How do you define a ‘northerner’?

Obviously, now that every high street in England looks identical, and everyone under 30 uses exactly the same Australian rising inflection in speech, books of this sort are based on a false and wishful premise. But let us enter into Paul Morley’s game and ask the question he has asked again.

What is ‘the north’ — or ‘the North’ — anyway? Obviously, as a geographical entity, we know (roughly) what we are talking about; we can argue about Derbyshire, but between Yorkshire and Scotland no one is going to dispute what the north is.

Culturally, we may think we know what we are talking about, but all attempts to pin this down founder on the rocks of narrowness and outdated stereotype. Lazily, people sometimes refer to ‘the northern accent’, without differentiating between accents from Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Bradford, Newcastle, Carlisle and Sheffield. These are all distinct from one another, and distinct again from rural accents. Almost all, too, have different versions belonging to the working class and the middle class. In most cases, I can easily tell whether someone comes from Rotherham or from Barnsley, 22 miles distant. The difference between the Yorkshire and Lancashire accent is so marked that it is hard to understand how they could ever be lumped together as typifying ‘the northern accent’.

If that is the case, how much more true is it about something as nebulous and varied as a ‘northern culture’? Even stereotypes vary dramatically, from the taciturn Yorkshire farmer to the weeping adult Scouser, laying flowers at the site of some celebrity’s death. (Some of us might wonder whether the stereotypical Liverpudlian is northern at all, rather than Irish.) And what about the difference between Asian communities in Bradford and those in Bethnal Green? — no longer a Pakistani/Bangladeshi divide, but by now a north/south one; or the distinction between the long established Afro-Caribbean civilisations in Chapeltown in Leeds and Brixton?

I don’t think I have ever read a book about the North which mentioned the Yorkshire gentry, who have done so much to shape the region.