Robert Shore - Bang in the Middle

At that moment I realised that something important – life-changing, even – was happening to me: I was reconnecting with my Inner Midlander. This sort of thing happens to Northerners all the time, of course. It’s easy for them because there are so many clichés about Northern identity that they can tap into. But if you’re a Midlander? Instinctively, as well as in point of strict bio-geographical fact, I had always known I was one, of course, but I had no idea what that might signify in a wider sense. What is a Midlander?

‘Right,’ I said, putting the phone down and turning to my son with unwonted firmness of purpose. ‘You wanted to know where I am from, Hector. I say to you now that I don’t really know. Not geographically, obviously – show me a map and I will unerringly pin the tail of a donkey to the precise point on it where Mansfield lies. It’s just above Nottingham and a bit up and to the right from Derby. But in a broader sense – culturally, philosophically – I’ve no idea what it means to be a Midlander. So I must find out. We must find out. You have asked me the question and together we will discover the answer. Son, let us get into the car immediately and set off in search of my – I mean, our – identity.’

I thought my speech stirring, but Hector just looked a bit confused and upset. After all, he’d been planning to watch Megamind on DVD.

Putting her head round the door precisely on cue, his French mother came to his rescue again. ‘Hector’s got a birthday party this afternoon and we’re having lunch with the Downings tomorrow, so there’s no question of us going anywhere this weekend.’

‘Oh,’ I quivered, momentarily thwarted. ‘All right then, we’ll go next weekend instead.’

* * *

In truth, I was glad to have an opportunity to do a little research before setting off in search of my Midland heritage, and that is what I spent every spare moment of the following week doing. What I discovered by leafing through classic accounts of tours around England was very illuminating. Pretty depressing too, if truth be told.

If you want to know about attitudes to the Midlands, you could do worse than start with Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island (1995). Bryson is an American who settled in the UK – in North Yorkshire, to be precise, a choice that may be significant in itself – and made a reputation for himself as a travel writer. In Notes from a Small Island he set himself the task of explaining the British to themselves by undertaking a tour of this ‘small island’ – not so small, however, that he felt the need to engage in any detail with its sizeable middle swathe. No major Midland towns are marked on the map at the front of Bryson’s book. We find London, Oxford, Leeds, even Bournemouth and Halkirk (‘Where?’ I hear you cry), but no Nottingham or Birmingham – the latter being the largest city in the UK after London.

Flicking through its pages, there’s a sense that for the most part Midland locations are beneath Bryson’s notice. When he does write about them, he adopts a tone of gentle condescension. Retford, for instance, he declares ‘a delightful and charming place’; ‘the shops seemed prosperous and well ordered. I can’t say that I felt like spending my holidays here.’ Worksop is ‘agreeable enough in a low-key sort of way’. After he quits the South, the people he encounters only really come to life again and begin to talk with vivid local accents when he reaches the great city-states of the North, Manchester and Liverpool, where ‘bus’ suddenly vowel-shifts into ‘boose’. If you tried to arrive at a working definition of the Midlands from Notes from a Small Island , you might be tempted to characterise it as the lowland bit between the national peaks, however defined – geographically, socially or culturally.

Bryson’s book is part of a much wider tradition. The great surveys of the country tend to bypass the Midlands or emphasise its anonymity by other means. In his classic interwar study In Search of England , for instance, H.V. Morton names Rutland in the Midlands as ‘the smallest and happiest county in England’, but then adds: ‘I am the only person I have ever known who has been [there]. I admit that I have known men who have passed through Rutland in search of a fox, but I have never met a man who has deliberately set out to go to Rutland; and I do not suppose you have.’ Morton pays Rutland a great compliment, but in such a way as to stress its invisibility at a national level. As he says, ‘most people think [it] is in Wales’ – which, let’s face it, isn’t meant as a compliment.

Another mid-century guidebook pays tribute to the beauties of the Midland landscape, suggesting that the ‘Peak District in Derbyshire – with Buxton spa as a Convenient Centre – is worth a visit’. It turns out to be a qualified recommendation, however: ‘Whoever cannot go to Cumberland, Northumberland or Yorkshire will find compensation in the moorlands and hills of the Peak District, and in its deep valleys and rugged cuttings.’ In other words: for real English scenery, you’d be better off in the real North. The Midlands can be delightful, the author allows, but it’s never more than a ‘compensation’, a second-best option, a silver medallist at best in the race for national gold.

When an opinion is expressed about the region as a whole, it’s usually thoroughly damning. In 2003, the East Midlands found itself listed in a Spectator magazine travel special under the heading ‘Best Avoided: Places That Suck’. Recent research confirms how widespread this perception is. ‘Industrial, built-up, heavily populated, busy, no countryside; Uninteresting, nothing there, not touristy, unromantic; Dark, dirty and grey; Cold and windy’ were the words used to summarise the views of foreign respondents in a tourist-board survey of perceptions of the region. Booked your summer holiday yet? Well, now you know where you should be going.

The West Midlands fares little better in the popular imagination. Researchers at King’s College London recently announced that, for most people, Birmingham accents were inextricably linked with low intelligence. Most non-natives remain blind to the region’s charms, a tradition that stretches back at least as far as the Industrial Revolution. When Queen Victoria travelled through the Black Country – so named owing to the soot and grime that coated this highly industrialised area in the nineteenth century – she insisted on having the blinds pulled down in the royal train. Figuratively at least, it’s with the shutters firmly closed that most people still prefer to experience the Midlands. Americans call their Midwest – that big bit between the exciting, trendy coastal states – the ‘flyover states’. We’re a much smaller country and less given to taking domestic flights, but by analogy we could call the Midlands the ‘drive-through counties’ – the boring bit you drive through to get to where you really want to be.

In her spiky survey Class , Jilly Cooper – she of the saucy horsey romps – complains about ‘the terrible flat “a”s and dreary, characterless Midlands accent … which conjure up a picture of some folk-weave goon’, before declaring, in the chapter on ‘Geography’, that for the upper classes and, by extension, anyone from the smart set: ‘The Midlands are beyond the pale.’ Dispiritingly, many Midlanders wouldn’t disagree. There’s a thread on the Amazon website that’s very revealing of what might be called Midlander status anxiety. One contributor says: ‘Strictly speaking, coming from Derbyshire, I suppose I live in the Midlands but I feel like a Northerner. It has to do with accent, values and the time of day you eat your dinner.’ Another from Stoke-on-Trent agrees: ‘Though perhaps geographically we are in the North Midlands, we are very much a Northern city in spirit, outlook and feeling.’ Contributors regularly refer to the Midlands as a kind of ‘no-man’s-land’ or ‘minor melting pot’ that is ‘caught between stereotypes’ of North and South and that consequently lacks a distinct character of its own.