this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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What do you consider to be "The North"? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I love asking UK, especially English, people this question; the answers vary wildly. Once had a Londoner describe the north as "anywhere north of the M25".

So, lemmings, where is 'the north' to you?

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Roughly north of a line from the ~~Mersey~~ Dee to the Humber. If we use counties then the southern borders of Cheshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire form the line.

It's essentially this:

I highly recommend Rory Stewart's documentary Border Country: The Story of Britain's Lost Middleland if you can find it anywhere as it does a good job of looking at the North and how it is so strongly connected to Scotland, it's really Hadrian's Wall that divided us along an arbitrary geographical feature because it was easy to defend.

edit: as much as I'd like to exclude Cheshire I am allowing them into the North, so changed Mersey to Dee.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yup, this looks about right to me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You could argue that some parts of North Lincolnshire are in the North. If you draw a line across, you'd be in the heart of Lancashire.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You could use the same argument to suggest that most of Norfolk is in the Midlands, but it isn't.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I was actually going to mention that in my original comment. In my mind it kind of is in the midlands seeing as it aligns with the rest of the midlands.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

In my mind geological barriers trump all imaginary lines. Latitudes means little when there's 25 kilometers of water between you and the other side of land. Counties have irregular shapes mostly due to geographic features making it historically difficult to easily traverse over the areas that would become boundaries between two counties; cultural differences between these counties are a phenomenon that arises because of on-the-ground geography rather than imaginary latitudinal lines and to me, that's why they take precedence.