Wow, bravo Joshi Herrmann! When I was at Sussex in the 70s, I was astonished that every single southern pal had never visited the North. I arranged a convoy to see David Bowie (Aladdin Sane) at Preston Guild Hall in 1973.

London was a great place to visit then, and we spent many weekends ambling around and buying Biba-label baked beans for our cupboards. Now I find it can be oppressive and overcrowded, and the tube is grim.

My professional fees (and those of most people) go to a London office, run by Londoners, and that money largely stays in the South. As you correctly point out, London is not the nation, and I would hazard a guess that there are still plenty of Southerners who have never visited a Northern town or city.

This is good as far as it goes, but the author is only partly correct both in identifying the problem and suggesting a solution. More regional reporters would be a fine thing, but what has been missing from journalism for more than a generation is depth and breadth of experience that used to come from training on local newspapers.
I should declare here that I’m a product of just such training, and although I was not cut out for reporting and moved into the production side as a sub-editor pretty much as soon as I was able, I nevertheless had nearly four years of indentured apprenticeship which gave me first-hand experience of local government from parish to county council, and court reporting from local magistrates’ to crown court.
I started that training aged 18, in 1986. How many of Unherd’s writers don’t have degrees? Or have a background in reporting, rather than commentary?
The author’s own title, The Mill, may be a fine platform, but I see it offers long-form writing. Great for a career as a pundit, but not so good for reporting on grassroots issues.
The decline of the local press has been going on for decades. My hometown paper, which paid for my training, closed months after I joined the staff. Those days are never coming back, so what should be the modern equivalent? Because it’s not The Mill, nor for that matter, Unherd – great though it is.

I spent the first 30 years of my life in London with only the most cursory and infrequent forays up north. But having spent the rest of my life based in the north, and Manchester is the south for me, I am aware of the excessive focus on London and the south in the MSM generally which greatly diminishes my interest in its obsessions. If the conservatives want to hang on to their red wall gains it might be worth their establishing a well staffed conservative office that is based up north so that many of the metropolitan obsessions of London-centric thinking are squeezed out of the party.

Personel is policy

True in Twitter, true in administration, true in legal matters, true in the FBI, true in journalism

Eexcellent article on aimportant, ismple and overlooked topic.

I know the feeling. I live in a stunning coastal town in Southwest Florida. You should hear what the sophisticates in filthy, crime-ridden Manhattan say about us. Incidentally, that “journalist from a national newspaper” is a he or she, not a “they”. Capitulating to nonsensical “social” fads in grammar ruins an otherwise good piece.

It sounds bleak oop north! But actually, as a resident in Greater Manchester and having been born here, i wouldn’t swap it for (anywhere in the rest of) the world. My student days were in London, and i enjoy visiting our capital but hsppy to return home. And actually, i don’t recognise Joshi’s depiction of the Manchester-Leeds train service. Yes, there’s a strike on at the moment so services will get cancelled, but not when i use the Manchester-Leeds line which is working pretty well in my experience. 23 cancelled services a day? No. Making a case based on an exaggeration isn’t a good idea.

There is, of course, something to be said for his points regarding London-centricity. My preferred solution would be for national bodies such as the ENO to do the simpler thing by visiting more often than the drastic step of relocation. There may be plenty of opera fans among the 3 million local residents, but would they attend often enough to enable the ENO to continue to thrive? More research is needed on such matters, rather than an emotive “we’re so hard done by” story. And there’s nothing worse than a northerner with a chip on his or her shoulder, especially one covered in gravy.

Moving the ENO to Manchester is absurd not because Manchester shouldn’t have a resident opera company but because it is robbing Peter to pay Paul. The ENO does a wonderful job in London which has comparatively fews opera companies by international standards. The right solution would be to fund a new opera company based in Manchester.

While it certainly has its downsides, following a football team away from home will get you to the north. I very much doubt I would have gone to Doncaster, Hartlepool, Macclesfield, Tranmere, Carlisle and other exotic locales without following Bournemouth away from home in my twenties. The downside is that you have to have an iron constitution for beer, watch some terrible football and surround yourself with barbarians. But you do see England. I honestly think there’d be a greater sense of Britishness if we didn’t have (largely) separate divisional pyramids for all the nations.

It’s not just the media in this country that confines itself to London and resides in a cosy, leafy enclave with mostly upper class white liberals, and then pretends to represent all of England.

Well, the dear old Manchester Guardian that I was brought up on in my childhood near Stockport, read by my classic Liberal parents, certainly went down the pan when it moved to the fleshpots of London. Finished off by the insufferably smug Rusbridger, it’s now unrecognisable, and seems to be inhabited by hysterics masquerading as “journalists”.

It should be mandatory for every Londoner to spend at least a year up north to broaden their horizons and gain some empathy as I and many others did in their studying years. It is the only way to break the Capital’s groupthink.

excellent piece!

It is far too expensive now to employ reporters on the ground so ‘the news’ is what happens on Twitter and what happens on Twitter is largely determined in a fairly small part of North London.

As a northerner who grew up midway between Manchester and Leeds but who has lived in London most of my life, I’m a bit conflicted. However, fundamentally I do think moving the ENO is a bad idea, and that you don’t have to be hugely London-centric to think so.
Aside from the problem that the ENO has hundreds of staff members who might not all relish the idea of uprooting their lives and families to move to Manchester, I do think the Opera North thing is an issue. The Pennines aren’t an impregnable wall, and people do cross them for stuff like nights out, gigs, shopping and shows. In my experience the audience for the great cultural institutions in that area – Opera North, Leeds playhouse, the Royal Exchange, the Lowry – is basically the same set of people. It seems that this was the point that the chap this journalist met on a bus was making.
Also, the fact is that not only are the ENO and Opera North opera companies but they are both mid-priced, English language opera companies who turn out a mix of the traditional operatic repertoire and more crowd-pleasing light opera/shows. I’d be surprised if Opera North is delighted by this turn of events to be honest.
Finally – unpopular opinion alert – based on my own experience, from both growing up and from my friends in the north now, the audience for “high art” just is smaller proportional to population in the North compared to London. I’m in my 30s and have plenty of friends in middle class jobs in Leeds and Manchester and they just don’t go to the theatre/classical music performances in the way that people from a similar social background living in London do. They go to gigs, to pubs, to high end restaurants, but in my experience there is just not the same appetite for “high culture” in Yorkshire/Manchester. Not that there is no audience for that stuff, but it is smaller.
Also comparing the population of Manchester to Greater London is misleading, but I’m not sure that comparing the populations of Greater Manchester and Greater London isn’t equally misleading. Places like Wigan and Stalybridge are a 45 minute train ride to central Manchester (not to mention a world away for many residents, albeit I guess not the ones who are debating the ENO’s move). The radius of places that can get to central London in 45 mins by train is far wider than Greater London and takes in much of Hertfordshire, Essex, Kent, Sussex etc.

This is all well and good but clearly it is ridiculous to have the ENO in Manchester.

It should be in Birmingham, where there is a world class venue for it, in the middle of the country.

as Rupert Murdoch famously said ” Britain’s class system will never die as long as people reinforce their own view of where they sit in it, by what newspaper they buy every day”… He also said, and so true for Britain’s ruling lower middles ” Britons are driven, ruled and obsessed by their opinion, of other peoples opinion, of them”…Yea verrily Amen…!!!

The point is people in Manchester travelling to London might well be able to combine their opera visit with some other activity whereas the opposite case is a great deal less likely.