This is a grave error, and Burnham’s Manchesterism speech on Monday — his first major intervention as Prime Minister presumptive — acknowledged as much. Alongside his eyecatching plan for a Northern wing of Number 10, he lambasted the UK’s public sector for “chasing cut-price deals around the world” as opposed to helping our own “British-based suppliers”, and promised to make taxpayers’ money work “harder for them”. This was a theme Burnham aired repeatedly during the byelection campaign in Makerfield. He cited Britain’s “wasted decades” of neoliberalism and the need to end “forty years of failed economic policy”, raising the prospect of a Britain in which wealth will be rooted in actual production, far more evenly distributed across its regions, and democratically controlled.

The significance of his argument is that it points towards a different economic future from the Blair-era comforts that Starmer and Rachel Reeves have been selling us: essentially, spend more, tax fairly, regulate better. This assumes that Britain’s problem is essentially one of distribution and inefficiency, and could be corrected by a more competent management of the existing settlement.

Suggested Reading

Andy Burnham: King of normie populism

By Jonny Ball

This was always inadequate, and it is encouraging to see Burnham embrace the concept of Manchesterism, as laid out in The Productive State, by Mathew Lawrence and Alex Williams, one of the most serious economic frameworks to emerge from the Labour center-Left in many years. Nevertheless, Manchesterism, even in its most developed form, does not go far enough. It remains primarily a program for rebuilding the foundations of the economy through better public provision. But Britain’s crisis runs deeper, and Burnham needs to go much further if he is to arrest Britain’s decline and build an economy that rewards rather than punishes its citizens.

What Manchesterism gets right — and where it stops

Manchesterism starts from the observation that the neoliberal model for public services has failed on its own terms. The classic approach of the Tony Blair era was to invite private companies to bid for contracts to run public services, on the theory that competition would drive down costs, via the “cut-price” deals Burnham cited. What it produced instead was a helpless state, stripped of the capacity to do things itself, at the mercy of private companies far more skilled at exploiting contract law than any harassed local authority. The fundamentals of British life — care, energy, housing, transport, health — have become commodified, run by companies more interested in extracting wealth from the public realm than actually helping people lead productive and dignified lives. The tendency is visible all over the economy: in private equity firms making billions from dysfunctional care homes; in train operating companies extracting profits from lucrative franchises while services deteriorated; in “health services” companies milking NHS hospitals as infection rates rise.

The Manchesterism alternative is public corporations borrowing against their own revenue streams at the UK government’s borrowing rate, investing in infrastructure, and running services in the public interest. The Bee Network — Greater Manchester’s integrated bus system, which Burnham brought back under public control — works. Thames Water, by contrast, is a monument to scandalous dysfunction that follows when essential infrastructure is placed under financialized private ownership.

But while bringing the foundations of daily life under public control is welcome, it will only go so far. The only way to rebuild the engines of wealth creation and ensure that productivity gains translate into broadly-shared prosperity is to restore working-class power through secure, well-paid, productive jobs. GB Energy, if properly capitalized, could begin to change the terms on which Britain generates power. But it can only do so if Britain has the domestic manufacturing base to build the turbines, cables, and grid infrastructure required. There’s no point in trading a reliance on imported gas for a reliance on imported “clean” technology.

Instead, we must recognize that Britain’s political dysfunction is really a reflection of our failure to answer two fundamental questions: namely, who owns and operates the foundations of the economy? And in whose interests? Today, the economy serves shareholders, management consultants, financiers and property owners. The real challenge is to create an economy that instead serves workers, and rewards the creation of real wealth. In other words, Britain’s crisis goes deeper than Manchesterism — and the debate must be conducted at the level of rigor and ambition appropriate to the moment.

The productive crisis

Britain’s fundamental economic problem is structural and specific. Labor productivity has been essentially flat since the financial crisis of 2007-9. British workers produce less output per hour worked than their counterparts in Germany, France, or the United States — and the gap has been widening. Net national savings have been in negative territory for nearly two decades, and we have meanwhile been consuming our accumulated capital stock — letting factories rust, railways decay, and infrastructure crumble — rather than investing to expand it. Our trade deficit in goods has also been persistent since the mid-1980s. We have become a nation of consumers, and we are consuming on credit.

The scale of the destruction that created this situation is still not adequately appreciated. In 1979, manufacturing accounted for close to 30% of British GDP. Today, that figure is 8-9%, with employment in the sector falling from 6.8 million to 2.6 million workers. The well-paid, unionized factory jobs that sustained communities across the North, the Midlands, Wales and Scotland have meanwhile been replaced by insecure, non-unionized work in call centers and distribution warehouses. These are the communities that have voted for change at successive elections — including Brexit —and have been repeatedly disappointed. In the regions that bore the brunt of the destruction, economic inactivity among working-age people now runs at between 24 and 28%.

The financial sector that subsequently grew did not magically compensate for this destruction. Rather, it profited from it. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher’s new government implemented one of its signature policies in removing controls on the international flows of capital. This enabled the City of London to speculate with the wealth that had been generated by British production in international financial markets. When steelworks in Sheffield or shipyards on the Clyde or car plants in the West Midlands closed, the banks and asset managers were not passive bystanders. They recycled the capital — putting it into property speculation, consumer credit, and financial engineering.

Suggested Reading

Is it too late to reindustrialise?

By Rian Chad Whitton

One notorious instance occurred in 1991. Hanson Trust quietly acquired a stake in ICI, then Britain’s largest manufacturing company, in what was widely seen as the opening move in a hostile takeover. Hanson had no interest in building Britain’s chemical industry. Instead it hoped to unlock shareholder value through the break-up of one of Britain’s great industrial companies. Although the takeover never materialized, the episode accelerated a profound shift in ICI’s strategy. Within two years it had demerged its pharmaceuticals business as Zeneca and embarked on a prolonged restructuring driven increasingly by shareholder value rather than long-term industrial development. Hanson exited after making a substantial profit, having contributed precisely nothing to Britain’s productive capacity. This, in microcosm, has been Britain’s industrial policy over the past 40 years.

But this hasn’t just been bad for British industry. Financialized capitalism has also had consequences for equality. The richest 10% of the population now receives 35% of Britain’s income in yearly bonuses, dividends, capital gains, and rents. The richest 1% holds more than 20% of the total wealth, while the poorer half of the country holds around 5%. Real wages in 2023 were barely higher than they were in 2007. A third of children now live in poverty — more than half of them from working households.

This escalating inequality is not only the result of an unfair distribution of the proceeds of growth. An economy built on Serco contracts, Deliveroo riders and Cavendish Square hedge funds does not present us primarily with a distribution problem — which is why the old Blairite formula of spending more, taxing fairly and regulating better isn’t going to do much to improve it. This is, instead, an economy that has stopped growing in ways that reach most people. Stressed workers scrabble for gig work between insecure care-home shifts while those who own the businesses extract ever more wealth. This is because the productive base that once made broadly shared growth possible was deliberately dismantled.

So Britain cannot create prosperity, reduce inequality, or regain genuine sovereignty without rebuilding its productive base. Manufacturing is where labor productivity rises most systematically through mechanization, automation, technical change, and information technology. It is where workers’ power has historically been strongest, allowing productivity gains to translate into wage increases rather than shareholder returns. And it creates deeper growth around it too, since manufacturing doesn’t just create jobs in factories — it also supports jobs in the businesses that supply materials, transport goods, and sell finished products.

Moreover, services, including finance, which have become the mainstay of the British economy, will never correct the persistent trade deficit in goods. The alternative to reindustrializing Britain is not the economy of highly-paid knowledge workers that we were once promised. It is a low-tech, low-paid service economy in which finance continues to dominate and inequality persists. In other words, the Britain we live in now.

The skills catastrophe

Integral to Britain’s productive failure is an acute crisis of labor skills. The destruction of manufacturing did not simply eliminate jobs but extinguished the knowledge that lives within workforces, apprenticeship networks, and technical colleges — as well as the relationships between firms and the people who build and maintain things. The steel towns of South Yorkshire, the shipbuilding communities of the Tyne and Clyde, the sheet-metal and toolmaking traditions of the Black Country had distinct identities built on skill, pride in craft, and knowledge passed down over generations.

Once this knowledge is gone, it does not return automatically when investment arrives. British manufacturers regularly report the absence of welders and metal fabricators, toolmakers, electrical and instrumentation technicians, mechatronics and robotics engineers, and CNC programmers. These are the foundational competencies of any modern industrial economy — and without them, reindustrialization is far harder even when the will and the finance exist. The technical education system that might address this gap is fragmented and poorly funded. England is particularly weak on post-16 higher technical training — the kind of provision that Germany delivers through dual vocational apprenticeships and the Berufsschulen system. Worse, mainstream commentators have consistently failed to grasp the depth of the problem because they treat skills as a training policy question rather than a structural consequence of forty years of productive decline.

The coming wave of artificial intelligence displacement makes the urgency greater still. Without a deliberate and funded redeployment and retraining of workers, tied to real posts in expanding industrial sectors, Britain will face a hollowing out of its services workforce. We need a national labor plan, offering long-term training programs, mid-career conversions, and apprenticeships of a kind Britain has not had for decades.

The bond market as political test

One argument commonly ranged against public corporations is the idea that they will spook the bond markets. The specter of Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget of September 2022 is never far from such discussions. But the bond market panic Truss unleashed was a response to unfunded sovereign borrowing without specified supply-side returns. This was effectively a subsidy for the wealthy, not targeted public investment in productive assets.

By contrast, public corporation financing is usually acceptable to bond markets — as long as it is credibly structured and borrows against its own revenue streams. The Netherlands finances public corporation liabilities equivalent to nearly 80% of GDP without sovereign disruption, though, to be sure, the institutional framework is different from Britain’s.

Burnham has taken a position on this issue, even stating that “Britain is in hock to the bond markets” — though he has also sometimes tied himself in knots trying to reassure financial markets that an ambitious program would not alarm them. The Dutch example shows it need not be the dire problem it is often made out to be.

But a Labour government that begins to implement a truly ambitious industrial policy can expect a different order of response from the City of London — which will inevitably generate pressure on gilt yields, pressure on sterling, and pressure on the political class to abandon ambition. That pressure will not be a market verdict, however — but, rather, a political intervention by concentrated financial interests whose position would be threatened by the program.

Suggested Reading

What Burnham can learn from Boris

By Aaron Bastani

In other words, the barriers to taming the bond markets are political, not technical. A government that issues debt in its own currency and is prepared to use its central bank cannot be forced into default by bond market pressure. Central bank independence is a shibboleth of the neoliberal era — a constraint entrenched by Gordon Brown’s decision in 1997 to grant the Bank of England operational independence. However, its time has now passed. The Bank of England is a public institution, and part of its mission must be to deploy its control over the nation’s credit to rebuild the nation’s productive base. Since the crisis of 2007-9, the Bank has created vast amounts of money to bail out failing banks and manage stagnation. There has always been money for that. The Bank should be at least as forthright in rebuilding Britain’s productive capacity.

An ambitious Labour government should be able to rely on the Bank to continue holding its gilt stock rather than unloading it at loss-making prices, as it is currently doing at vast cost to public finances. The Bank ought to reinvest maturities and keep interest rates low and stable while Britain rebuilds its productive capacity. A break from the Bank’s current posture is a break from New Labour’s foundational economic settlement and should be named as such.

But even a cooperative Bank of England would be insufficient without a wave of public investment in key infrastructure capable of “crowding in” private investment. It would further require a well-capitalized Public Investment Bank with preferential access to the Bank of England. It would thus raise immediately the issue of some degree of capital controls, in order to ensure that money generated in Britain stays in Britain rather than being spirited away to accounts in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands the moment a government pursues policies that threaten the returns of mobile capital.

Capital controls are neither exotic nor radical. This was standard policy in Britain from 1945 to 1979, the period of the country’s strongest growth performance in recent decades. They are currently used by China, India, and many other successful industrializers. Even the IMF has acknowledged their legitimacy under conditions of financial instability. Their purpose is not to cut Britain off from the world but to change the incentives for fast-moving speculative capital, preventing it from disrupting the productive sector and limiting the power of finance over elected governments.

A Labour leadership candidate who cannot articulate a credible strategy to prevent capital flight, including the readiness to use targeted capital controls as and when they are necessary, has not yet answered the fundamental question about surviving contact with the City of London.

The policy space Brexit created

Beyond finance, a serious industrial strategy will also take advantage of the policy space that Brexit created and that no government since 2016 has exploited in the ten years since the vote. This failure makes Labour’s continuing internal paralysis over the question of rejoining the single market all the more damaging. Britain is now free to align trade policy with domestic investment and employment in ways that EU single market membership foreclosed.

An industrial strategy that hopes to deliver results will need time for productive capacity to take root. In the meantime, the risk is that new capacity will be killed through cheaper imports from countries with lower wages, laxer standards, state-sponsored overcapacity and so on. This is how capitalism works, and there is no point pretending otherwise.

Nevertheless, there are several tools available: WTO anti-dumping measures and safeguards; a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism that could equalize the carbon price of imports in steel, aluminum, cement and other foundational sectors from 2027; procurement rules requiring domestic content and supply chain traceability. If necessary, tariff-rate quotas, national security designations, and domestic content conditions can be attached to public subsidies and grid connections. Donald Trump has made managed trade a normalized reality in the world market — and there is no going back to the free-trade consensus of the previous, now defunct, era. Britain should use the space available to it and stop wasting time.

Organized labour as key mechanism

There is one further dimension of this debate which has been less visible so far, but is crucial to whether Britain can come up with a genuine alternative to an extractive economy— trade unions. Organized labour is not simply a constituency to be won over but a key mechanism for restoring Britain’s wealth-creating capacity. Union representation on the boards of public corporations is the lever through which public ownership serves the interests of workers and the public. Union power in Britain is how regional rebalancing becomes real rather than rhetorical. The skills crisis cannot be addressed without organized labour either — for workers tend to understand the needs of their own industries better than those outside them.  The reconstruction of apprenticeship frameworks, the rebuilding of technical education, the link between training investment and union density that coordinated market economies have consistently demonstrated — all of this requires workers’ collective power, organizational capacity and crucially, their practical knowledge.

The tests of seriousness

Andy Burnham could run on Manchesterism and offer a better-managed version of the current settlement. That would be an improvement — but it would not be the breakthrough that Britain truly needs. The country desperately needs policies that address its deep productive crisis. If a radical Labour government is to go down that path, four specific commitments will be the test of its seriousness, as we show in detail in our forthcoming book.

First, a target to raise manufacturing’s share of GDP to an achievable and sustainable level that could act as a base for further increases. This should be backed by a costed investment program that includes public equity stakes, a properly capitalized Public Investment Bank, and union board representation as a condition of public finance.

Second, graduated and targeted capital controls to protect democratic economic decisions from speculative financial attack.

Third, trade regulation that uses the policy space Brexit created and no government since 2016 has seriously exploited.

Fourth, a national labor plan for rebuilding skills and training, with long training programs, mid-career conversions, and apprenticeships with high completion rates, as the vital human foundation without which an expanding industrial base cannot exist.

Britain has had nearly five decades of neoliberal failure, punctuated by the periodic realization that its decline is worse than previously acknowledged. The debate that Manchesterism has opened is the right one, and the left should deepen it. The central challenge remains Britain’s crisis of production, from which its crisis of provision ultimately flows. The four commitments we have outlined are the minimum conditions for a genuine break. Anything less is a better-managed version of what we already have — and we know that it does not work.

Costas Lapavitsas, Larry Elliott, and Doug Nicholls are the authors of Reindustrialise Britain: A Strategy for Wealth Creation (Polity Press), forthcoming, September 2026.

One answer might be that they thought he was politically safe. This portraitist of the proletariat was from a middle-class background in a posh part of Manchester (the family actually kept a servant). He was also a stout Conservative who poured scorn on the suggestion that his work was in any way Left-wing. In one sense, that’s clearly true: to represent working people on canvas isn’t to promote their cause. Yet Lowry portrayed them as having a dignity and poignancy which one can see as implicitly political. What an artist says of his or her own work isn’t necessarily the last word. T.S. Eliot described “The Waste Land” as no more than a piece of rhythmical grousing. He was wrong.

Salford in those days was a town with a river so foul that not even canned fish could survive in it. Even so, the place was immortalized by a celebrated local folk singer, Ewan MacColl:

I heard a siren from the docks,
Saw a train set the night on fire,
Smelled the spring on the Salford wind,
Dirty old town, dirty old town.

Not every Salfordian rejoiced in the knowledge that their city was a byword for squalor. MacColl was a communist activist who in the Thirties had been a member of Red Megaphone, a Salford-based theater group which was revered throughout Europe. His partner was the formidable Joan Littlewood, whose Theater Workshop brought politically committed drama to the East End of London in the Sixties. Littlewood took under her wing a young woman called Shelagh Delaney, the daughter of a Salford bus driver, whose play A Taste of Honey stunned the cultural scene. Unusually for the time, the piece included a character of color, though in Salford this wasn’t that surprising.

Salford, after all, was home to the Manchester docks, where ocean-going vessels came and went up the Ship Canal, making it something of a cosmopolitan place. As a child, I lived in constant terror of being kidnapped by a Lascar, without having the faintest idea of what a Lascar was. Many years later, a truculent young man by the name of Morrissey, who was a pupil at my grammar school and has since fallen under the malevolent spell of Nigel Farage, pointed out that his songs were laced with allusions to Delaney’s play.

Delaney, who was employed for a while at a factory where my father spent most of his working life, had an on-off romantic relationship with the brash young son of a Salford bookmaker. His name was Albert Finney, and the two of them made a short film together. Finney went from Salford grammar school to RADA, graduating at just the moment when the new wave of working-class film and drama was breaking across Britain. One of his school friends, Harold Riley, became a distinguished painter, following in Lowry’s footsteps. Finney, too, is rumored to have turned down an honor from the Queen. My mother also remembered seeing the young writer Walter Greenwood, whose Thirties bestseller Love on the Dole became an immensely popular film, setting out for London in his ill-fitting best suit for a brief spell of celebrity.

The connections don’t stop there. When the Salford filmmaker Mike Leigh needed money to fund his early cinematic efforts, Finney stumped up the cash. Leigh also gave me some invaluable advice when I had a play staged in London 30-odd years ago. He hailed from the only area of the city which could be described as middle-class, a tiny enclave, and grew up not far from the home of an Indian schoolboy who attended Manchester Grammar School and whom I encountered while we were both working on the Christmas post. The next time I saw him was on the big screen playing Gandhi, having changed his name to Ben Kingsley.

Unlike Lowry and Finney, he seemed to enjoy being a knight. Nor was he the only Salfordian to win respectable recognition. My primary school was set in a warren of malodorous little streets in the city center, and the composer Peter Maxwell Davies was born and brought up in one of them. He would later study at Manchester, Rome and Princeton, ending up as Master of Music to the Queen and a knight of the realm. We once appeared together on a TV arts show, and I astounded him by whispering the words “Holly Street” into his finely tuned ear as the studio manager was counting down. He later decamped to Orkney, about as far from the dirty old town as one could wish.

More from this author

Why the BBC was never impartial

By Terry Eagleton

Around the corner from Holly Street lived a lab technician who spent his spare time reading Rimbaud and Baudelaire in the Salford public library. He was to become the country’s most renowned punk poet, and his name was John Cooper Clarke. Both of us have honorary doctorates from the local university, so that Cooper Clarke, with his cadaverous features, snake-thin body and purple-dyed spiky hair, now solemnly calls himself “Dr” in the publicity for his poetry-reading tours. He gave up hard drugs some years ago and even put on a tiny amount of weight, though he’s still almost invisible if you look at him sideways. Some ironist on a Salford street shouted at him: “Ay, Clarke, get back on the drugs, yer fat fuck!”

Lowry, Riley, Delaney, Finney, Clarke, Morrissey — all these names have something in common. It was Irish immigration into Salford and Manchester that laid the basis for a thriving working-class culture there. Even Eagleton is an Irish name of sorts, though Scottish in origin. The family probably went to Ireland as planters and returned, suitably humiliated by the Almighty, as proletarians. It’s easy to be pious or sentimental about such self-fashioning artists and writers. The Monty Python team had a hilarious sketch featuring a working-class writer sweating over the raw stuff of language while rebuking his coal-begrimed son for poncing around in the pit and betraying his old dad’s plebeian values.

Yet there were mill girls in Lancashire in Victorian times who would rise an hour early before work to read Shakespeare together, and it’s hard to be satirical about that. Few traditions are more honorable than those of the men and women who taught themselves to read, write and debate despite their lack of formal education. Ruskin College in Oxford, the Workers’ Educational Association, and university departments of continuing education have all played a vital role in this project. Some literary critic once described the novelist Thomas Hardy as an “autodidact”, despite the fact that Hardy, an apprentice architect, was more highly educated than the great majority of his fellow country people. What the critic meant was that he hadn’t been to Oxford or Cambridge. Hardy’s last novel, Jude the Obscure, makes it abundantly clear that he could imagine few worse fates.

An Oxford don was once invited to speak to a group of students at Ruskin College, most of whom would have been trade union activists or Left-wing militants in their former lives. Anxious not to strike a patronizing tone, the speaker decided that self-flagellation was the most productive tactic, breaking off his speech every few minutes to confess how little he really knew about the subject in hand, and how frightfully difficult it was to say anything definitive about it. He indulged in this scraping and squirming right up to his final words, which were a coyly self-effacing “I really don’t know” whereupon a voice from the back of the room thundered, “You’re paid to know!”

Some years ago, I was asked to give a talk in Bristol to one of the local groups which composed what was then the Worker Writers Association. This was a network of working people throughout the country who as former train drivers, postal workers or domestic servants were mostly engaged in writing their autobiographies, and who would meet together to discuss their work. A few of them even managed to get their stories into print. I was asked to speak about the theory of autobiography, and tried to keep it as comprehensible as I could without squirming and scraping, aware that nobody in the room had seen the inside of a college. When I finished speaking, an elderly, partially blind woman rose to her feet and asked rather querulously, in a rich West Country accent, what kind of language I was talking. Fearful that I’d failed to make myself clear, I was about to launch on a reply when she spoke up again. “Because I’d like to learn that language.”

I headed off for my appointment with Nathan Holmes, a Reform town councilor. We met at 10am at the Kings, across from Furness House — recognizable by its smashed windows and long-closed post office — and a statue of Sir Henry Schneider, one of the original town fathers. Inside the pub elderly punters nursed their second or third pint of the morning (the Kings keeps miraculous hours) and a lad of 15 waved at me from a window table. We introduced ourselves and Nathan explained he was in fact 29 and a famous drinker. I mentioned that some years ago, a friend of mine had been in the habit of scoring drugs in Barrow, finishing his evenings in a nightclub known as HMS Chlamydia. “It was a barge,” Nathan explained with all the authority of a seventh-generation Barrovian, “whose owner was banned from opening premises on dry land.”

Heady with the well-being that is the special gift of an Admiral Old J Pineapple with Coke and ice, Nathan and I stepped out of the Kings and into sheeting rain. As we walked, he pointed out charity shops; a pawn shop; a vaping emporium; an arts venue whose air conditioning caused an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in 2012, wafting the fatal bacteria over passersby and killing seven, and which is now closed permanently because of an asbestos leak; a market hall which the council shuttered on February 17 for the same reason; and a former working men’s club that was consumed by fire in 2017 but whose charred facade still stands, its garden full of refuse and its surfaces covered in graffiti (“Council stole my fukin car park”). At the “Gaza Strip”, a line of boarded up pubs, clubs and other defunct palaces of pleasure, it was time to part. Nathan extended a hand. “Welcome to Barradise.”

Barrow-in-Furness is the quintessentially left-behind former boomtown. It lies at the end of the Furness Peninsula — “Britain’s longest cul-de-sac” — at the entrance to Morecambe Bay. The town council of which Nathan Holmes is a member has few powers; important decisions are taken 34 miles and several light years away in the Lake District town of Kendal, seat of the unitary authority of Westmorland and Furness into which Barrow was unwillingly shoehorned in 2023. In fact, many Barrovians argue the town’s decline started in 1974, when it was hived off from Lancashire and incorporated into the administrative county of Cumbria (itself abolished in 2023).

Many and varied, in the declinist telling, are those responsible for the town’s current woes: successive political authorities, both Labour and Conservative, for starting development schemes that ran out of money and left unfilled holes in the town’s fabric; property speculators for buying up hundreds of houses and dividing them into bedsits, in the process preventing young Barrovians from getting onto the housing ladder; a gang of feral youths for terrorizing pensioners (when did you last see a McDonalds with a bouncer?).

It wasn’t always like this. In 1859, Henry Schneider turned Barrow into “the Chicago of the North” when he set up the world’s biggest steelworks, fed by his own iron. 12 years later, his associate James Ramsden founded the shipyard. Throw in an influx of Irish and Scottish labor and acres of brick terracing and you get the picture. Boys from the yard wed girls from the jute works and every street had a pub and a place of worship, mostly Catholic or nonconformist. “Barrow was a hive of theaters, music halls, and later, cinemas,” writes Jill Jepson in her account of the town; well into the Sixties, gates of 15,000 were not uncommon at lowly Barrow AFC. Barrovians gained a reputation for liking home so much that their idea of escape was a static caravan on the nearby dunes.

The yard specialized in warships, earning it a battering from the Luftwaffe in 1941. Postwar deindustrialization did for the steelworks while the end of the Cold War meant no more aircraft carriers to build. In the Nineties, 10,000 shipbuilding jobs were axed, with a deadly ripple effect on ancillary industries and services. The interdependence of town and yard that had sustained Barrow for most of its history was wrecked; as Derek Brook, a veteran Labour Westmorland and Furness councilor, told me, “all my friends with trades left and never came back.” The yard only escaped closure only because it had a monopoly on making nuclear submarines for the Royal Navy. Its current owner-operator is BAE Systems.

In 2014, Barrow was designated the unhappiest place in the UK. Its Covid mortality rate was among the highest nationally, and, in 2024, it came fourth in the league table of deaths from suicide, drink and drugs — the so-called “deaths of despair”. That same year, just 34% of Barrovians sitting English and Math GCSE gained a five or above, 12% below the national average. Last autumn, I visited a school in the center of town, where child poverty runs at 36%; behind each pebbledash facade might live five kids with different dads. “We don’t even think about teaching on a Monday,” the head told me. “We sit them down, give them something to eat, and look them over to see who had a difficult weekend.”

Little wonder that in the three decades to 2022, Barrow’s population fell steadily, if slowly, and now sits at 56,000. Meanwhile, BAE employees working on subs drive into town on a Monday morning, spend four nights in serviced apartments, before clogging the single-lane escape route at the end of a truncated week. Locals refer to them in a curt catch-all: “the contractors”.

In December I was among a crowd of just 2,106 that booed Barrow off the pitch following a three-nil defeat at the hands of Tranmere Rovers. That the Bluebirds are flirting with relegation from League Two may have something to do with the fact that the first team trains two hours away in Manchester, where many of the players live.

There are some new arrivals: but not to everyone’s liking. From July, the adjacent town of Dalton will host a new Muslim prayer hall. Among the allegations aired by opponents of this “mega-mosque in the Lake District” — in reality an innocuous, low-slung building well outside the national park — is that it will offer snipers an excellent vantage from which to shoot children at the neighboring primary school. Driving around Barrow with Sam Plum, the outgoing chief executive of Westmorland and Furness Council, I asked why the Union flags flying from the lamp posts were at half-mast. “They’re not,” she replied. “They’re the height of a man standing on a Transit van.”

On we drove, past the ruins of Furness Abbey, fully the equal in grandeur and romantic isolation of the more celebrated Fountains Abbey across the Pennines, and down Abbey Road, with its salubrious middle class side-streets and better-performing schools. Then we reached the waterfront, a mash-up of reclamation and demolition, sky, sea and Little Tony’s Tires, of slag piers and a notorious Glasgow-style tenement, Egerton Court, where you can pick up a rodent-infested flat at auction for £6,000. The tour ended on Walney Island, 11 miles long and nowhere more than a mile wide, a sleeping policeman of sand and marram grass guarding Barrow and its shipbuilders from the Irish Sea.

Wherever you stand in the central wards, as Jean McSorley, a historian of Barrow, told me, you can’t avoid the Shed, the headquarters of Britain’s submarine industry. The color of weathered silage and as brooding, hulk-like and tyrannical as the Ziggurat of Ur, it blocks every vista and is over the crest of every hill. In it and the surrounding assembly halls, nuclear physicists, engineers, electricians, metallurgists, coders and other specialists are engaged in an endeavor so complex that, to quote one senior naval officer, “there are stages when it’s like blacksmithing and there are stages when it’s like brain surgery.”

More from this author

Britain can’t tell its national story

By Christopher de Bellaigue

And this is what makes Barrow so interesting. For unlike almost every other British town with an industrial past, it also has an industrial future. A big chunk of the increased military spending that Sir Keir Starmer unveiled last year will be spent in Barrow, bolstering Britain’s fading pretensions to global significance. BAE is building four Dreadnought class nuclear-powered submarines to replace the Vanguards that entered service in the Nineties. Last September, the King was in town to welcome the newly completed HMS Agamemnon, the Navy’s seventh Astute class sub, also conferring royal status on the Port of Barrow. Yet another class of sub is being developed with the US and Australian navies.

Its order-book full to bursting, BAE has already added more jobs than it axed in the Nineties, and the workforce is expected to grow by a further 20%, or 2,500 people, over the coming decade. This number will include many Barrovian apprentices, a sign that ties between town and yard are being renewed. As Sam Plum told Patrick Cockburn of the Independent, “If you were born in Barrow today, you would know that you will be able to get a job in 18 years’ time.”

All the same, it will be harder to overcome the socio-economic chasm between the town’s two selves. That the Barrow of the Shed — that of ambition, ingenuity and a belly for the fight — breathes the same air as the villainous Egerton Court is a besetting shame. Each evening the yard releases thousands of well-paid professionals into a town center they roundly shun because the houses are rank and there is nothing to spend their money on. It’s the hairline fracture in every Dreadnought off the stocks, and the Government knows it.

In 2024, Starmer pledged £220 million over a decade to revive Barrow town center, stimulate the construction of thousands of houses, and improve people’s health and educational attainments. The goal is for BAE employees to settle in Barrow with their families, hymn the beauty of its tidal sands (a twitcher’s paradise) and contribute to the town’s rebranding as a somewhat edgy gateway to the Lake District.

Last February, Starmer appointed Simon Case, Boris Johnson’s former cabinet secretary, to be chair of Team Barrow, a public-private partnership charged with birthing the new Barradise. A year on, despite local grumbles that non-Barrovian civil servants are being paid a fortune to take forever achieving nothing, progress has been made.

“Unlike almost every other British town with an industrial past, it also has an industrial future.”

In September, the University of Cumbria opened a Barrow campus offering courses in mechanical engineering and nursing, the idea being that graduates will end up in jobs in the yard or Furness General Hospital, which suffers — surprise, surprise — from acute staff shortages. (That Dalton prayer hall will serve Muslim consultants at the hospital wasn’t something young Nathan Holmes wanted to talk about). Then, in January, after a long wait, Westmorland and Furness Council announced that it had found a lead developer to build 1,350 new homes in the Barrow docklands.

Planning for the campus and the Marina Village, as the docklands scheme has been insipidly named — as if the Chicago of the North were Jersey! — predate the Starmer government. But the combined resolve of BAE and the Prime Minister, who visited Barrow last year, increased the viability of both schemes. Extra cash has also been secured for health and roads, while on the private side of the partnership emboldened construction companies have been applying for planning permits in growing numbers.

The 100-strong initial student intake at the new campus is composed mostly of locals, BAE told me. Some, in fact, are on BAE bursaries; a “significant increase in applications” bodes well for next year. Other initiatives, such as placements for pupils studying at a local technical college, a new training hub intended to increase footfall in the town center, and support for early-age book-readers in Barrow, cost the world’s sixth largest arms manufacturer little — while demonstrating that it no longer regards its social and pastoral role as stopping at the yard gates.

Peter Anstiss, the former BAE business development director and Team Barrow’s CEO, acknowledged the public’s impatience with the pace of change, telling me that an initial phase of “process” and “deep dives” will give way to one of “delivery” by “experienced individuals” enjoying enhanced freedom of maneuver. His basic point was clear: Britain doesn’t lack for innovative governance structures designed to overcome planning bottlenecks and the corseting effect of regulation. Do not be surprised if Team Barrow soon adopts one such model in the hope of moving everything along faster.

Whether that will reassure those Barrovians who are increasingly drawn to the politics of protest is unclear. Last summer’s by-elections to fill three seats on the town council resulted in all being won by Reform candidates, Nathan Holmes among them. Come May 2027, when Barrovians — in yet another political reorganization — send representatives to a new enlarged authority, and elect a mayor enjoying devolved powers from London, there is every reason, I was repeatedly told, to expect a further rebuff for the traditional parties.

People react oddly to windfalls, and in the case of Barrow suspicions that outsiders are pulling a fast one have been sharpened by avoidable disasters like the recent closure of the market hall, which left some 70 stallholders adrift. After we met, Nathan sent me two images. The first was a “what we were promised” graphic of people going about their business in an attractively landscaped part of central Barrow. The second was  a “what we receive” photograph, showing the same area as it stands, desolate, unimproved and under inches of rain. The latter, in the end, may speak more persuasively than the technocratic reasonableness of Peter Anstiss. In truth, however, Barrow is already showing signs of the long-awaited revival; it must now accelerate.

Picture them as corrupted versions of Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee: bewitched by mischievous supernatural forces and on a quest to massacre an Ent. Arriving at the ancient place, Carruthers wields the chainsaw while Graham holds the camera. Around them Storm Agnes shrieks her protests, while the ghosts of Roman centurions gaze impassively on. Jagged steel bites deep into sycamore sap. The canopy teeters, then falls ignominiously to earth. Afterwards, Carruthers takes his wedge back to the baby’s cradle. The child wakes, crying — as does the horrified world. The spell is broken. Gamgee betrays Frodo to the police, and they both get banged up for four years apiece.

This, minus a few flourishes, is the morality tale offered by Channel 4’s new two-part documentary about Sycamore Gap, though it is disguised as a quaintly rural police procedural. Northumbrian pipes drone in the background as a section of the trunk is uncovered on a slab, as if for an autopsy. A commenting detective seems embarrassed to spell things out: “In this case, the victim is … for want of a better word … the tree, really.” The camera lingers over the wounds, unfettered by the usual concern for respecting the decency of the dead.

In happier times, the sycamore had been visually compelling to visitors, partly because it was so solitary. The barren landscape enhanced its numinous dignity, as did the near-symmetry of the steep banks on either side. For years people had made pilgrimages, asked for engagement blessings, fertilized its roots with the ashes of their loved ones. The tree had seemed resilient ­— even invincible — much older than its 130 years. Back in 2003, it had survived a near-extinction event, narrowly avoiding a collision with a BBC helicopter carrying Alan Titchmarsh.

Slumped and surly on hard plastic chairs at the police station, Carruthers and Graham each tried to deny the crime, but the evidence was all there on their phones. There were voice recordings suggesting they reveled in the public attention. There was a wedge of greenwood, photographed in the boot of Graham’s car. There were even what police called “the owl photographs”: pictures of Carruthers grinning idiotically in his workshop, inexplicably holding some baby owls. Behind him were 11 chainsaws. He had told the police he had none.

And of course, there was the video of the act itself. Documentary viewers see it in the second episode. Filmed in the dark, the blurry footage and eerie noises have something of a horror movie. I had to suppress my urge to look away. Afterwards, various locals reflect on camera about how stupid the defendants were to leave a visual record of their crime. They don’t seem to realize that this was surely part of the point.

When the story first hit the national news, Carruthers texted Graham “Here we go”. A detective recalls on camera how she started to wonder: “Is this why they’ve done it? Are they doing this because they want to be famous?” Carruthers seemed much more interested in his nocturnal escapade than in his newborn, despite a tribute to her being the pretext. On the night itself, his partner sent him a film of their daughter feeding. Came the text back: “I’ve got a better video than that.”

Perhaps, then, there was a spell cast upon the pair after all: not so much by Cumbrian boggarts or Northumbrian fairies, ­but rather by the little folk in their phones. Thousands of visual representations of the tree were already in the public domain. It had featured in films, television programs, pop videos, endless Facebook posts and Instagram reels. In making their mark on this icon, did an envious Carruthers and Graham imagine they were stealing some of the magical aura for themselves? At the trial, Carruthers claimed incomprehension at all the fuss: “It was just a tree.” Still, it was a special enough tree that he felt moved to drive 36 miles in a storm to chop it down.

More from this author

Jessica Mitford: faux-progressive troublemaker

By Kathleen Stock

Apparently, most locals didn’t realize that the sycamore was special either, until, in 1991, it appeared in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. As an elderly resident from the nearby town of Haltwhistle said: “Sycamore Gap was just a tree on Hadrian’s Wall, nobody ever thought about it, talked about it, or nothing, until Kevin Costner came to do the film there … The tree looked absolutely fantastic.” A market developed for mementos in its image: paintings, jewelry, even tattoos. Said a local publican: “People come into the pub at least a dozen times a day, and they say ‘can you tell me where the tree is, the one that used to be in Robin Hood?’”

Also in the documentary, there are expressions of fury and grief from longstanding and particularly ardent Sycamore Gap-lovers. Many of them seem equally unable to separate the real tree from images of the tree. “I was 100% in mourning” said one man, moved to tears by the loss. Before its demise, he wistfully recalled, “I would post on social media ‘Hey the tree’s looking good today!’ … it would get thousands of reactions.”

In the aftermath of the crime, academics rushed to analyze what precisely had been taken. Why was there quite so much public grief? Some thought it was a violation of a sense of the natural world as “home”. Others concluded that our “need for trees might run deeper than we think”. But I’m afraid this is all too politically convenient. I don’t think the furor was really about the natural world at all, nor even about trees in general. The whole episode can tell you practically nothing about the gorgeous sycamore growing anonymously in the corner of a wood near your house.

The tree in its historic setting of Hadrian’s Wall was certainly a lovely and resonant object. But it was surely its fame in the eyes of others that imbued it with most of the prestige. The more that people made films about it, or took selfies in front of it, the more prestigious and alluring it got. In this sense, the tree was like any sacred object, manmade or natural. New visitors found it particularly meaningful, knowing that lots of other people had previously found it meaningful too.

suggested reading

How to revive mythic Britain

By Aris Roussinos

But equally, the meaning was more profane than this reference to the sacred suggests; for it was mostly tied to imagined admiring gazes from other people. A lot of enjoyment of the tree came from thinking of exotic others — film stars, pop stars, influencers — enjoying it first. In a sense, then, actual deep connection in the here and now was deferred.

It’s hard to get people to care about nature: to turn it from background to foreground. The consensus among relevant English heritage organizations seems to be to lean into social media as a tool for sparking engagement, but I wonder if it doesn’t defeat its own purpose. Not far from me is Birling Gap and the Seven Sisters, where a steady stream of tourists also traipse, bathing in the glow reflected by thousands of previous representations. They take their selfies, eat their picnics, and have a lovely time. But I’m not entirely sure they really look at the cliffs.

Viewed in this light, both the outraged public response and the draconian prison sentence that followed the crime invite a new interpretation. There was criminal damage not only to a living tree, but also to a fantasy object that made people feel specially connected to glamorous others elsewhere. Carruthers and Graham didn’t just chop down a sycamore — they destroyed an infinite number of future selfies. “For me, it’s an attack on the way people live”, reflected the chief police investigator in the documentary. In a sense, he was probably right.

But let us not be too bleak. In an instructive folk tale, there is often a hopeful ending. The hapless woodcutters still languish in prison, thankfully beyond the reach of any early release scheme from the Home Secretary. Twelve green shoots are now reported to be sprouting from the remains of the Sycamore Gap trunk. And most important of all, visitors have started taking dramatic pictures of the stump.

Like many on the Left who live in the North, I admire Burnham, I genuinely do. He manifests his inherited Christian principles by donating 15% of his salary every month to a homeless charity. He helped fight for a second, thorough inquiry into the Hillsborough disaster, and got it. He’s performing the ultimate act of socialist civic alchemy by bringing Manchester’s bus service back into public ownership, which puts him well to the Left of Keir Starmer, let alone this month’s Tory transport secretary, whoever he is. Burnham’s instincts on renationalisation, regional devolution, and creating a new green industrial age for the North chime exactly with mine and are therefore entirely correct. And yet. It’s always been far too easy to mock Burnham’s Mayor-of-Munchkinland bumptiousness — so let’s begin.

Head North is extremely earnest. Better still, it’s exhilaratingly unedited. Take Burnham’s account of a Christmas party in 2015, at “a popular late-night watering hole for MPs”. Steve and Andy “found to our surprise that our names were down on the door as VVIPs”. I mean, there’s your first flashing light, mate. You’ve just been clattered out of the park by Jeremy Corbyn in your second Labour leadership bid, now suddenly you’re what — watering hole royalty?

Anyway, there they are, the VVIPs. Knocking back a few, minding their own business, when “a chocolate fountain of all things arrived on the table, a bucket of champagne and four flutes”. Two young women “unexpectedly sat down with us”. Andy “was thinking how nice of them”. Of course you were, you gormless fanny. Luckily, Steve twigged what was going on, whacked him on the kneecap, and pointed out “the unmistakable circular outline of a camera lens”.

The image of a baffled Burnham being hoicked from tabloid peril is an oddly endearing one. Was he really an innocent abroad in the fleshpots of SW1 though, or just hopelessly, stupidly naive? There’s a case to be made for the latter. As he reminds us approximately 8,000 times in the book, he’s an Everton fan — he has nursed a visceral hatred of the Sun for its disgusting coverage of the Hillsborough tragedy since 1989 — but he still tumbled into a photocall in a London taxi plastered with Sun ads during his 2015 party leadership campaign.

Blame the shark-infested Westminster bubble, I suppose, a phrase that makes several appearances. Indeed, no cliché is left unturned in the memoir section of Head North. Here’s Rotheram, on his political ascent: “It did feel like different worlds colliding when you saw me, a lad from a building site in Kirkby, working with people who had every opportunity handed to them on a plate.” The whole book’s like this, the two of them taking it in turns to say the same things in often identical language, a sort of platitudinous leap-frog, until they’ve both run out of puff.

More from this author

Wes Streeting is a man for all factions

By Ian Martin

Burnham’s, though, is the more interesting career trajectory: Everton scally to trade mag hack to parliamentary assistant to MP, right up to Big Manc. Being mayor suits him. He was, by contrast, utterly forgettable in the early days, one of those generic ministers shuffled around by New Labour in the fag-end of its run. In 2009, Burnham was in many ways a calamitous culture secretary. He made loud walrus noises about safeguarding the internet for children and then didn’t because he couldn’t. He seemed pretty clueless about art, and architecture. For instance, he granted immunity from listing to the brutalist Robin Hood Gardens estate — a decisive step towards its eventual, scandalous pulverisation.

At least he could talk about football — which, let’s face it, is how most people experience popular culture. He has always been more comfortable talking about working-class pursuits. During his indignant pandemic confrontation with the Johnson government, he warned that pubs and bookies were suffering. This common touch, his understanding of how ordinary people live, is perhaps why he was a bad Cabinet member but is a very good urban mayor.

It was no help against his suave, haughty nemesis, Michael Gove, however; when Burnham was opposite him in 2010, as Labour’s shadow education secretary, it went pretty badly. In the Commons, Gove offered commiserations on the failure of Burnham’s (first) leadership bid: “He was an advocate for both modernisation and aspirational socialism, which is why, of course, he came fourth out of five.” Our Andy, warming to the rap battle, warned Gove that he and Ed Balls were the “strike force for the parliamentary football team — he softens up opponents and gives me the bullets to finish them off”. Gove wanly observed that bringing firearms to a football match didn’t really seem fair. How clever Gove seemed, how clumsy Burnham looked. And this sense of being excluded from the posh end of democracy seems to fuel a lot of Head North’s bitterness about our patrician parliamentary culture.

Now, of course, there’s a Gove-Burnham rematch, and Andy’s well ahead on points. Gove is Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities — exactly the sort of wide-spectrum bullshit he derided in 2010, when he restored the Department for Education’s no-nonsense title. (The ministry had been rebranded in the late Brownite era as the Department for Children, Schools and Families.) These days, Gove has to pretend the Government gives a toss about Manchester and Liverpool. Burnham, who has repeatedly called his bluff, reports back on how Westminster has serially betrayed his embittered and angry constituency. As Gove’s stock has fallen, Burnham’s has risen. Meanwhile, the North-South divide is worsening.

Suggested reading

The myth of Tory Birmingham

By Richard Vinen

During the pandemic, the Tories’ political disdain for the North wasn’t even hidden. Burnham recounts a telephone call with Boris Johnson, who seemed entirely unaware that Manchester had been under Covid restrictions for two months without any compensation. Burnham had been presented with a rescue package as a fait accompli. It wasn’t enough to cover furlough. When he went back to Downing Street, he got Robert Jenrick, who “just spoke in this very pompous way”. There followed a nervy few hours of brinkmanship, with Downing Street trying to split Manchester MPs. Burnham convened a press conference, telling everyone “more in sorrow than in anger” (but with actually quite a lot of anger) what had happened. While he was speaking, he got a text from an MP: now, Manchester would only get a third of the original offer.

It was the opposite of levelling-up, petty and nasty. “I walked away from that press conference utterly crestfallen,” Burnham writes. Then the messages started flooding in. He’d stood up for his people against the spiteful protectorate of the South. The King of the North had, in defeat, proved himself. The civic reeves and stewards all swore allegiance.

Head North calls for a real levelling-up, as opposed to the recent hollow farce. Burnham and Rotheram make a strong case for a new, green industrial revolution. The North-West, thanks to its topography, could produce twice the amount of clean energy it needs. Exporting the rest could make us £50 billion a year; if profits could be kept in the region, it would be transformational. I live close to Morecambe Bay — 52 square miles of wind, sun and tide just sitting there, all vast and shallow and keening for something to happen. Apart from a smallish offshore windfarm, it’s a wet blankness haunted by the vanished hordes of 20th Century factory workers on holiday fortnights, and the ghosts of Chinese cockle pickers. I’m with the Lads: let’s get the green energy revolution rolling.

That’s just one example of their good, uncontroversial ideas — more social housing, improved social care, the renationalisation of public utilities; these are enlivened here and there with teenage politics. Burnham on Thatcher: “We all remember her comments that there is ‘no such thing as society’; she fundamentally believed that people did not have a right to the basics in life.” Mate, I yield to nobody in my loathing of Baroness Trunchbull and even I don’t believe that. Still, the Lads come across as unvarnished men but busy ones, trying their best to improve things for the vulnerable and homeless, the sort of people Robert Jenrick would step over, if he ever encountered them.

There’s a mood throughout the book of adolescent hurt, a culture of tribal victimhood — which is entirely justified, on the evidence of the last 14 years of Tory cold-shouldering, and also makes total sense, when you realise that the audience they’re addressing is the North itself. It feels as though the purpose of this book is to galvanise the region’s tribes, to weaponise a shared set of complex grudges, rather than to persuade anyone south of Stoke-on-Trent of anything.

In the end, Head North is a harmless anthology of sensible ideas, larded with chippy biographical detail; what irritates is the way everything is suffused with Northern exceptionalism. According to Scouse and Scouser, Northern mums are the fiercest mums, Northern mates are the most loyal mates, and the reason the authors are natural team players is, you guessed it. There’s a lot of chat about levelling up, but these guys clearly think they represent a higher form of humanity to start with. As a Southerner who’s lived in the North-West for half my life, I can confirm that there are plenty of arseholes up here and plenty of kind, comradely, mum-loving people in the boroughs of London.

Suggested reading

The media's Manchester snobbery

By Joshi Herrmann

The accidentally-funniest example of Northupmanship comes in 2010, when Our Andy hears that Ed Miliband is standing for the leadership against his brother David: “I never imagined that two brothers would run against each other — I guess as a Northerner that is not something we would do.” Two brothers at odds! It makes you wonder if Burnham — a football and Madchester fan — has ever heard of the Manchester footballing siblings Bobby and Jackie Charlton. Or indeed the Manchester band, Oasis.

This Northern exceptionalism will play well to the gallery, but might it not undermine the case for regional equality? Perhaps the special case they argue for the North won’t go down that well in the Midlands, say. But it does furnish an interesting origin story for the Scouse Marvels: thwarted and frustrated by the elite cabals of snooty Southerners, they return disappointed to their homeland — and to their ultimate, glorious destiny.

Gateshead may still be overshadowed, but its greatest monument has become legendary. Anthony Gormley’s Angel of the North celebrates its 25th birthday this month: a worthy occasion to remind ourselves that the town in which it stands is a microcosm of North East England, and its guardian angel represents both the past and the future of a region that continues to evolve.

If industrial Gateshead appeared to visitors like Priestley as a squalid anthill, then this was the consequence of the modernity that that had come to Tyneside as early as the seventeenth century. Nearby Whickham has a good claim to be Britain’s first truly industrial society; by 1700, over 75% of the residents worked in mines and factories. The pride of neighbouring Winlaton was Sir Ambrose Crowley’s ironworks, reputedly the greatest manufactory of ironware anywhere in Europe, which churned out pots and pans, shackles for the slave trade, and the nails that held together the wooden walls of the Royal Navy. To house the expanding workforce, a sort of model village sprang up, which prefigured the terraced streets that went on to so characterise the North of England.

Places like Whickham were built on the mountain of coal that lay beneath the rolling landscape of northern County Durham. By 1911, fully one third of the county’s working age population were mining it, sending their output up to the Tyne for export, via the mighty Dunston Staiths in Gateshead. The ACDC frontman Brian Johnson grew up in Dunston and recalls that the pits and steelworks would “declare a truce on Mondays” so washing could be hung out without getting filthy. The quote from Virgil’s Aeneid that appeared on Gateshead’s civic arms — Caput Inter Nubila Condit (“Its head is in the clouds”) — was a nod to the smoke that usually wreathed the town.

Gateshead, then, was a firmly working-class place, a sort of proletarian backstage to the grandeur of Georgian Newcastle, and a place where some of the richest, most mellifluous Geordie is spoken by the natives. Brian Johnson himself has an accent as thick as a submarine window, and the folk culture of Northumbria is replete with references to the children of Gateshead. It is the home of the fictional Cushie Butterfield, the star of a well-known Geordie drinking song. (“She’s a big lass, and a bonnie lass, and she likes her beor.”) It is also the site of that riotous bacchanal of 1862, the famous Blaydon Races — which is the subject of Tyneside’s national anthem — as well as the once-mighty Federation Brewery, a huge structure by the Tyne that looked like a Soviet power plant, and whose output was served in the Palace of Westminster. The town’s traditions run as deep as the coal seams under County Durham.

But Gateshead was also a site of modernism. Thomas Wright, the first astronomer to speculate that faint nebulae were distant galaxies, was educated there. In the nineteenth century, the lightbulb inventor Sir Joseph Swan lived in Low Fell, the town’s grandest suburb, where his house, Underhill, was the first in the world to be illuminated by electricity. And in 1984, a housebound Gateshead pensioner called Jane Snowball became the world’s first online shopper when she took part in an innovative council scheme to place an order from her local Tesco using her TV’s remote control. She bought cornflakes, eggs, and margarine.

More from this author

The North East will rise again

By Dan Jackson

And beneath where the Angel of the North now spreads its wings lies a site of huge significance for Britain’s modern industrial history. It was in the Team Valley in 1934 — amid a depression that had cratered demand for coal and ships, and therefore crippled the North East’s economy — that the national government decided to build Europe’s first ever industrial estate. Its aim was to create “facilities required by industrialists engaged in starting fresh enterprises” — of the type that were then booming in the South. The locale had been rural until a colliery opened there in 1842 — one of many operated by our new King’s stupendously wealthy ancestors, the Bowes family. But by the Thirties, 57% of Gateshead’s population was out of work — so, in the words of the commissioner appointed to help Britain’s “special areas” by the surprisingly forward-thinking Chancellor Neville Chamberlain, “novel and unorthodox” measures were required.

Over £2million of government funding was awarded to transform the boggy, 700-acre site. The designs were produced by 29-year-old William Holford — a key figure in twentieth-century urban planning, who worked on the masterplans for Durban and Canberra. The industrial estate enabled Gateshead to diversify. After it was opened by King George VI in 1939, the first tenants were very different to the usual heavy industries, with haulage contractors, coachbuilders, and clothing factories proliferating. This was Tyneside’s answer to the Golden Mile in West London — with its grand, art deco Hoover and Firestone factories — and by the Sixties, more than 16,000 people worked at the Team Valley Trading Estate. And it’s still thriving, with more than 20,000 employed there in firms as diverse as Express Engineering and Primula Cheese.

Driven by a similar sense of reinvention, by the Nineties Gateshead Council started to conceive of a new landmark that would welcome travellers to Tyneside, acting as a “millennial image that would be a marker and guardian for our town”. When Anthony Gormley was first approached by the council, he was unconvinced, dismissive as he was of “roundabout art”. But then he saw a photo of the mound where the old pithead baths had been; it reminded him of the tumuli at Wayland’s Smithy, the evocative bronze age barrow grave in Oxfordshire. What Gormley then created — a 20-metre-tall steel colossus, based on a cast of his own body — has a similar ineffability: the North’s response to the great priapic giant of the South at Cerne Abbas in Dorset.

The Angel’s site, at the southern approaches to Gateshead Fell, presents a 360 degree sweep of Northumbrian history. To the North lie the heights of Sheriff Hill, an eleventh-century battlefield and the spot where the burghers of Newcastle would turn out to meet the justices before they crossed the Tyne. Slightly to the West are the ancient Anglo-Saxon settlements of Ravensworth and Kibblesworth, and the valley of the Derwent River, one of the great crucibles of the industrial revolution. In the South is Birtley, once the site of the sprawling munitions plant of “Elisabethville”, which was home to 6,000 refugees from war-torn Flanders during the First World War, when it was run as a Belgian colony by the government in Brussels. To the South-East lies the Sixties new town of Washington, and its vast Nissan factory, which churns out more cars in a year than the whole of Italy. Finally, lying deep beneath the site is a former colliery, where miners toiled (and frequently died) for 200 years. Few locations can evoke the richness of Tyneside’s history, and to stand here on a bright and windy day, while the diggers and cranes puff and pant nearby to widen the A1, reminds you that this place is always on the move.

Suggested reading

Why the North will crush the South

By Ian Martin

“People are always asking, why an angel?” Gormley once said. It isn’t a specifically Tyneside symbol. The so-called “Dirty Angel” on a column in Newcastle’s Haymarket is actually a rather Wagnerian depiction of Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, brandishing a sword and laurel wreath and raised in memory of the Northumbrians who fell in the Boer War. Gateshead itself — home of the formidable “Gateshead Gurkhas”, spearpoint of the British Army in the Second World War — has on its cenotaph a stern depiction of “manhood in the attitude of defence” above the Latin proverb MORS JANUA VITAE: “Death is the Gate to Life”. Despite its 208-tonne weathered Corten steel bulk, and 177ft wingspan, the Angel of the North is more benign and irenic — its wings subtly angled forward by 3.5 degrees to create a sense of embrace.

Made of the same quarter inch-thick plate that was the staple of Tyneside shipyards, the sculpture was inspired by a conversation between Gormley and a local councillor, Pat Conaty, who had migrated from County Cavan to Gateshead in the Fifties — just as so many belonging to the Irish Diaspora before him had come to the coalfields and steelworks of North-East England. “What we need Mr Gormley,” said Cllr Conaty as they walked up the site, “is one of your angels.” From the late Eighties, Gormley had played with angelic imagery in a sculptural series called The Case for an Angel, and this suggestion captured his imagination — and may also have appealed to his own Irish Catholic background (his parents chose his initials to spell out the old Jesuit motto AMDG).

The result was a masterpiece of monumental sculpture: a work of public art utterly different from the reactionary and totalitarian monumentalism that Gormley had wanted so much to avoid. And it soon inspired genuine local affection — so much so that before Newcastle United’s appearance in the 1998 FA Cup Final, the Angel was vested in a huge black and white shirt bearing the name of local hero Alan Shearer. “I was very moved,” said Gormley later. “That was a baptism.”

Suggested reading

What England owes the Irish

By Tom Holland

What does the Angel represent, 25 years after its birth? It has certainly become a cynosure for Gateshead itself, even replacing the goat’s head on the local football club’s crest, and whenever I drive past it on the A1, I’m always struck by its enduring power and dignity. The word angel comes from the Greek angelos, itself a translation of a Hebrew word meaning “messenger”, and has been used in that sense, both secularly and spiritually, since its first manifestation in Old English. Can this Angel bring a hopeful message to a region of England that has not enjoyed a happy transition from the industrial to the information age?

In numerous interviews, Gormley has mused on what this great structure had meant to him and the people who built it, how rooted it is — literally, with 20-metre-deep foundations to stop the North winds blowing it over — and how it transcended individual lives. But when asked the simplest question, why he chose an angel, Gormley replied simply: “The only response I can give is that no-one has ever seen one and we need to keep imagining them.” Given everything that has gone before the Angel, and the enduring hardship of its hometown, we need to keep reimagining what places like Gateshead — and the wider North East — could be like, too.

Regions are losing their identity. Professional football teams no longer field any local players, and local newspapers are disappearing, replaced by “some mass publication thrown at [the public] like a bone to a dog”. These organs of hatred publish indignant lies about workers bingeing on champagne and immigrants taking advantage of our great traditions of hospitality. The “miserable meanness” of the press faithfully reflects “this present age of idiotic nationalism, political and economic”.

The year was 1933. J.B. Priestley, born in Bradford in 1894, had been commissioned by the Left-wing publisher, Victor Gollancz, to spend two months travelling through rural and industrial England, from the honeyed manor houses of the Cotswolds to the stinking slums and slippery cobblestones of the Black Country, Lancashire and Tyneside. The vaguely defined “North” was a foreign country even to some members of the London establishment who were supposed to represent it. This geographical blindness appears to be a chronic condition. Several visitors from the South who have stayed at my home on the Anglo-Scottish frontier were surprised to discover that Carlisle is not a Scottish city, and that Hadrian’s Wall is not the national border.

Along with Daniel Defoe’s Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain and William Cobbett’s Rural Rides, Priestley’s English Journey is one of the great travelogues of English literature. He talked to actual people and stayed in each place long enough to suffer the effects of its architecture, food and air. He listened rather than interviewed, jotting down the chatter of factory workers, bus passengers, commercial travellers, tramps in a hostel, women at a whist drive, slum children at a multi-ethnic primary school. The result is a work of bracing televisual intensity. There is none of the metropolitan prissiness that makes so many English travelogues, historically speaking, a waste of time.

Priestley wrote like an opinionated anthropologist with an ear for a good joke and a rare ability to communicate in different forms of English: “As a rule I like local accents, and have kept one myself. They make for variety in speech and they give men’s talk a flavour of the particular countryside to which at heart they belong. Standard English is like standard anything else — poor tasteless stuff.” Reading Priestley today, it strikes me that the “local accents” he relished were micro-dialects, peculiar to certain towns, small districts or even occupations. Received pronunciation may still be dominant, as Amol Rajan complained this year, but the remedy is not necessarily within easy reach. We also now have standard Yorkshire, standard West Country and standard Cockney, which can be just as flavourless.

Just over two years after Priestley returned to London (in a smog so thick that all he saw of England through the windscreen was “a large wobbling green rectangle” on the back of a removal van), George Orwell set off on his own voyage of grim discovery. He, too, had been commissioned by Victor Gollancz. The fruit of two ghastly months in Lancashire and Yorkshire, The Road to Wigan Pier, was published by the Left Book Club in 1937.

Seeking out the worst “the North” had to offer, Orwell was expiating the guilt he felt as an old Etonian and as a former officer in the Imperial Police Force in Burma, where duty had compelled him to bully and punch the natives. (“Orientals can be very provoking.”) His journey was an exercise in figurative and literal blacking-up — crawling along mine-shafts, sleeping in hostels and boarding houses infested with human “black beetles”, as he called them with pince-nez distaste. “Is it ever possible to be really intimate with the working class?” he wondered. He generalised and supposed, identified this and that “sort of person”, and came to his own and to no one else’s conclusions.

The Road to Wigan Pier begins with the weariest cliché of life “oop North”: “The first sound in the mornings was the clumping of the mill-girls’ clogs down the cobbled street.” Curiously, Priestley had recently observed that “clogs have disappeared, for though they were really very sensible footwear for work, being healthy, comfortable and cheap, they carried a bad social stigma on them, even when I was young”. “Clumsy clogs”, Orwell speculatively calls them when trying to catch the eye of a young woman seen from his seat on the train. He supposes that she must have been poking a stick up a blocked kitchen waste-pipe: her face wore “the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen”.

This kind of moral means-testing and stereotyping is still quite common in metropolitan and even local writing about the North of England. Why assume that the woman was desolate and hopeless? I hate to think what my face looks like when I’m doing it, but in the long and varied list of necessary household jobs there can be few more engrossing and ultimately rewarding than rodding out a drain.

Suggested reading

Why Grimsby was left behind

By Derek Turner

Priestley had his own forms of bigotry. He loathed the “violent racial prejudices” which blighted the lives of mixed-race children in Liverpool, but in the same decaying city, he yearned for the day when all Irish labourers would be cleared out of every western port from Cardiff to the Clyde: “what a fine exit of ignorance and dirt and drunkenness and disease!” At a public meeting in Bristol, he found the black-shirted Fascists as pathetically insignificant as the Communists with their “rising of the masses”: “Who cares about masses? … Men, women and children — but not masses.” Yet when he celebrated “the West Indian flavour” of Bristol, he was referring not to people, but to the tobacco and chocolate industries.

It is a shame that, while Orwell’s northern odyssey is still a common point of political reference, Priestley’s more wide-ranging, less dictatorial survey rarely gets a mention. English Journey is said to have helped Labour win the 1945 general election by giving a friendly face to the frighteningly faceless victims of capitalism. Priestley himself stood as an independent socialist candidate (he came third in Cambridge behind Labour and the Conservatives). He believed that centralised government and national party politics were stifling democracy and that England should be divided into four, five or six partially self-governing “provinces”: “politics should be local, so that you can keep an eye on them”. Today’s Labour Party, with its plans for devolution, could usefully employ him as a posthumous consultant.

At Westminster, Priestley’s omnivorous intellect would have been a liability. He was quite happy to publish findings which might have supported the arguments of his opponents. There must be some politicians today who would do this for the sake of an honest discussion, but I don’t know who they are. Both Priestley and Orwell condemned the blithe assumption that one shouldn’t feel sorry for people who work in deadening and dangerous occupations because “they’re used to it”. Unlike Orwell, however, Priestley noticed that many people enjoyed working in a factory. At an electrical components plant in the Potteries, the workers were “brisk and contented” despite the production-line monotony. The women who did nothing but attach labels to pairs of socks at a textile factory in Leicester were astonishingly cheerful. They preferred a job of pure routine because “they could then work all day and think about something else while they were working”.

Suggested reading

Britain's forgotten King of the North

By Dan Jackson

So much of Priestley’s post-First World War England is familiar that a few months ago I began to wonder whether most of the big changes in British society since 1933 were simply adjustments or variations in very long-term trends. Living in the far north of Cumbria, I find some of the picturesque period details quite up-to-date. I know people who are happy to work in factories, who find coach travel “voluptuous” and who drink the “brown speckled mess” that, hereabouts, could still claim to be “the national drink”: “We are all floating somewhere on a full tide of tea.”

There is, however, one glaring difference which reassured me that our age of post-Brexit opportunities has brought something new to British history.

Neither Priestley nor Orwell say very much about politicians, except in a general sense. They chide governments for being oblivious or indifferent to poverty and squalor, and for sitting in a haze of self-congratulation in Westminster while the City plays games with the riches that the industrial North has manufactured and dug out of the ground. But they say nothing of elected and unelected parliamentarians lobbying for their own interests, promoting the cowardly, the idle and the vicious, and causing death and unhappiness for the benefit of their political careers.

Missing from Priestley’s English Journey and Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier are Prime Ministers plotting coups, gambling away the nation’s wealth, lying in the face of evidence and shame, and installing the “miserable meanness” of the popular press in the heart of government. The fact that these are after all, despite the similarities, chronicles of a bygone age should give hope that the current virulent outbreak of Westminster parochialism is a passing phase. Priestley’s book would be just the thing for a north-bound fact-finding minister to read while waiting for the next uncancelled train to Outer England.

***

Order your copy of UnHerd’s first print edition here. 

This corner of North-East England is still not much visited by out-of-towners — competing as it does with the bright lights of Newcastle, Hadrian’s Wall country, and the grandeur of the castles strung along the Northumberland coast from Warkworth to Bamburgh. But this original Geordie Shore has long been Tyneside’s playground.

Just as the Victorians invented industrial life, and the discipline of the factory hooter and dockyard clock, so too did they conceive of leisure as a commodity — best consumed at certain times and in certain demarcated zones, where the railways could whisk you away from the grime and regimentation of industrial towns to the fresh air and freedom of the seaside. In the North-East, the centre of all this was the bottom right-hand coastal corner of Northumberland, where the 12 miles of metal-bashing industry from Newcastle to the sea transformed suddenly into a sea-front dreamland for the middle and working classes. The abrupt change of mood is still palpable, as Tyneside turns to seaside, business turns to pleasure, production to consumption.

More from this series

Escaping the Seventies class war

By Justin Webb

By 1911, Britain had over 100 substantial seaside resorts, from the big boys of Blackpool and Brighton to lower league Largs and Llandudno. In its size and proximity to its larger urban neighbours, the Northumbrian Riviera fits somewhere in between these poles, more akin to the maritime resort suburbs of Penarth or Southsea; but like all of them it was a place of beaches, bathing and boarding houses — with a big slug of hedonism.

The ying and yang of refinement and raffishness, primness and vulgarity, recurs both within and between British seaside towns: think of neighbouring Lytham and Blackpool, Hove and Brighton, even Portstewart and Portrush. The Geordie Riviera was like this too, where Tyneside’s wealthy coastal suburbs of stockbrokers’ Tudor villas, Masonic lodges and pristine golf clubs chafed alongside the fleshpots, arcades and rollercoasters of Whitley Bay’s South Parade and Spanish City — where Bank Holidays in my youth were always a grisly bacchanal of fighting and fornication.

Yet Whitley had once been “the Blackpool of the North East”, a major destination for holiday-makers who regularly filled up the B&Bs and caravan sites well into my Eighties childhood, and its attractions were primped and packaged by great commercial artists like Fred Taylor and Tom Purvis for LNER, whose colourful posters are all masterpieces. The most exciting buildings were born in the Riviera’s pleasure-seeking Edwardian heyday — all, tellingly, in the neo-Baroque style. Whitley Bay’s cheerful station, for instance, was built in 1910; with its swagged and garlanded clock tower and Paris Metro style canopy, it became the destination for Tyneside day-trippers and vacationing Glaswegians heading south for marginally warmer climes.

More from this author

Jack Charlton's vanished world

By Dan Jackson

This taste for voluptuous neo-Baroque was in some ways an Edwardian reaction to the severity of Victorian Gothic. So, when the Spanish City was built in 1910, its mammarian dome was second only in size to St Paul’s Cathedral. It was influenced by and contemporaneous with the development of Atlantic City in New Jersey, where the stupendous Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel had been built in 1906. Both places specialised in the architecture of pleasure and sybaritic escapism.

Tynesiders had much to escape from. Northumbria offered the worst housing conditions in England: more Geordies lived in flats and tenements than anywhere outside Scotland. And its staple industries were known as “the hardest work under heaven” — even if the trades were relatively well-paid, providing disposable income for fun and frolics. That Geordies flocked to an Iberian building that exudes the Moorish sensuality of El Andalus, or the dazzlingly white Mediterranean sunlight of a Sorolla painting — decades before the great victory of the Spanish costas over the British seaside — speaks to a yearning romanticism in the Northumbrian soul.

On a summer’s day, it remains a wonderful spot to drink in the scenic views of the coal-streaked sands of Whitley, with the North Sea shimmering like the Bay of Naples. In the distance, perched on a tidal island, is St Mary’s Lighthouse, surrounded by a picturesque setting of cottages, rockpools and the lapping waters of Tyne, Dogger and German Bight. But in the final decade of the 20th century, Whitley suffered years of decline. The peeling paint on the Spanish City’s “Corkscrew” rollercoaster matched the corroding metalwork on the Tyne. When great coastal landmarks like the Tynemouth Plaza — a vast Second Empire-style ballroom and winter gardens — burned to the ground in 1996, it felt like a portent. It was hard to see a bright future for a place whose rise and fall had corresponded so closely to the economic fortunes of Tyneside.

Suggested reading

Why the North will crush the South

By Ian Martin

And yet the Northumbrian Riviera is bustling once again. Largely gone are the boarding houses and sticky-carpet bars for hen and stag parties; instead, it’s all about surf cafés, hipster boutiques and vegan cake shops. Not long ago, the Guardian even named Whitley Bay as one of the coolest places to shop. This growing embourgeoisement has been mirrored by the changing politics of the coast. The constituency of Tynemouth — which was once one of the few Tory strongholds in the North-East, home to the very grand Conservative MPs Dame Irene Ward and then Sir Neville Trotter — has been solidly Labour since 1997. Meanwhile, neighbouring Blyth Valley, in the Northumbrian rust belt, having been rock solid Labour since the Thirties, flipped to the Tories in 2019.

The resurgence of this Geordie Shore has been in part down to an active local authority, and the boost from Covid that the British seaside received from day-trippers instead of holiday-makers. But the demographics of the coast have changed too, with growing numbers of younger professionals and their families moving close by. A spot of paddle-boarding out of Cullercoats harbour, a park run along the links, or even just a Di Meo’s ice cream and a bimble along the sea front: these have become favourite pastimes of the aspirational Geordie.

The uses of this place may have changed, but what continues to draw people here is the great beauty of the land and seascape. The American artist Winslow Homer lived in Cullercoats in 1881, and honed his watercolour technique painting the local fisher lasses and the changing moods of the North Sea. The working-class novelist Jack Common recalled sallying forth in the Twenties from industrial Newcastle to North Shields, where “the air was full of the sea glow, a salt radiance brightened all the long Tynemouth streets”.  Even Charles Dickens himself came here in 1867, walking from Newcastle to Tynemouth, and, after being knocked over by a wave on Longsands, recorded that “spanning the restless uproar of the waves was a quiet rainbow of transcendental beauty. The scene was quite wonderful.”

That scene, today, is often reminiscent of one of the most reproduced of those railway posters from this riviera’s golden age: British Rail’s depiction of an impossibly good-looking young family, optimistically dressed for the Northumbrian climate, bobbing in the waters by St Mary’s Island, above the legend “Life is Gay at Whitley Bay”. The Geordie Shore is back, if it ever went away.

In recent years, though, Europe’s largest bus station has had the sandblasters round; the facade doesn’t exactly shimmer, but now it seems friendly. One side of the terminus has been pedestrianised. It has always been a great way to get out of Preston. Now, it might even be a great way to arrive.

“It’s about investing,” Matthew Brown gushes. “All it needed was someone to think long term.” The Leader of Preston City Council is a Labour man almost to the point of caricature: a lanky Lancastrian in a flat cap and thick British Racing Green workers’ shirt. Increasingly, he is also an unlikely Lenin to a new wave of global leftism. The stuff he’s doing here, not too far from the factories whence Friedrich Engels once minted his champagne kitty, has been profiled all over the world as “The Preston Model”.

Until their defeat, when Corbynites wanted to point to an economic policy, they would often wave towards Preston. John McDonnell was a frequent visitor. Funds had been earmarked, in the event of a 2019 Labour victory, to frank Prestonist policies across the country. More lately, yesterday’s man Ed Miliband devoted an entire chapter of his new book, Go Big: How To Fix Our World, to the town’s schemes. In an age of thinning possibilities, Preston seems to suggest somewhere that the Left can go.

From the brow of the hill, Brown points to a big hole in the centre of town, where a slew of brutalism has been torn down. Soon, it will rise again, as a cinema, owned by the council, and run by an independent contractor: the Preston model is based on keeping money in circulation in the town, rather than having it bleed back to some distant corporate HQ. The contracts for the old building’s demolition were won by local businesses.

But the problem with buying local is so obvious entire books have been written about it. The nation-state is inherently redistributive: that’s part of the bargain. The block grant that Preston receives from central government is funded through the dark satanic number mills of Canary Wharf. But once it arrives, they convert capitalism into socialism: a perfect economic cycle.

Just outside the Council’s offices, a cafe-restaurant has been turned into a worker’s co-operative, The Larder (4.5 stars on Google reviews). “It’s about putting power in people’s hands,” Brown tells me. In his section of the Left — the one that once contained Tony Benn — democratic participation is the cure for all ills. It’s an idea that seems to conform to basic human psychology: taking decisions at the closest level of organisation won battles for the Wehrmacht, and profits for GE.

More from this author

The death of Basildon

By Gavin Haynes

How you get to that point is a different issue. Whereas previously socialism asked how can a state become like a company — incorporating workers into its overall plan — Prestonism asks: How can a company become more like a state, giving democracy to the workers? “With a co-operative,” Brown says, “everyone gets a vote. From the cleaner to the managing director.”

But where will the money come from? This is the eternal dance of history. The Left says: wouldn’t it be nice if we all worked as a team and pooled our winnings. To which the Right replies: yes, it would. You first.

Yet Brown points to a student accommodation block: black brick, four storeys, undistinguished, but no failure. It was funded by the Lancashire Pension Fund. “See, there are millions of pounds that would otherwise go to fund something in Abu Dhabi.” But if a new spa resort in Abu Dhabi pays a higher rate of return, that might be useful to the Prestonian pensioners scraping by. And worse: if the market in Preston collapses, well, there are suddenly a lot of eggs in one local basket.

Still, there is something here that most “neoliberal” economic theory doesn’t quantify well: the power of reputation, and observation. Nassim Taleb touched on it with his idea of Skin In The Game. If the Lancashire Pension Fund goes bust, the university accommodation managers will have their own community to answer to. And the Lancashire Pension Fund can at least keep a much closer eye on their asset here than they might on, say, a condo block in Vancouver.

At its heart, the Preston Model is a reaction against globalisation, on a Legoland scale. We are alienated from the fruits of our labour, and that gap between the observable allows for all sorts of perversions to creep in. In the long run Preston will always be out-competed by the forces of capital — an invisible shapeshifting enemy — but at an instinctual level, they’re not onto nothing.

There’s a certain vacant fatalism, for instance, in the attitude of Councillor Ron Woollam, deputy leader of the Preston Tories, to what the town centre should actually look like, who it should be for. “We’re quite worried about the bank actually,” he says. “We don’t think it’s the job of the council to be making these kinds of investments… and as to the model, well, we keep asking for evidence, if it’s worked then there should be signs. But none is ever really forthcoming. In fact, we think it’s actually discouraging investment. People are put off by the meddling.”

More from this author

Is Farage's Reform Party onto something?

By Gavin Haynes

A decade ago, LendLease turned up in Preston. Britain’s largest property investors had successfully backed Liverpool’s One mall development. Now, they proposed to extend the favour to Preston with a £700 million investment. Heavy change. But the deal fell through, in part due to niggles from the Labour-lead council.

LendLease might have been something great for Preston. But then, as anyone who has been to a British shopping mall will know, this is highly unlikely. The town’s gig staple, The Warehouse, “would have been bulldozed if the shopping centre had gone ahead,” Brown tells me. Here, Joy Division recorded a live album twelve weeks before Ian Curtis’ death. Here, generations of bands have had their start.

Now, instead of LendLease’s glistening food courts, what persists is a far smaller rebuild of the old Edwardian market, reborn in glass panels with independent traders. Paired with where the cinema will go, it’s a core that will likely revitalise the downtown precinct: a place worth congregating, in a town centre worth spending money in.

Suggested reading

Nobody ever leaves North Korea

By Etan Smallman

But that invites problems of its own. If the Preston Model is as successful as its inventors boast, then Big Capital will be along soon, ready to get its tentacles of jobs and investment into the place. So what’s an ardent socialist to do? Is this a model that can only win under conditions of failure?

In this country, we aren’t even close to answering these questions. In France, where they think from their gut first and add their reason after, they have long maintained a separate tax code for small business. Their small, independent shop sector thrives, but their big enterprises do OK too. The Monop’ is at the end of your block, but Marie at the boulangerie also gets by. In the UK, the Tesco Express squats at the end of your block, and the boulangerie is a Gregg’s. We don’t seem to have a cultural mechanism to price the value of autonomy, of community connections. And through some twisted vision of materialism, we don’t seem to believe that we even should.

As national politics comes to seem ever-more removed from our lives, the Left especially is retreating to a local level, where they can still hold power. But then, alongside this localism of the Left, the Right are also becoming invested in their own notions of local: of tradition, authenticity, capital-P Place. Preston was the site of the last battle fought on English soil — the Jacobite rebellion of the Young Pretender.  Now that the Left has bet its future on an ex-mill town in Lancashire, it may again decide who reigns.

I sometimes think that the North, where I live, is a bit like the bandar-log: we are certain that if only London would give us the things that make London successful, then we’d be successful too. You know: a fast train, a tram system, a big concert hall, relocate a government department or a TV channel.

Perhaps it’s time we changed our tune, though; perhaps the North needs to stop trying to be something it’s not. Giving the bandar-log fire meant they would be monkeys with fire — it wouldn’t automatically make them humans. Likewise, lavishing the North with the trappings of our capital, which is pretty much the greatest city in the world, won’t turn it into London.

In any case, deep down, the North doesn’t really want to be London. It just wants to be a happier, healthier, wealthier version of itself. So I’d suggest its leaders stopped banging on about the capital sending up some fire and, instead, started asking what is different and special about the North of England.

Part of the trouble is that the North is stuck in the Heseltine Model of regional development. It’s a model focused on the city, not small towns, suburbs or rural places. And it’s an approach which relies on the property developer, on shiny regeneration with offices, city squares and urban living. This is a big city solution in a region with a population density below 1,000 per square mile compared with London’s population density of 15,000 per square mile.

Suggested reading

Where's our ambition for the North?

By Phillip Blond

Leaders up here are kidding themselves that central government cash, plus developer chutzpah and strong local leadership, will birth an economic powerhouse — despite 40 years and counting of it not working. We even use the phrase, The Northern Powerhouse, as if our repeating it again and again will make it come true.

The American urbanist, Aaron Renn, understands the idea of a city’s identity and individuality. He speaks compellingly about how a place must embrace its uniqueness, drawing on Oriana Schwindt’s research about how cities in the Mid-West were all trying to be like somewhere else — New York, Boston, San Francisco or LA – and so were losing any sense of their own identity. Renn’s characterisation immediately sounds familiar:

“The imagery is so similar, pictures of the hip creative class, some start-ups, something about the local fashion and food scene, some people on bicycles going through the center of the city. I love all of these things and I would argue that you have to have them in order to make a city competitive in today’s marketplace. But they are not things that set a city apart.”

The same goes for the North, where our focus on the “powerhouse” myth means regeneration and regional development are about increasing productivity rather than improving lifestyle. This isn’t to dismiss the importance economic growth, but to observe that the strategy for economic development — regenerate, invest for growth — hasn’t changed for decades, yet the blame for its failure is put down to not enough cash from London. Nobody questions whether the strategy might be part of the problem.

This is all compounded by a continuing emphasis on how the North is hard done by, with a focus on the worst parts of the North — its failures not its successes. On Question Time the other week, film-maker Ken Loach described, without being challenged, the North East of England as “desolate”. A region containing Durham Cathedral, the Newcastle riverside, Northumberland’s coast and the Upper Tees Valley. Desolate?

Suggested reading

Why the North East of England is different

By Dan Jackson

Most of the North is not urban, is not in a state of seemingly terminal decline and is not remotely desolate except in a “Cathy running across the moor shouting Heathcliffe” way. Speak to a Northerner about the North, and they will talk about moors and mountains, lakes and rivers, market towns and stately homes, woods and rolling acres.

Yet our blinkered economic development approach completely ignores this in favour of linking together five or six city centres with speedy trains and filling those centres with shiny offices.

It’s time to turn all this on its head. Leave behind those dreams of past industrial might and talk, instead, about what makes the North special. Let’s talk about what makes it unique: its environment. And in doing this, we can build on the back of good things that have happened already to make that environment even better. The South Yorkshire Forest has planted trees on former mine workings and slag heaps; Pennine Prospects are developing the idea of a regional park in the South Pennines, and the Environment Agency is using flood control funding to plant new woods and natural water traps in the upper Aire and Calder catchments.

Suggested reading

Why wilding should make our hearts sing

By Amy-Jane Beer

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.

Suggested reading

Can Manchester unite the country?

By Jonn Elledge

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.

Suggested reading

Brexit has exposed our education apartheid

By Matthew Goodwin

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.