The Midlands

Geography is controversial. I come from Nottingham and I live in Lincolnshire. I have always felt cheated by a frame of reference which sees the north as essentially economically less successful than the south.  The south as more refined and the north as the home of the funniest comedians etc, etc. This article makes the case for the invisible bit in the middle, the Midlands – hooray for that! It tells us:

The Midlands – that great swath of England squeezed between the self-mythologising power blocs of north and south on the national map – has an image problem. And that problem, essentially, is that it doesn’t have an image.

Even in this great age of identity politics, coming from the Midlands is tantamount to coming from nowhere in particular. Professional northerners are legion, but professional Midlanders? Why, the very word “Midlands” is rarely employed outside the specialised news contexts of weather and travel. There are a lot of roads in the Midlands – it’s a very popular place to travel through – and as for weather, there’s as much of it in the Midlands as anywhere else. But beyond that, what are the term’s associations? There’s the correspondence of the (London-born) classical actor John Gielgud, where he refers to the zone between his legs and midriff as “the Midlands”. We all come from there at a biological level, but in identity terms there is little social cachet in announcing that you hail from the nation’s meat and two veg.

Personally, I blame the Midlands’ anonymity on the national media’s obsession with the so-called “north/ south divide”. There are few cliches journalists and broadcasters in Britain find less resistible than that which pictures the country in terms of a sharp and simple opposition between north and south, with the north cast as the great English “other”, the rebellious, working-class outrider to the normative, establishmentarian south.

Why should Midlanders start to identify themselves with their broader homeland as volubly and visibly as northerners do with theirs? Quite simply because almost everything of any value, ever, started life in England’s belly: the Midlands has served as the womb and birthing pool for most of the ideas and innovations that have driven English, and indeed world, civilisation since the earliest times.