So instead of looking South, or to past glories, let’s take a leaf out of the Ruhr’s book and concentrate on making the North cleaner, greener and open. Evidence tells us that how people feel about where they live makes a big difference to local economic success. In the Ruhr the starting point was cleaning the rivers and greening an environment damaged by a century of coal mining and steel making. It meant that the inhabitants realised that leisure — what people do when they’re not working — is of equal importance to new industry and the grand infrastructure of commerce.
Instead of trying to build gritty urban living in the centres of Bradford, Oldham and Sunderland, let’s turn these places’ unused, derelict industrial sites into country parks — let’s rewild the towns and cities of the industrial North. Let’s learn from the late, great Will Alsop, whose Bradford Masterplan invoked the city to bulldoze the mostly empty, 1970s city centre buildings, and replace them with a park. Note, too, his M62 corridor “super city” showed connection isn’t just about road and rail but about topography and history too.
In greening the inner city, we also improve air quality, get less car-dominated places and begin to transform the relationship old industrial communities have with where they live. We reconnect them with the original environment of the North, with the hills and valleys, the rivers and the woods.
So let’s have a South Pennines National Park between Barnsley and Bolton, Burnley and Keighley — a beautiful place where, more than anywhere, the industrial revolution was born. Let’s make England’s spine — the Pennines —a place of leisure and pleasure running from Derbyshire to the Scottish border. Let’s focus on the North as a fantastic place to live, a great place to set up a business, and a brilliant place to visit. All, with or without fast railways, just a few hours from the world’s greatest city.
The best thing about this is that the North doesn’t need permission from London to do all this. And probably needs a lot less money to do it than it will cost to build a fast railway from Leeds to Manchester.
And instead of moaning about how everything goes to London, the North should also remember that we all benefit from London being the world’s greatest city – the wealth, power and influence of that place makes Britain so much richer than we’d be without it. We don’t make the North successful by making London less successful.
None of this means we should ignore the persistent poverty in some places, the underperforming schools and the brain drain the North suffers from — but, by focusing on the environment and on the idea of leisure and pleasure, we change the way people feel about where they live. And by doing so, we can reduce that temptation to head off to greener pastures. There is clear evidence to show that the biggest problem with poorer communities — wherever they are — is that anyone with get up and go, gets up and goes. The evaluation of the New Deal for Communities Programme observes how this entrenches disadvantage as the best and brightest leave to be replaced by new residents, always poor and often new immigrants.
If there is central government funding to be had, perhaps it should be used to make sure the per pupil funding in schools is equal to that received by pupils in London.
The North-South divide is real — culturally, economically and socially. There are stark imbalances in funding and Whitehall has a slightly colonial attitude towards far away places. That’s why the North has to turn off the Powerhouse nonsense and look, instead, to its own assets.
When Arup prepared a masterplan for Airedale (the towns of Shipley, Bingley and Keighley and surrounding communities), one of its conclusions was that these places had their backs turned to their greatest treasures — the amazing South Pennines countryside, the river and the canal.
If we want to make a real change, we Northerners have to turn our backs on the few city centres and look up at what we all really know is the North’s uniqueness — something millions saw when the Tour de France visited Yorkshire — those hills, rivers, moors, market towns, lakes, country towns and parks. That’s where our future success lies.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe