With his ponytail and bushy grey and brown beard resembling a Regency-era portrait, McMahon looks like he belongs to another century — until, that is, you see the metal band t-shirt tucked into his jeans. It reads: “Therapy?” Stanley certainly needs some, its old signage crumbling, its Edwardian town hall abandoned for so long it’s begun to sprout trees. The particular stretch we’re walking down is, technically, the 41st most deprived of England’s 34,000 “super-output areas”: these “SOAs” are how Westminster census-takers parcel up the nation’s small communities.

At last, this despair is being registered back in London. Stanley is one of around 250 communities that will receive funding as part of the Government’s new £5 billion “Pride in Place” scheme. McMahon is precisely the sort of figure you’d hope such a scheme would empower — part of England’s informal social militia, battling against a decline so severe that The Guardian now suggests the most deprived parts of the country could be even poorer by the next election.

When I arrive in Stanley, McMahon is on his lunch break. He runs Pact House, a kind of all-purpose social fishing net, helping people here to do everything from IT training to learn how to care for their newborns. McMahon is particularly proud of the fact that people who come here initially to seek help often then stay on as volunteers. “We see people who’ve gone through domestic abuse, addiction, and mental health trouble,” he says. “They come out the other side and then help.” It’s a model of social triage that shows people at their best in the most challenging circumstances.

Expansive, all-purpose social hubs like a Pact House are now a common feature across post-industrial Britain. A substitute social infrastructure where the state has frayed. Stanley is reflective of County Durham’s history in other ways too. Once synonymous with organized labor, heavy industry and the industrial revolution, Durham mineworkers pioneered the Friendly Societies that were prototypes of National Insurance and the NHS. The Durham Miner’s Gala has been held almost every year 1871. I grew up nearby in Sunderland in the Nineties and 2000s and I’m a regular Miners Gala attendee. As teenagers, my friends and I frequently visited Durham to watch hardcore punk gigs at a venue called The Fishtank.

By then, Durham was already a shadow of its former self. There were around 230 collieries operating in England in 1944, making Durham the country’s industrial heartland. As the war ended, the nation’s keenness to move on saw Durham condemned. In 1951, Durham County Council designated around a third of its villages as “Category D” settlements — meaning they had “outlived their usefulness.” Support was cut; development discouraged; residents advised to move on.

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That was 75 years ago now, a full lifetime, but the effects of this managed decline echo to this day. Child poverty rates in the region remain extremely high: 38.7% of children in County Durham are in poverty compared to 27% nationally. This long history of adversity also helped forge the area’s distinctive political culture. Chopwell, one of Durham’s Category D villages, was nicknamed “Little Moscow” for its radicalism. Touring the North East in the Thirties, the Labour intellectual Harold Laski found an impoverished miner’s home containing only William Morris books. The tenant had sold all his furniture before them.

But ancient loyalties shifted markedly in the “Red Wall” election of 2019, when two Durham constituencies elected their first ever Conservative MPs. Keir Starmer’s Labour reclaimed the seats in 2024, but last year’s council elections highlighted how tenuous his hold was. Durham became one of the country’s first Reform-majority councils. The party’s celebrity Northerner, Darren Grimes, is now a councillor in the ward just across from Stanley. His campaign platform, centered around which flags to wave on buildings and on cutting Durham council’s largely nonexistent DEI jobs, had little to say about the business end of poverty in an area that has been neglected for decades.

In her 1939 book, The Town That Was Murdered, the Jarrow MP Ellen Wilkinson wrote about the ups and downs of life in an interbellum industrial Britain that regularly shed its workers and rehired them broken and impoverished. Even in the glory days of coal, Durham miners were in and out of employment as surely as the tide. Wilkinson was keen to honor them in a way largely absent from politics today, writing that “the history of a town is not that of its famous men only, but the story of the tenacity of its unknown fighters in the struggle for existence”.

Darren McMahon is one of those unknown fighters. Another is  Linda Kirk, who runs Just for Women, a wellbeing and advice center on Stanley high street, from an office decorated with artificial pink flowers and a cabinet containing several of the “Heart of the Community” awards she has won over the years.

Kirk is clear that a lack of jobs has crippled Stanley. “In the Sixties and Seventies, we had a lot of businesses that came in,” she says. “Big businesses. Through the Eighties and the Nineties we saw that decline.” Stanley once had its own department store, Doggart’s, a family-owned retail chain that closed in the Eighties. “It was the John Lewis of Stanley,” Kirk adds, the pride in her voice palpable. “You used to be able to go and buy all your lovely clothes and housewares. The street was vibrant.”

Kirk runs a mother’s group, and hears every day how the disappearance of social infrastructure is affecting the younger generation. “They call their children as you would a cat that didn’t go outside,” she explains. “They’re ‘house’ children. They come from school and they’ve got nowhere to go. They’re just hemmed in. Literally hemmed in. Where can our children go? Where can they go?”

Strong social ties were once the real wealth of working-class life, but these are vanishing. According to the Government’s Community Life survey, the North East is now the loneliest part of Britain. Especially deprived areas, like Stanley, have double the rate of loneliness and isolation of the wealthiest. An ONS study published last October said that 33% of 16-29 year olds feel lonely “often, always or some of the time”. The loss of jobs has been compounded by a loss of social spaces: no pubs, no youth centers, no well-kept parks to hang out in.

When I ask Kirk what a rejuvenated Stanley might look like, her ambitions are modest. “We’ve got another town center that’s not too far away from us: in Consett.” Consett is another County Durham town, characterized by steep hills lined with miner’s terraces and Persimmon new builds. It’s bisected by the River Derwent and sits on the edge of the North Pennines National Landscape. Boasting better transport links than Stanley, Consett also attracts commuters from Sunderland and Newcastle. “You can see that it is just absolutely thriving,” Kirk says of the town. “We’re hoping this is what’s going to happen in Stanley. That’s what we’re looking forward to.”

What’s striking about my conversations in Stanley is that when I raise the idea of local pride, people talk about things that those in other places take for granted. The opportunity to have a pint with some friends; to buy a knickknack from a local shop; to push their kid on a swing with some other parents. “We look at Consett,” Kirk says, “and think ‘Why can’t we have the same?’”

It’s a question decades of trickle-down dogma has never really solved — and yet it’s one that could transform our political life far beyond the North East. Luke Akehurst, the Labour MP for North Durham, watched Reform win a landslide at the local council elections in 2025.  For him, the results are less a protest against Durham Labour and more about anger at national decline. People “felt their town was suffering from a failure of government,” Akehurst says. “Whether that’s on the issue of failure to control borders — which there’s no point pretending that my constituents don’t care about — or a failure to provide the basics.”

To that extent, Pride in Place can hopefully move decision-making away from Westminster — to let local people decide how to spend their millions, whether on crumbling village halls or dormant youth clubs. Akehurst sees this particular pot as the last chance to evade the slow death of local traditions. “Craghead Colliery Band practice in a band room at the Craghead Victory Club.” he says by way of example. “The ceiling there is cracked. It’s leaking and dangerous. They have a cadet band, bringing kids in to play instruments. They can’t run sessions for young people because it’s not a safe environment. Pride in Place could literally give them a new ceiling.”

It would seem an easy decision to make. Yet since Johnson won his landslide, Whitehall has offered a stream of overly complex, heavily centralized, and impossibly bureaucratic redistribution policies: The Towns Fund, Levelling Up, Build Back Better. All have spectacularly failed to deliver on what voters in places like Stanley were promised. In early 2024, Durham County Council even took it upon itself to sue the Government for rejecting five bids for Levelling Up money on which it had spent £1.2 million. They abandoned the legal case the same year, citing a lack of money.

Pride in Place may yet avoid these pitfalls. But Labour is meanwhile keen to avoid the charge of being “as bad as the Tories” — who, predictably, siphoned their own Towns Fund into Tory constituencies. As is often the case with Starmer’s Labour party, the logic here seems self-defeating.

Labour’s army of special advisors in Westminster appear to have convinced themselves that such “pork-barrel politics” is at the heart of political distrust. The Tories, by contrast, understood the more basic political rewards of giving the people what they voted for, the kind of political patronage Ronald Reagan once referred to as “dancing with who brung ya”. Labour, by contrast, arrive at the dance floor nervous that to cut some rug on behalf of their voters is somehow unfair.

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Pride in Place’s architects do seem sincere in their desire to empower places like Stanley. Ben Glover of the Independent Commission on Neighborhoods (ICON), which helped develop the scheme, sees it as a successor to Big Local — the Lottery-funded program giving 150 neighborhoods across England £1 million each to make improvements with minimal bureaucracy.

Glover argues that the cash would be better spent on interpersonal initiatives like knitting clubs more than high streets. In the least well-off neighborhoods, a trip to the high street is far less important than the social connections that were once sponsored by employers and trade unions.

When I spoke to Linda Kirk, however, the technicalities of Westminster funding formulas seem far from her mind. “We’re trying to hold on to dignity and respect and all of that,” she says. “My take on it is about leaders. I’ve got a thing about leaders and we really do need strong leaders that we can believe in.”

Walking around Stanley, I can’t avoid the sense that all Whitehall’s handwringing arguments about the best way to deliver levelling up-type projects are missing the point. Labour will invest £36 billion over a plethora of schemes while in office — three times what was pledged under Boris Johnson. Yet it still might not make a difference large enough to win these  communities back, with one recent report suggesting Labour risks an electoral wipeout if it fails.

In 2021, the Center For Cities released a study that claimed that closing the North-South divide would cost £2 trillion and take decades. To make real progress would take a nationwide effort similar to the post-Cold War reunification of Germany, where a solidarity tax on the West was levied to rejuvenate the East. Labour hasn’t promised anything like this. Indeed, it isn’t clear that the money markets, whose permission the Government needs to rebuild these parts of Britain, would even allow such an effort.

After so many failed projects to address regional inequality, then, Pride in Place feels like a step in the right direction — but a small step. Large swathes of the country are aging and have been in decline for decades, propped up by transfers from London’s economic surplus. There has been no serious attempt by any Western government to change the economic paradigm of the last two generations, a paradigm that has swept Britain clean of the kind of industrial jobs that once made County Durham so prosperous.

Where once there were mines, shipyards, factories and refineries, Britain made a desert of call centers, betting shops and Deliveroo bikes and called it peace. Millions of us live in “Category D” Britain — just as those old condemned mining villagers did, where residents feel their best days are long behind them. By the time the next election comes round, people like Darren McMahon are likely to still find themselves battling tirelessly at the frontline of British malaise, providing hope where others have given up years ago.

Given its distinctiveness, it’s hardly surprising that the region has a long history of being run as a separate political unit. By holding out against Viking invasion, the Northern Anglo-Saxons established an Earldom of Northumbria that reached from the Forth to the Tees (before pressure from the Scots pushed its northern boundary south to the Tweed). Not only was this territory topographically encapsulated — “between the brine and the high ground and the fresh stream water” — but it was also defined by its sheer distance from London and the centres of royal power. The armigerous families who then controlled the medieval North East, such as the Percys and the Nevilles, had an unusual degree of independence within an English polity that had centralised much earlier than its European neighbours.

To a historian, therefore, there is something very satisfying about the recent news that the Government has approved a “devolution deal” to create a new “North East Mayoral Combined Authority” with an elected Mayor. This is an important milestone in the evolution of what is arguably England’s most well-defined region, as the new entity will cover the historic counties of Northumberland and Durham — the land from the Tweed to the Tees — and the cities, within them, of Durham, Sunderland and Newcastle upon Tyne.

The hope is that the North East will thrive under a unified political leadership; and the region’s history suggests this optimism is not unfounded. In the Early Medieval period, the Prince Bishop of Durham presided over his Palatinate from his palace at Bishop Auckland like a Rhineland Fürstbischof. He had the powers of a king to hold courts, raise armies (to defend the border against the Scots) and even mint his own coinage — with silver Durham pennies issuing from Silver Street by the River Wear. This quasi-independence created a cadre of educated clerks to manage the county palatine’s legal, financial and administrative affairs. The presence of this proto-civil service contributed to both local economic development — the Prince Bishops were enthusiastic participants in the coal trade — and perhaps even the unusually high levels of literacy in the far North of England.

This was a sort of English devolution, avant la lettre, and meant that by the 17th century, County Durham was the only part of England which returned no members of parliament. The first MPs for Durham were elected in 1675, a full 410 years after a comparable cathedral city such as Lincoln; the Prince Bishop only returned his powers to the crown in 1836. So there is a sense that the governance of the North East was only settled around the same time as the United Kingdom itself was forming. Some excitable Northumbrian patriots (probably including me) might even consider us to be the fifth nation in the union.

But if the region’s political independence was dwindling, its economic independence was growing. The early modern period saw the temporal power of the Prince Bishops eclipsed by that of the coal barons who grew fantastically rich from the collieries of Northumberland and Durham. By the 18th century, control of the northern coal trade had fallen into the hands of a cartel of wealthy families known as the “Grand Allies”, whose price-setting so irritated the City of London that they nicknamed them “the Newcastle Parliament”.

This oligarchic and proto-corporatist approach to conducting business was typical of the North East, and would recur in the 19th century, when a handful of plutocratic industrialists dominated the civic life of the region, and wielded almost feudal power: men such as the armaments tycoon Lord Armstrong, the shipbuilder Sir Mark Palmer, or the great ironmaster Sir Lowthian Bell. Studying the region for his report on “Industrial Tyneside” in 1928, the sociologist Henry Mess observed that “the feudal tradition is strong in Northumberland”, “and there is not the sharp divorce between it and the new industrialism which is found in most areas”.

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In many respects the Trade Union barons who emerged in the 20th century to challenge the oligarchs could be similarly feudal — especially Durham miners’ leaders such as John Wilson, Peter Lee and Sam Watson. And yet the Trade Unions in the North East achieved much for their members — not just better pay and conditions, but in their pioneering work on housing, schools, sanitation and care for the elderly. Organisations such as the Durham Miners Association achieved something approaching a welfare state while William Beveridge was still in short trousers. For as John Tomaney has argued so cogently, “County Durham thrived when it had the power collectively to help itself”. History offers something of a blueprint to a region thinking anew about how to exercise local power to improve the lives of its people.

A word that was often depicted on miners’ banners in shimmering gold like the Name of God was “nationalisation”, and yet nationalisation turned out to be a mixed blessing. For as much as it delivered gains in living standards — which my grandparents from the Northumberland coalfield spoke about with wonder for the rest of their lives — it inevitably led to centralisation. It left the North East vulnerable to capricious and parsimonious Westminster governments. Not only that, it disempowered the civic and associational institutions that had once had the confidence to tackle the scourge of poverty in old age, or build something as beautiful as South Shields Town Hall, where the debates “had the importance of those in Cicero’s Senate or Pitt’s House of Commons“.

The North East has been hammered by austerity, with funding cuts to councils of 79% since 2010. These have come close to undermining the functioning of local government altogether. But municipal leaders themselves have come to recognise that the principle of devolving power matters almost as much as the funds that come with devolution.

Reading about the latest development, I was particularly delighted (and not a little surprised) that the seven North East councils have managed to overcome the parochialism and local rivalries that have stymied municipal coordination in the region. “They have a beef that goes back centuries”: what Tony Soprano once said of the Balkans could be said of Newcastle and Sunderland. From the English Civil War, during which they took different sides, to the previous attempt at regional governance — the short-lived Tyne and Wear County Council, which was perceived to favour Tyneside excessively — mistrust and bad feeling have for too long percolated from the football terrace and message board to the political sphere. Despite evidence that shows that people in the North East have the greatest sense of belonging to their region than anywhere else in England, we’ve memed ourselves into thinking that Tyneside and Wearside are so totally incompatible that we can’t present a united front — even as the North of England’s other great conurbations have surged ahead with their own elected mayors.

That’s not what the North East wants anyway, some would argue. The shadow of a 2004 referendum hangs over any debate over devolution in the region. Rejected by almost 78% of voters, it’s often held up as evidence that there is no appetite for devolved power. But it took place in a different time, when there was a Labour government in office that was spending big in the region. The cabinet was stuffed full of North Eastern MPs, including the PM himself. And the Yes campaign was vague and complacent, while the No campaign tapped into a burgeoning anti-politician rhetoric, as well as the fears in the south of the region that this would be an assembly run from, and in the interests of, Tyneside (fears exploited skilfully by a trainee political Svengali from County Durham called Dominic Cummings, a key figure in the No campaign).

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The question remains, then, as to whether this new mayoral authority will receive a public mandate. But the North East only ever thrived under local political leadership. As a distant outpost of the over-centralised British state — still reeling from the effects of the First World War, let alone the Second — it has been declining for over a century. For all the boosterism about being the only region with a positive balance of trade, the North East is now the poorest, unhealthiest and unhappiest region of England. It regularly tops the charts for “deaths of despair”, with a suicide rate twice that of London; 38% of local children live in poverty; and GDP per capita has plummeted in the North East from 93% of the national average in 1981 to 73% by 2017. No other English region has suffered such decay.

But something is stirring in the North. A phalanx of City Region “Metro Mayors” are establishing new centres of independent power and influence, while attempting to move beyond the belief that Westminster is both the cause of — and the solution to — all our problems. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that whatever the problem, it is always someone else’s fault. Especially in politics,” wrote Jamie Driscoll, one of the likely contenders for the North East mayoralty, recently. “What, though, if there are some genuinely difficult problems to solve?”

There certainly are. Labour Together’s recent “Plan for National Infrastructure” argued that Britain’s “urban hinterlands, small cities, towns, coastal and rural areas… are experiencing forms of economic ‘undevelopment’”. This would present a daunting prospect to any government, but could an elected mayor for the lands between the Tweed and the Tees catalyse a Northumbrian renaissance?

Maybe. Certainly, the nationalising and centralising tendencies of the British state over the past century have disenfranchised the regions of England that might look enviously at the thriving German Länder — with their networks of regional banks and vocational training centres — and wonder what went wrong. For there’s a prize to be seized in the North East. The region that arguably did more than most to carbonise the planet might lead the way in decarbonisation, and create meaningful work. It might even rediscover the traditions of bottom-up social and economic development, and become one of the great heartlands of technical innovation, associationism, self-help and co-operation. Never again, we must hope, will talented locals like Dr Fiona Hill — recently installed as Chancellor of Durham University — be told that “There’s Nothing for You Here”.