The North, as an entity, has a geographical status that stretches roughly from the border between Yorkshire and Derbyshire to Scotland. It has a cultural status that is just as clear, though perhaps less easy to define. A 10-part radio programme, presented by Melvyn Bragg on Radio 4, is going to address the history and culture of this part of the country.
The cliche that obscures all other ideas of Northern culture derives from working-class life in Manchester and Liverpool. To think of the North is, one concludes, to think of Coronation Street, the Beatles, Cilla, Peter Kay and the paintings of LS Lowry. They are all amiable and interesting, but they are only a small part of the whole. It’s worth thinking, too, of the existence of the great princely churchmen of York and Durham; of the magnates who built Castle Howard and still stomp over the Yorkshire grouse moors; of the industrialists who formed the cities, filled their art galleries with treasures and built vast palaces, still standing in their suburbs and selling for a comparative song.
There are, too, the lives of intellectuals and artists and thinkers; there are long established libraries and universities, orchestras, theatres and art galleries. The North comprises rural existence, too, a couple of spa towns acutely conscious of social status, communities of West Indian and Asian origins, and an enchanting small Yorkshire town with the highest proportion of lesbians in its population anywhere in Europe. It is curious that all this diversity is represented in such narrow ways.
Instead of LS Lowry, we might look at the paintings of Adolphe Valette, an atmospheric Manchester impressionist, or at the Victorian Atkinson Grimshaw. Grimshaw specialised in night scenes, and loved the poetry of the docks; scenes at Hull and Liverpool are among his best. If we are thinking of pop music, then Sheffield provides some complex, lyrical talent: Jarvis Cocker’s Pulp, Richard Hawley and the Human League are expert at that buttonholing story-as-song (“You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar …”).
Coronation Street is part of the story, but another version of Manchester life has been served up on television by Russell T Davies in Queer as Folk and Cucumber. Here, the panorama is compellingly broad, from wealthy to needy, and the minor parts beautifully characteristic – there is no shortage of confident Manchester women, from Vince’s supermarket colleagues to Stuart’s secretary in Queer as Folk to the adversarial dykes in Cucumber, and over the whole thing, a relish for glamour and display.
The range of Northern society can sometimes be glimpsed. You see it in Alan Bennett, in the intellectual cut and thrust of The History Boys, and also in the social comedy of A Private Function. Perhaps his most brilliant contribution is a 1988 fly-on-the-wall documentary for the BBC about a Harrogate hotel, Dinner at Noon, where the entire gamut of wealthy or respectable Yorkshire society drift through its halls, are overheard, and drift out again.
Novels of Northern working-class life go on being written, often to great effect. The kitchen-sink realists of the 50s and 60s were often from Yorkshire – Stan Barstow, the wonderful David Storey, and Keith Waterhouse. Pat Barker’s first novels, including Blow Your House Down, the best novel of the Yorkshire Ripper’s reign of terror, occupy the same territory. Recently, Ross Raisin’s book God’s Own Country entered into remote rural Yorkshire with great energy. But the greatest of all North of England novelists, Arnold Bennett, surely demonstrates the possibility of range; the exquisite tale of social climbing and cheek in The Card, the examinations of the life of business in Clayhanger and The Old Wives’ Tale and, most memorably, in a short story called “The Death of Simon Fuge”, a night among champagne-guzzling tastemakers, playing avant garde German music and collecting rare books without ever losing their Northern manners.
What “The North” means is not exactly lost, but is in the process of being simplified. We have to look hard to find a North that thinks, dresses up, shows off, reads and responds to beauty. We like to laugh; we don’t laugh when we’ve made a joke ourselves; we relish a view; we don’t go on about it afterwards; and best of all, I would say, we like a bit of a spread. You can find all that in the films, novels, poetry, art and theatre the North has produced, from Wordsworth and the Brontës to Victoria Wood and Arctic Monkeys. But to say all that is to do something we don’t traditionally tend to do: enthuse.
• The Matter of the North, presented by Melvyn Bragg, begins on Radio 4 at 9am on Monday.
