Identity Of English Midlands

I'd like to comment about the Identity of the area of Britain commonly called the Midlands, particularly relating to identity issues. I've lived in and around much of the East Midlands (Lincs,Notts,Derbys) for about half of my life and been an exile for about the other half. I consider myself an East Midlander.

This page was inspired by a Northerner claiming that Midlanders misappropriate the Northern label, and that's what I want to comment on. But to save this being a collection of random rants, I thought I should try and sort out a common identity-blob with you all. Please edit the next section as you please to make it running text, and don't worry about authorship. -- DanSheppard

If you want to skip the geography lesson go to the next unitalicised bit.

The English Midlands are geographically (in my mind) an area of England comprising an arc of places between a hundred and a hundred and two hundred miles from London, and which are also more north of London than west of it. They form a border between what's easily identifiable as the south-east and east anglia on one side, and `the north' on the other.

The principle division within the Midlands is between the West and East Midlands. The East Midlands are actually north-east of the west midlands. The two areas are joined by several parallel main roads, the A38 from Birmingham to Derby, the M42 from Birmingham to Nottingham and the M69 from Coventry to Leicester.

The West Midlands are centred around the large city of Birmingham and various smaller cities which are almost joined on to it [Less vague stuff about the West Midlands can be found at WestMidlandsOfEngland].

The East Midlands comprises three principle cities or comparable size, Nottingham, Derby, and Leicester. The area certainly covers Nottinghamshire, [east and central?] Derbyshire, and Leicestershire. The status of Lincoln and Lincolnshire is uncertain, but I think it makes sense to regard Lindsey and Kesteven (two areas of lincolnshire) as East Midland, and Holland (another division of lincolnshire, not the nation) as East Anglian.

Whilst the North has been traditionally identified with production, and the south with consumption, the midlands can be regarded as the area of markets (commercial and consumer), of trade and of merchanting. Birmingham has large markets in Jewlery, [mumble, mumble, more info?], Nottingham in Flowers and Fancy Goods, and so on. Also The Midlands also have a distinct manufacturing slant, the east having including (until recently) Coal Mining, steel fabrications (bicycles, cranes), and the west having car and tool manufacture, and [mumble]. There's also a tradition of traditionally craft manufacture localised to particular cities, shoe making in Leicester, leather in Walsall and Chesterfield, fancy goods in Nottingham, and so on.

The Midlands also border the rich farm lands of Northants, Beds, East Anglia, making them an important business area for food product manufacture. Think Melton Mowbray, and then go and find it on a map. And that's it really. it's a border place. On the edge, trading, a mixture of accents and enterprises and people and scenery. Characterised more by its edgeness, it's mixture, than by its purity. London and Leeds are about an equal way apart. You can choose which of the two poles of England you visit on a whim.

Okay, lecture over.

The reason I think it's important to study cases like the Midlands and border areas in general (I know nothing of the Scottish Borders, perhaps someone could enlighten me) is that they're often culturally ambiguous, seen as a mix of two purer types. What can an identity be for a midlander, surely it's just half way between that of a northerner and a southerner.

Let's accept Levi-Strauss's ideas for an argument a moment (which was roughly that myths can be broken down into kind of genetic blobs like genes or phonemes and assembled into mythical ideas, a bit like memes). We have, with the way England is currently constructed, a mythical Albion of two pedigree races of myths. There's the North which is grim and painted by Lowry, where people say trouble at mill and live on depressing council estates, and drink proper beer. (Remember I'm talking about the myth here, not the reality). And there's the south which is a bit poncy and full of dinner parties and lager and stockbrokers rendered by damian hurst.

The midlands, then, must be some intermediate of this, some watered down slightly-grim slightly-poncey place where they drink half-good beer and have half-conceptual artists who paint not-quite-so-satanic mills-cum-gymnasia.

It seems to me that this is a very poor model, not only for the midlands but also for the north and south. Neither the north nor the south are entierly like their myth, to believe in a bipolar opposition is to trivialise the complexities of those places too. The myth of the dilution of the racially pure is dangerous in people, and based upon this misunderstanding that genes and breeds of people or animals or myths are continuous things like coloured paints which if excessively mixed leads to everyone being monochromicity. Biological genes are not like that, they are discrete entities with O(n^2) interactions, when they meet new possibilities are opened up, different outcomes beyond the scope of the pure gene-sets.

The same is true, I believe, of the Midlands. Some University people may know of what's sometimes called town vs. gown, or the tension between academics and non-academics for notional ownership of some university town. Whilst the most visul outcome of these tensions are press reoprts of agression, in most people they serve to temper the excesses of each. How many people would want a University with no positive connections to the surrounding economy, or a town which was antagonistic to study or self-improvement?

Imagine that situation many times over in a town. Between rural people and city people, self-identified 'working' and 'middle' classes, racial mixes, industries from lace to train making, and so on. Surely these will be the places where truces would be reached, where (for example) the constant arguments over the relative merits of the town and countriside are not judged by flag waving activists, but by a population all deeply enmeshed in both of these worlds.

It's not just these tensions that put value in the place. There's a strange kind of beauty to the way Nottingham canal goes from bieng navigable to being the domain of reeds and algae, to a nature reserve, to an open-cast-coal mine, in the nightly 40-tonne trucks from Holland bringing tomorrows flowers to britain.

Perhaps not so much a dilution as a synthesis.