] There was a large battle between Thatcher and the coal miners, and eventually, after almost a year of strikes, Thatcher won, and then embarked on a series of privatisation measures, shutting down unprofitable mines and factories and selling off everything from railroads to utility companies to private investors.
[00:11:12] The result was a huge loss of jobs in these industries, which were concentrated in the north.
[00:11:20] Unemployment shot up, reaching 13% across the UK, as 2 million people in the UK were out of work.
[00:11:29] And this was particularly concentrated in towns and cities which had been dominated by coal mines, which were predominantly found in the north of England and in southern Wales.
[00:11:42] And in many cases, these areas have never recovered economically.
[00:11:48] There are stark wage and productivity gaps between the North and the South, with people in London earning an average of ⅓ more than their Northern counterparts, and productivity of workers in London being 40% higher than those in the North.
[00:12:05] 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 over Scotland, but it is exactly the same in the north of England.
[00:12:19] The seat of political power is London, and people in the North often complain that politicians in Westminster do not care about them and that there is inadequate investment in the north of England.
[00:12:33] They have a point.
[00:12:35] The north of England is poorly connected from a public transport perspective, especially in smaller towns and cities.
[00:12:43] Education spending tends to be lower in the North than in the South.
[00:12:49] And, as you might expect, this has a real knock-on effect.
[00:12:53] Salaries are lower, there are fewer job opportunities, fewer opportunities for investment or grants for starting new businesses.
[00:13:02] And there is a large gap between north and south not just in economic and educational opportunities, but in life expectancy.
[00:13:12] In the southeast of the country, the most prosperous region of England, the life expectancy at birth is 80.1, whereas in the northeast, where it is lowest, it is 77.2.
[00:13:26] And if we drill down even further the differences are even greater. In Blackpool, which is incidentally where my father was born, the life expectancy at birth is 73, but in Cambridgeshire, in the southeast, it is 83.
[00:13:44] It is quite horrific to put it like that, but the average child in Blackpool will live 10 fewer years than one born in Cambridgeshire.
[00:13:55] Now, you might be listening to this thinking “Well, my country has divisions too”. The north vs south of Italy, or East vs. West Germany, for example.
[00:14:05] But neither of those are as extreme as in the UK.
[00:14:11] According to one report from 2019, ‘the UK is more regionally divided than any comparable advanced economy’.
[00:14:21] In this report, the researchers found that rates of mortality vary more within the UK than in the majority of developed nations, and that there are some places in the UK, like Blackpool and Manchester, which have mortality rates that are worse than those in parts of Turkey, Slovakia and Romania.
[00:14:41] Now, no offence to any wonderful people living in Turkey, Slovakia or Romania, but the GDP per capita of the UK is more than double that of Slovakia, triple that of Romania and four times that of Turkey, so given the wealth that exists in the country, the health outcomes for citizens should be better.
[00:15:02] There have been various government initiatives to try to fix this disparity, and reduce the economic gap between north and south. Most recently, the former Prime Minister Boris Johnson campaigned on a message of “levelling up”, and increasing government spending in the north of the country, but according to most northern commentators, very little real progress has been made.
[00:15:28] Now, we must move on to talk about language and culture, because I think this will be more interesting for you than me reciting figures about mortality rates or productivity statistics.
[00:15:41] 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 and South, which was based on a complicated set of criteria.
[00:15:55] A polling company called YouGov once tried to draw the line based on a simple question: it asked people what they call the meal that they have at the end of the day.
[00:16:07] If they called it “dinner”, they were from the south, and if they called it “tea”, they were from the north.
[00:16:14] The polling company surveyed 42,000 people and split the country based on whether people were more likely to call it dinner or tea. And the result was pretty similar to the map that the university professor had presumably spent thousands of hours carefully crafting.
[00:16:34] And this is just one vocabulary example.
[00:16:37] Accents are different, with southern accents typically having a long “a” in words like “bath” or “laugh”, and northern accents shortening them, like “bath” and “laff”.
[00:16:51] In several northern dialects speakers drop the direct article, or just shorten it to “t”, so instead of saying “in the bath”, they might say “in’t bath”. What’s more, in several northern dialects people will drop the “h” at the start of a word, saying “ave” instead of “have”, “art” instead of “heart”, and so on.
[00:17:19] Now, these are just a few examples. There is a huge variety of different vocabulary used not just in the south vs the north, but a variety within both regions themselves.
[00:17:31] 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 Southern accent.
[00:17:51] For a long time, until really the early 21st century, the BBC, the country’s national broadcaster, required all of its broadcasters to speak in a certain way, in a southern way, similar to the accent that I have, as I am from the south of the country.
[00:18:09] Northern journalists knew that they needed to adjust their accent, to soften it to sound less Northern, in order to get ahead in their careers.
[00:18:20] This thankfully has now changed, the BBC encourages a variety of accents, and it now has a headquarters in Manchester, but while I was growing up at least, everyone you heard on the BBC spoke in a particular way; they spoke like a Southerner.
[00:18:38] Now, every country, no matter how big or small, has its divisions, friendly rivalries between people from different regions.
[00:18:47] England is no exception, although the line between north and south is not nearly as clear as some people might think it is.
[00:18:55] There are no signs saying welcome to the north or welcome to the south, no river you cross or mountain range you need to go through.
[00:19:04] If you are travelling in England and you are unsure whether you’re in the north or south, let me suggest to you a foolproof way.
[00:19:12] Take out a piece of paper and draw a picture of someone eating fish and chips in that white porcelain thing you wash yourself in, and ask a passerby what is going on.
[00:19:26] If they say that someone is having their dinner in the bath, you’re probably in the south.
[00:19:32] If they say they’re “aving ‘t tea in’t bath”, you’re probably in the north.
[00:19:38] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the north-south divide of England.
[00:19:43] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:19:47] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:19:50] What areas of England have you been to? Were you aware of a north-south divide? What divisions are there in your country, if any?
[00:19:57] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:01] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:08] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:13] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the north/south divide.
[00:00:26] One way of dividing England is by whether you are a northerner or a southerner, whether you come from the north or the south of the country.
[00:00:35] But as you will see, it is not simple, not simple at all, and this story will touch on British history, economics, politics, society, culture and more.
[00:00:47] It is also, I should add, part of a three-part mini-series we’re making on British divisions. In part one, we talked about the thousand-year rivalry between Scotland and England, and in part three we talked about The Wars Of The Roses.
[00:01:02] OK then, let’s get started and talk about The Great British Divide.
[00:01:10] In 2008, a professor at the University of Sheffield published a startling discovery.
[00:01:18] Professor Danny Dorling had drawn, he had mapped out from west to east, a line that divided England.
[00:01:28] To the north of the line was “the North”. To the south of the line, “the South”.
[00:01:34] Now, this wasn’t a revolutionary division, it wasn’t a division that Professor Dorling created himself. For centuries people in England had referred to themselves as either Southerners or Northerners, but nobody could quite agree on where the line that divided one from the other was.
[00:01:56] It probably started somewhere close to southern Wales, and then went east and north.
[00:02:04] It was a fuzzy, unclear line, in people’s minds at least.
[00:02:09] But some cities were unanimously agreed to be southern or northern.
[00:02:15] London was southern.
[00:02:18] Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle were northern.
[00:02:22] But there was no defining line, there was no geographical line, like a river or a range of mountains, no political line where one part started and another ended, nothing that clearly marked where the north ended and the south started.
[00:02:41] Wherever this line was, it was also not a straight line but one that went northeast at an almost 45-degree angle, so, strangely enough, some “northern” cities were further south than “southern” cities.
[00:02:58] Plus, there was the complication that there is a region of the country called “The Midlands”, which insisted it was its own region but was often called south by Northerners and north by Southerners.
[00:03:14] Anyway, the point is that any line, any division, was fuzzy, unclear.
[00:03:22] Where there was unanimous agreement, however, was that there was a division.
[00:03:28] The north was not the same as the south.
[00:03:31] Life was different, the people were different, people spoke with different accents, they used different words, they did different jobs, they drank different types of beer, they wore different clothes, they had different lives.
[00:03:45] Northerners and Southerners were both English, but they were very different people.
[00:03:51] So, in this episode, we will explore the question of both what, where and why.
[00:03:59] What are some common differences between people from the south and the north, how many of these are just stereotypes, and how many are really true?
[00:04:10] Where does this division lie, and how can you tell whether you are in the north or the south of the country?
[00:04:18] And why do these divisions exist?
[00:04:22] Let’s start with some common differences between northerners and southerners, and for this we are actually going to turn to the words of George Orwell, in his book The Road to Wigan Pier.
[00:04:35] “A Yorkshireman in the South will always take care to let you know that he regards you as an inferior. If you ask him why, he will explain that it is only in the North that life is 'real' life, that the industrial work done in the North is the only 'real' work, that the North is inhabited by 'real' people, the South merely by rentiers and their parasites. The Northerner has 'grit', he is grim, 'dour', plucky, warm-hearted and democratic; the Southerner is snobbish, effeminate and lazy - that at any rate is the theory. Hence the Southerner goes north, at any rate for the first time, with the vague inferiority-complex of a civilised man venturing among savages, while the Yorkshireman, like the Scotchman, comes to London in the spirit of a barbarian out for loot.”
[00:05:26] In other words, the Northern man considers himself to be a real man doing real industrial work. And he considers Southern men to be snobs, doing easy work.
[00:05:38] And the Southern man looks down on his Northern counterpart as something of a savage, an uncivilised barbarian.
[00:05:48] They are both British, both English even, but they feel little sense of kinship, given their differences.
[00:05:58] This was written in 1937, and this broad theme has continued to this very day.
[00:06:07] There was a really good BBC documentary from 1970 with an interview of a southern woman who married a northern man. She talks about her experience living in the north, and how none of the women cooked their children any proper food; they would either give them money for fish and chips or cook them something all in one pan, and then the poor children would have to eat out of the pan, they would have no plates.
[00:06:34] And then the BBC journalist went to the north to ask the northerners about their view of the south, and they responded that Southerners are snobs, they go out to eat at restaurants because they can’t cook for themselves, and that they wouldn’t even dream of living in the south because it sounds so awful.
[00:06:55] And even to this very day, you can find videos on YouTube where people go to the streets of London or Manchester, Leeds or Newcastle and ask people what they think of their Southern or Northern counterparts and you will hear very similar things.
[00:07:14] So, where does this come from?
[00:07:17] Well, to understand this we need to have a brief history lesson.
[00:07:22] For the purposes of this episode, we need to go back to the Industrial Revolution, which started in Britain in the mid-18th century.
[00:07:32] Long story short, people from the countryside flocked to the cities to work in factories, producing everything from textiles to tools to iron.
[00:07:43] Britain transitioned from an agrarian, farming-based economy, to an industrial one.
[00:07:51] Although the capital and dominant city was London, the Industrial Revolution led to huge growth of cities outside the capital.
[00:08:01] And particularly so in the north of the country, which had better access to natural resources, better rivers to power the mills and later transport goods, and better access to ports.
[00:08:14] Birmingham, for example, went from a population of 15,000 in 1700 to 75,000 a hundred years later, and over half a million a hundred years after that.
[00:08:28] Manchester, Liverpool, and Newcastle, these were all cities at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, cities which grew both in size and wealth during the 18th and 19th centuries.
[00:08:40] The north was industrial, factories, mines, dominated by manual labour.
[00:08:47] Life was tough, long hours doing often dangerous work in a factory or down a coal mine, but at least it was predictable, once you had a job, it would be a job for life.
[00:08:59] But moving into the 20th century, especially after World War I, the industries that had powered the North were in decline.
[00:09:08] Coal mining, steel production, shipbuilding. These were industries that Britain had excelled in in the 19th century and had been able to sell its products around the world.
[00:09:20] But in the 20th century, British products were no longer so competitive. Countries invested in their own steel and coal industries, and there was a diminishing need for British products.
[00:09:34] Initially, these British industries were supported financially by the government. If they went out of business, millions of jobs would be at risk, so the government continued to prop up these struggling industries.
[00:09:48] The south of England, on the other hand, which had never been so dominated by industry, transitioned into a more service-based economy: finance, law, technology, professional services, all sectors of the economy that were more profitable, and more competitive in a globalising world.
[00:10:09] Then, in the late 1970s, Britain got a new Prime Minister: Margaret Thatcher.
[00:10:15] She was a Conservative, both by political allegiance and in her fiscal beliefs.
[00:10:21] In other words, she represented the Conservative party and she believed in small government, that individuals and businesses should be responsible for themselves; the government should not support them by subsidising their life or business.
[00:10:38] And you may know what happened next.
[00:10:41] Margaret Thatcher started the process of closing the coal mines, which were mostly found in the north of the country.
[00:10:50] There was a large battle between Thatcher and the coal miners, and eventually, after almost a year of strikes, Thatcher won, and then embarked on a series of privatisation measures, shutting down unprofitable mines and factories and selling off everything from railroads to utility companies to private investors.
[00:11:12] The result was a huge loss of jobs in these industries, which were concentrated in the north.
[00:11:20] Unemployment shot up, reaching 13% across the UK, as 2 million people in the UK were out of work.
[00:11:29] And this was particularly concentrated in towns and cities which had been dominated by coal mines, which were predominantly found in the north of England and in southern Wales.
[00:11:42] And in many cases, these areas have never recovered economically.
[00:11:48] There are stark wage and productivity gaps between the North and the South, with people in London earning an average of ⅓ more than their Northern counterparts, and productivity of workers in London being 40% higher than those in the North.
[00:12:05] 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 over Scotland, but it is exactly the same in the north of England.
[00:12:19] The seat of political power is London, and people in the North often complain that politicians in Westminster do not care about them and that there is inadequate investment in the north of England.
[00:12:33] They have a point.
[00:12:35] The north of England is poorly connected from a public transport perspective, especially in smaller towns and cities.
[00:12:43] Education spending tends to be lower in the North than in the South.
[00:12:49] And, as you might expect, this has a real knock-on effect.
[00:12:53] Salaries are lower, there are fewer job opportunities, fewer opportunities for investment or grants for starting new businesses.
[00:13:02] And there is a large gap between north and south not just in economic and educational opportunities, but in life expectancy.
[00:13:12] In the southeast of the country, the most prosperous region of England, the life expectancy at birth is 80.1, whereas in the northeast, where it is lowest, it is 77.2.
[00:13:26] And if we drill down even further the differences are even greater. In Blackpool, which is incidentally where my father was born, the life expectancy at birth is 73, but in Cambridgeshire, in the southeast, it is 83.
[00:13:44] It is quite horrific to put it like that, but the average child in Blackpool will live 10 fewer years than one born in Cambridgeshire.
[00:13:55] Now, you might be listening to this thinking “Well, my country has divisions too”. The north vs south of Italy, or East vs. West Germany, for example.
[00:14:05] But neither of those are as extreme as in the UK.
[00:14:11] According to one report from 2019, ‘the UK is more regionally divided than any comparable advanced economy’.
[00:14:21] In this report, the researchers found that rates of mortality vary more within the UK than in the majority of developed nations, and that there are some places in the UK, like Blackpool and Manchester, which have mortality rates that are worse than those in parts of Turkey, Slovakia and Romania.
[00:14:41] Now, no offence to any wonderful people living in Turkey, Slovakia or Romania, but the GDP per capita of the UK is more than double that of Slovakia, triple that of Romania and four times that of Turkey, so given the wealth that exists in the country, the health outcomes for citizens should be better.
[00:15:02] There have been various government initiatives to try to fix this disparity, and reduce the economic gap between north and south. Most recently, the former Prime Minister Boris Johnson campaigned on a message of “levelling up”, and increasing government spending in the north of the country, but according to most northern commentators, very little real progress has been made.
[00:15:28] Now, we must move on to talk about language and culture, because I think this will be more interesting for you than me reciting figures about mortality rates or productivity statistics.
[00:15:41] 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 and South, which was based on a complicated set of criteria.
[00:15:55] A polling company called YouGov once tried to draw the line based on a simple question: it asked people what they call the meal that they have at the end of the day.
[00:16:07] If they called it “dinner”, they were from the south, and if they called it “tea”, they were from the north.
[00:16:14] The polling company surveyed 42,000 people and split the country based on whether people were more likely to call it dinner or tea. And the result was pretty similar to the map that the university professor had presumably spent thousands of hours carefully crafting.
[00:16:34] And this is just one vocabulary example.
[00:16:37] Accents are different, with southern accents typically having a long “a” in words like “bath” or “laugh”, and northern accents shortening them, like “bath” and “laff”.
[00:16:51] In several northern dialects speakers drop the direct article, or just shorten it to “t”, so instead of saying “in the bath”, they might say “in’t bath”. What’s more, in several northern dialects people will drop the “h” at the start of a word, saying “ave” instead of “have”, “art” instead of “heart”, and so on.
[00:17:19] Now, these are just a few examples. There is a huge variety of different vocabulary used not just in the south vs the north, but a variety within both regions themselves.
[00:17:31] 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 Southern accent.
[00:17:51] For a long time, until really the early 21st century, the BBC, the country’s national broadcaster, required all of its broadcasters to speak in a certain way, in a southern way, similar to the accent that I have, as I am from the south of the country.
[00:18:09] Northern journalists knew that they needed to adjust their accent, to soften it to sound less Northern, in order to get ahead in their careers.
[00:18:20] This thankfully has now changed, the BBC encourages a variety of accents, and it now has a headquarters in Manchester, but while I was growing up at least, everyone you heard on the BBC spoke in a particular way; they spoke like a Southerner.
[00:18:38] Now, every country, no matter how big or small, has its divisions, friendly rivalries between people from different regions.
[00:18:47] England is no exception, although the line between north and south is not nearly as clear as some people might think it is.
[00:18:55] There are no signs saying welcome to the north or welcome to the south, no river you cross or mountain range you need to go through.
[00:19:04] If you are travelling in England and you are unsure whether you’re in the north or south, let me suggest to you a foolproof way.
[00:19:12] Take out a piece of paper and draw a picture of someone eating fish and chips in that white porcelain thing you wash yourself in, and ask a passerby what is going on.
[00:19:26] If they say that someone is having their dinner in the bath, you’re probably in the south.
[00:19:32] If they say they’re “aving ‘t tea in’t bath”, you’re probably in the north.
[00:19:38] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the north-south divide of England.
[00:19:43] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:19:47] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:19:50] What areas of England have you been to? Were you aware of a north-south divide? What divisions are there in your country, if any?
[00:19:57] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:01] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:08] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:13] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the north/south divide.
[00:00:26] One way of dividing England is by whether you are a northerner or a southerner, whether you come from the north or the south of the country.
[00:00:35] But as you will see, it is not simple, not simple at all, and this story will touch on British history, economics, politics, society, culture and more.
[00:00:47] It is also, I should add, part of a three-part mini-series we’re making on British divisions. In part one, we talked about the thousand-year rivalry between Scotland and England, and in part three we talked about The Wars Of The Roses.
[00:01:02] OK then, let’s get started and talk about The Great British Divide.
[00:01:10] In 2008, a professor at the University of Sheffield published a startling discovery.
[00:01:18] Professor Danny Dorling had drawn, he had mapped out from west to east, a line that divided England.
[00:01:28] To the north of the line was “the North”. To the south of the line, “the South”.
[00:01:34] Now, this wasn’t a revolutionary division, it wasn’t a division that Professor Dorling created himself. For centuries people in England had referred to themselves as either Southerners or Northerners, but nobody could quite agree on where the line that divided one from the other was.
[00:01:56] It probably started somewhere close to southern Wales, and then went east and north.
[00:02:04] It was a fuzzy, unclear line, in people’s minds at least.
[00:02:09] But some cities were unanimously agreed to be southern or northern.
[00:02:15] London was southern.
[00:02:18] Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle were northern.
[00:02:22] But there was no defining line, there was no geographical line, like a river or a range of mountains, no political line where one part started and another ended, nothing that clearly marked where the north ended and the south started.
[00:02:41] Wherever this line was, it was also not a straight line but one that went northeast at an almost 45-degree angle, so, strangely enough, some “northern” cities were further south than “southern” cities.
[00:02:58] Plus, there was the complication that there is a region of the country called “The Midlands”, which insisted it was its own region but was often called south by Northerners and north by Southerners.
[00:03:14] Anyway, the point is that any line, any division, was fuzzy, unclear.
[00:03:22] Where there was unanimous agreement, however, was that there was a division.
[00:03:28] The north was not the same as the south.
[00:03:31] Life was different, the people were different, people spoke with different accents, they used different words, they did different jobs, they drank different types of beer, they wore different clothes, they had different lives.
[00:03:45] Northerners and Southerners were both English, but they were very different people.
[00:03:51] So, in this episode, we will explore the question of both what, where and why.
[00:03:59] What are some common differences between people from the south and the north, how many of these are just stereotypes, and how many are really true?
[00:04:10] Where does this division lie, and how can you tell whether you are in the north or the south of the country?
[00:04:18] And why do these divisions exist?
[00:04:22] Let’s start with some common differences between northerners and southerners, and for this we are actually going to turn to the words of George Orwell, in his book The Road to Wigan Pier.
[00:04:35] “A Yorkshireman in the South will always take care to let you know that he regards you as an inferior. If you ask him why, he will explain that it is only in the North that life is 'real' life, that the industrial work done in the North is the only 'real' work, that the North is inhabited by 'real' people, the South merely by rentiers and their parasites. The Northerner has 'grit', he is grim, 'dour', plucky, warm-hearted and democratic; the Southerner is snobbish, effeminate and lazy - that at any rate is the theory. Hence the Southerner goes north, at any rate for the first time, with the vague inferiority-complex of a civilised man venturing among savages, while the Yorkshireman, like the Scotchman, comes to London in the spirit of a barbarian out for loot.”
[00:05:26] In other words, the Northern man considers himself to be a real man doing real industrial work. And he considers Southern men to be snobs, doing easy work.
[00:05:38] And the Southern man looks down on his Northern counterpart as something of a savage, an uncivilised barbarian.
[00:05:48] They are both British, both English even, but they feel little sense of kinship, given their differences.
[00:05:58] This was written in 1937, and this broad theme has continued to this very day.
[00:06:07] There was a really good BBC documentary from 1970 with an interview of a southern woman who married a northern man. She talks about her experience living in the north, and how none of the women cooked their children any proper food; they would either give them money for fish and chips or cook them something all in one pan, and then the poor children would have to eat out of the pan, they would have no plates.
[00:06:34] And then the BBC journalist went to the north to ask the northerners about their view of the south, and they responded that Southerners are snobs, they go out to eat at restaurants because they can’t cook for themselves, and that they wouldn’t even dream of living in the south because it sounds so awful.
[00:06:55] And even to this very day, you can find videos on YouTube where people go to the streets of London or Manchester, Leeds or Newcastle and ask people what they think of their Southern or Northern counterparts and you will hear very similar things.
[00:07:14] So, where does this come from?
[00:07:17] Well, to understand this we need to have a brief history lesson.
[00:07:22] For the purposes of this episode, we need to go back to the Industrial Revolution, which started in Britain in the mid-18th century.
[00:07:32] Long story short, people from the countryside flocked to the cities to work in factories, producing everything from textiles to tools to iron.
[00:07:43] Britain transitioned from an agrarian, farming-based economy, to an industrial one.
[00:07:51] Although the capital and dominant city was London, the Industrial Revolution led to huge growth of cities outside the capital.
[00:08:01] And particularly so in the north of the country, which had better access to natural resources, better rivers to power the mills and later transport goods, and better access to ports.
[00:08:14] Birmingham, for example, went from a population of 15,000 in 1700 to 75,000 a hundred years later, and over half a million a hundred years after that.
[00:08:28] Manchester, Liverpool, and Newcastle, these were all cities at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, cities which grew both in size and wealth during the 18th and 19th centuries.
[00:08:40] The north was industrial, factories, mines, dominated by manual labour.
[00:08:47] Life was tough, long hours doing often dangerous work in a factory or down a coal mine, but at least it was predictable, once you had a job, it would be a job for life.
[00:08:59] But moving into the 20th century, especially after World War I, the industries that had powered the North were in decline.
[00:09:08] Coal mining, steel production, shipbuilding. These were industries that Britain had excelled in in the 19th century and had been able to sell its products around the world.
[00:09:20] But in the 20th century, British products were no longer so competitive. Countries invested in their own steel and coal industries, and there was a diminishing need for British products.
[00:09:34] Initially, these British industries were supported financially by the government. If they went out of business, millions of jobs would be at risk, so the government continued to prop up these struggling industries.
[00:09:48] The south of England, on the other hand, which had never been so dominated by industry, transitioned into a more service-based economy: finance, law, technology, professional services, all sectors of the economy that were more profitable, and more competitive in a globalising world.
[00:10:09] Then, in the late 1970s, Britain got a new Prime Minister: Margaret Thatcher.
[00:10:15] She was a Conservative, both by political allegiance and in her fiscal beliefs.
[00:10:21] In other words, she represented the Conservative party and she believed in small government, that individuals and businesses should be responsible for themselves; the government should not support them by subsidising their life or business.
[00:10:38] And you may know what happened next.
[00:10:41] Margaret Thatcher started the process of closing the coal mines, which were mostly found in the north of the country.
[00:10:50] There was a large battle between Thatcher and the coal miners, and eventually, after almost a year of strikes, Thatcher won, and then embarked on a series of privatisation measures, shutting down unprofitable mines and factories and selling off everything from railroads to utility companies to private investors.
[00:11:12] The result was a huge loss of jobs in these industries, which were concentrated in the north.
[00:11:20] Unemployment shot up, reaching 13% across the UK, as 2 million people in the UK were out of work.
[00:11:29] And this was particularly concentrated in towns and cities which had been dominated by coal mines, which were predominantly found in the north of England and in southern Wales.
[00:11:42] And in many cases, these areas have never recovered economically.
[00:11:48] There are stark wage and productivity gaps between the North and the South, with people in London earning an average of ⅓ more than their Northern counterparts, and productivity of workers in London being 40% higher than those in the North.
[00:12:05] 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 over Scotland, but it is exactly the same in the north of England.
[00:12:19] The seat of political power is London, and people in the North often complain that politicians in Westminster do not care about them and that there is inadequate investment in the north of England.
[00:12:33] They have a point.
[00:12:35] The north of England is poorly connected from a public transport perspective, especially in smaller towns and cities.
[00:12:43] Education spending tends to be lower in the North than in the South.
[00:12:49] And, as you might expect, this has a real knock-on effect.
[00:12:53] Salaries are lower, there are fewer job opportunities, fewer opportunities for investment or grants for starting new businesses.
[00:13:02] And there is a large gap between north and south not just in economic and educational opportunities, but in life expectancy.
[00:13:12] In the southeast of the country, the most prosperous region of England, the life expectancy at birth is 80.1, whereas in the northeast, where it is lowest, it is 77.2.
[00:13:26] And if we drill down even further the differences are even greater. In Blackpool, which is incidentally where my father was born, the life expectancy at birth is 73, but in Cambridgeshire, in the southeast, it is 83.
[00:13:44] It is quite horrific to put it like that, but the average child in Blackpool will live 10 fewer years than one born in Cambridgeshire.
[00:13:55] Now, you might be listening to this thinking “Well, my country has divisions too”. The north vs south of Italy, or East vs. West Germany, for example.
[00:14:05] But neither of those are as extreme as in the UK.
[00:14:11] According to one report from 2019, ‘the UK is more regionally divided than any comparable advanced economy’.
[00:14:21] In this report, the researchers found that rates of mortality vary more within the UK than in the majority of developed nations, and that there are some places in the UK, like Blackpool and Manchester, which have mortality rates that are worse than those in parts of Turkey, Slovakia and Romania.
[00:14:41] Now, no offence to any wonderful people living in Turkey, Slovakia or Romania, but the GDP per capita of the UK is more than double that of Slovakia, triple that of Romania and four times that of Turkey, so given the wealth that exists in the country, the health outcomes for citizens should be better.
[00:15:02] There have been various government initiatives to try to fix this disparity, and reduce the economic gap between north and south. Most recently, the former Prime Minister Boris Johnson campaigned on a message of “levelling up”, and increasing government spending in the north of the country, but according to most northern commentators, very little real progress has been made.
[00:15:28] Now, we must move on to talk about language and culture, because I think this will be more interesting for you than me reciting figures about mortality rates or productivity statistics.
[00:15:41] 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 and South, which was based on a complicated set of criteria.
[00:15:55] A polling company called YouGov once tried to draw the line based on a simple question: it asked people what they call the meal that they have at the end of the day.
[00:16:07] If they called it “dinner”, they were from the south, and if they called it “tea”, they were from the north.
[00:16:14] The polling company surveyed 42,000 people and split the country based on whether people were more likely to call it dinner or tea. And the result was pretty similar to the map that the university professor had presumably spent thousands of hours carefully crafting.
[00:16:34] And this is just one vocabulary example.
[00:16:37] Accents are different, with southern accents typically having a long “a” in words like “bath” or “laugh”, and northern accents shortening them, like “bath” and “laff”.
[00:16:51] In several northern dialects speakers drop the direct article, or just shorten it to “t”, so instead of saying “in the bath”, they might say “in’t bath”. What’s more, in several northern dialects people will drop the “h” at the start of a word, saying “ave” instead of “have”, “art” instead of “heart”, and so on.
[00:17:19] Now, these are just a few examples. There is a huge variety of different vocabulary used not just in the south vs the north, but a variety within both regions themselves.
[00:17:31] 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 Southern accent.
[00:17:51] For a long time, until really the early 21st century, the BBC, the country’s national broadcaster, required all of its broadcasters to speak in a certain way, in a southern way, similar to the accent that I have, as I am from the south of the country.
[00:18:09] Northern journalists knew that they needed to adjust their accent, to soften it to sound less Northern, in order to get ahead in their careers.
[00:18:20] This thankfully has now changed, the BBC encourages a variety of accents, and it now has a headquarters in Manchester, but while I was growing up at least, everyone you heard on the BBC spoke in a particular way; they spoke like a Southerner.
[00:18:38] Now, every country, no matter how big or small, has its divisions, friendly rivalries between people from different regions.
[00:18:47] England is no exception, although the line between north and south is not nearly as clear as some people might think it is.
[00:18:55] There are no signs saying welcome to the north or welcome to the south, no river you cross or mountain range you need to go through.
[00:19:04] If you are travelling in England and you are unsure whether you’re in the north or south, let me suggest to you a foolproof way.
[00:19:12] Take out a piece of paper and draw a picture of someone eating fish and chips in that white porcelain thing you wash yourself in, and ask a passerby what is going on.
[00:19:26] If they say that someone is having their dinner in the bath, you’re probably in the south.
[00:19:32] If they say they’re “aving ‘t tea in’t bath”, you’re probably in the north.
[00:19:38] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the north-south divide of England.
[00:19:43] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:19:47] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:19:50] What areas of England have you been to? Were you aware of a north-south divide? What divisions are there in your country, if any?
[00:19:57] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:01] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:08] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:13] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
