Northern England, also known as the North of England, the North Country, or simply the North, is the northern area of
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...
. It broadly corresponds to the former borders of
Angle
In Euclidean geometry, an angle is the figure formed by two rays, called the '' sides'' of the angle, sharing a common endpoint, called the '' vertex'' of the angle.
Angles formed by two rays lie in the plane that contains the rays. Angles a ...
Northumbria
la, Regnum Northanhymbrorum
, conventional_long_name = Kingdom of Northumbria
, common_name = Northumbria
, status = State
, status_text = Unified Anglian kingdom (before 876)North: Anglian kingdom (af ...
, the
Anglo-Scandinavian Kingdom of Jorvik, and the
Celt Britonic Yr Hen Ogledd Kingdoms.
The common governmental definition of the North is a grouping of three
statistical regions: the
North East, the
North West
The points of the compass are a set of horizontal, radially arrayed compass directions (or azimuths) used in navigation and cartography. A compass rose is primarily composed of four cardinal directions—north, east, south, and west—each sepa ...
, and
Yorkshire and the Humber. These had a combined population of 14.9 million at the
2011 census, an area of and 17
cities
A city is a human settlement of notable size.Goodall, B. (1987) ''The Penguin Dictionary of Human Geography''. London: Penguin.Kuper, A. and Kuper, J., eds (1996) ''The Social Science Encyclopedia''. 2nd edition. London: Routledge. It can be def ...
.
Northern England is
culturally
Culture () is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and Social norm, norms found in human Society, societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, Social norm, customs, capabilities, and habits of the ...
and
economically distinct from both the
Midlands and the
South of England
Southern England, or the South of England, also known as the South, is an area of England consisting of its southernmost part, with cultural, economic and political differences from the Midlands and the North. Officially, the area includes ...
. The area's northern boundary is the
border with Scotland, its western the
border with Wales, and its eastern the
North Sea
The North Sea lies between Great Britain, Norway, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. An epeiric sea, epeiric sea on the European continental shelf, it connects to the Atlantic Ocean through the English Channel in the south and the ...
; there are varying interpretations of where the southern border with the Midlands lies culturally; the Midlands is often also split by closeness to the North and the South.
Many
Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States, that occurred during the period from around 1760 to about 1820–1840. This transition included going f ...
innovations began in Northern England, and its cities were the crucibles of many of the political changes that accompanied this social upheaval, from
trade unionism
A trade union (labor union in American English), often simply referred to as a union, is an organization of workers intent on "maintaining or improving the conditions of their employment", ch. I such as attaining better wages and benefits (su ...
to
Manchester Liberalism. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the economy of the North was dominated by
heavy industry
Heavy industry is an industry that involves one or more characteristics such as large and heavy products; large and heavy equipment and facilities (such as heavy equipment, large machine tools, huge buildings and large-scale infrastructure); o ...
such as weaving, shipbuilding, steel-making, and mining. Centuries of immigration, invasion, and labour have shaped Northern England's culture, and it has retained countless distinctive
accents and dialects, music, arts, and cuisine.
Industrial decline in the second half of the 20th century damaged the North, leading to greater deprivation than that of the South. Although urban renewal projects and the transition to a
service economy
Service economy can refer to one or both of two recent economic developments:
* The increased importance of the service sector in industrialized economies. The current list of Fortune 500 companies contains more service companies and fewer manu ...
have resulted in strong economic growth in parts of the North, the
North–South divide remains in both the
economy
An economy is an area of the production, distribution and trade, as well as consumption of goods and services. In general, it is defined as a social domain that emphasize the practices, discourses, and material expressions associated with the ...
and
culture
Culture () is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups ...
of England.
Definitions
For government and statistical purposes, Northern England is defined as the area covered by the three
statistical regions of England –
North East England,
North West England and
Yorkshire and the Humber. This area consists of the
ceremonial counties
The counties and areas for the purposes of the lieutenancies, also referred to as the lieutenancy areas of England and informally known as ceremonial counties, are areas of England to which lords-lieutenant are appointed. Legally, the areas i ...
of
Cheshire,
Cumbria
Cumbria ( ) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in North West England, bordering Scotland. The county and Cumbria County Council, its local government, came into existence in 1974 after the passage of the Local Government Act 1972. C ...
,
County Durham,
East Riding of Yorkshire
The East Riding of Yorkshire, or simply East Riding or East Yorkshire, is a ceremonial county and unitary authority area in the Yorkshire and the Humber region of England. It borders North Yorkshire to the north and west, South Yorkshire to t ...
,
Greater Manchester
Greater Manchester is a metropolitan county and combined authority area in North West England, with a population of 2.8 million; comprising ten metropolitan boroughs: Manchester, Salford, Bolton, Bury, Oldham, Rochdale, Stockport, Tam ...
,
Lancashire
Lancashire ( , ; abbreviated Lancs) is the name of a historic county, ceremonial county, and non-metropolitan county in North West England. The boundaries of these three areas differ significantly.
The non-metropolitan county of Lancash ...
,
Merseyside
Merseyside ( ) is a metropolitan and ceremonial county in North West England, with a population of 1.38 million. It encompasses both banks of the Mersey Estuary and comprises five metropolitan boroughs: Knowsley, St Helens, Sefton, Wi ...
,
Northumberland
Northumberland () is a county in Northern England, one of two counties in England which border with Scotland. Notable landmarks in the county include Alnwick Castle, Bamburgh Castle, Hadrian's Wall and Hexham Abbey.
It is bordered by land ...
,
North Yorkshire
North Yorkshire is the largest ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county (lieutenancy area) in England, covering an area of . Around 40% of the county is covered by National parks of the United Kingdom, national parks, including most of ...
,
South Yorkshire
South Yorkshire is a ceremonial county, ceremonial and metropolitan county, metropolitan county in the Yorkshire and Humber Region of England. The county has four council areas which are the cities of City of Doncaster, Doncaster and City of Sh ...
,
Tyne and Wear
Tyne and Wear () is a metropolitan county in North East England, situated around the mouths of the rivers Tyne and Wear. It was created in 1974, by the Local Government Act 1972, along with five metropolitan boroughs of Gateshead, Newc ...
and
West Yorkshire
West Yorkshire is a metropolitan and ceremonial county in the Yorkshire and Humber Region of England. It is an inland and upland county having eastward-draining valleys while taking in the moors of the Pennines. West Yorkshire came into exi ...
, plus the unitary authority areas of
North Lincolnshire
North Lincolnshire is a unitary authority area in Lincolnshire, England, with a population of 167,446 in the 2011 census. The borough includes the towns of Scunthorpe, Brigg, Haxey, Crowle, Epworth, Bottesford, Kirton in Lindsey and Bar ...
and
North East Lincolnshire.
Historic counties
![Northern England-Historic counties](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/Northern_England-Historic_counties.svg)
The historic counties ceased to be used for any administrative purpose in 1899 but remain important to some people, notably for
county cricket.
Other definitions
Some areas of
Derbyshire
Derbyshire ( ) is a ceremonial county in the East Midlands, England. It includes much of the Peak District National Park, the southern end of the Pennine range of hills and part of the National Forest. It borders Greater Manchester to the nor ...
,
Lincolnshire
Lincolnshire (abbreviated Lincs.) is a Counties of England, county in the East Midlands of England, with a long coastline on the North Sea to the east. It borders Norfolk to the south-east, Cambridgeshire to the south, Rutland to the south-we ...
,
Nottinghamshire
Nottinghamshire (; abbreviated Notts.) is a landlocked county in the East Midlands region of England, bordering South Yorkshire to the north-west, Lincolnshire to the east, Leicestershire to the south, and Derbyshire to the west. The trad ...
and
Staffordshire have Northern characteristics and include
satellites of Northern cities. Towns in the
High Peak borough of Derbyshire are included in the
Greater Manchester Built-Up Area
The Greater Manchester Built-up Area is an area of land defined by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), consisting of the large conurbation that encompasses the urban element of the city of Manchester and the metropolitan area that forms ...
, as villages and hamlets there such as Tintwistle, Crowden and Woodhead were formerly in Cheshire before local government boundary changes in 1974, due to their close proximity to the city of
Manchester
Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The t ...
, and before this the borough was considered to be part of the
Greater Manchester Statutory City Region
The Greater Manchester City Region, commonly just the Manchester City Region and sometimes the Greater Manchester Statutory City Region, is a combined authority region in England, consisting of Greater Manchester and five boroughs, roughly ...
. More recently, the
Chesterfield,
North East Derbyshire
North East Derbyshire is a local government district in Derbyshire, England. It borders the districts of Chesterfield, Bolsover, Amber Valley and Derbyshire Dales in Derbyshire, and Sheffield and Rotherham in South Yorkshire. The populatio ...
,
Bolsover
Bolsover is a market town and the administrative centre of the Bolsover District, Derbyshire, England. It is from London, from Sheffield, from Nottingham and from Derby. It is the main town in the Bolsover district.
The civil parish for th ...
, and
Derbyshire Dales districts have joined with districts of South Yorkshire to form the
Sheffield City Region
The South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority is the combined authority for South Yorkshire in England, with powers over transport (public transport and major trunk roads only), economic development and regeneration. It covers a total area of 3 ...
, along with the
Bassetlaw District
Bassetlaw is a local government district in Nottinghamshire, England. The district has four towns: Worksop, Tuxford, Harworth Bircotes and Retford. It is bounded to the north by the Metropolitan Boroughs of Doncaster and Rotherham, the east ...
of Nottinghamshire, although for all other purposes these districts still remain in their respective East Midlands counties. The historic part of Lincolnshire known as Lindsey (in essence the northern half of the county) is considered by many to be northern, or at least a larger part of Lincolnshire than merely the north and northeast Lincolnshire districts. The geographer
Danny Dorling includes most of the
West Midlands and part of the
East Midlands in his definition of the North, claiming that "ideas of a midlands region add more confusion than light". Conversely, more restrictive definitions also exist, typically based on the extent of the historical
Northumbria
la, Regnum Northanhymbrorum
, conventional_long_name = Kingdom of Northumbria
, common_name = Northumbria
, status = State
, status_text = Unified Anglian kingdom (before 876)North: Anglian kingdom (af ...
, which excludes Cheshire and southern Lincolnshire, but notable not Lindsey which was first Northumbrian.
Personal definitions of the North vary greatly and are sometimes passionately debated. When asked to draw a dividing line between North and South, Southerners tend to draw this line further south than Northerners do.
From the Southern perspective, Northern England is sometimes defined jokingly as the area north of the
Watford Gap between
Northampton and
Leicester – a definition which would include much of
the Midlands
The Midlands (also referred to as Central England) are a part of England that broadly correspond to the Kingdom of Mercia of the Early Middle Ages, bordered by Wales, Northern England and Southern England. The Midlands were important in the In ...
.
Various cities and towns have been described as or promoted themselves as the "gateway to the North", including
Crewe,
Stoke-on-Trent, and
Sheffield
Sheffield is a city in South Yorkshire, England, whose name derives from the River Sheaf which runs through it. The city serves as the administrative centre of the City of Sheffield. It is historically part of the West Riding of Yorkshire a ...
. For some in the northernmost reaches of England, the North starts somewhere in North Yorkshire around the
River Tees – the Yorkshire poet
Simon Armitage
Simon Robert Armitage (born 26 May 1963) is an English poet, playwright, musician and novelist. He was appointed Poet Laureate on 10 May 2019. He is professor of poetry at the University of Leeds.
He has published over 20 collections of poetr ...
suggests
Thirsk
Thirsk is a market town and civil parish in the Hambleton district of North Yorkshire, England known for its racecourse; quirky yarnbomber displays, and depiction as local author James Herriot's fictional Darrowby.
History
Archeological ...
,
Northallerton
Northallerton ( ) is a market town and civil parish in the Hambleton District of North Yorkshire, England. It lies in the Vale of Mowbray and at the northern end of the Vale of York. It had a population of 16,832 in the 2011 census, an increa ...
or
Richmond – and does not include cities like Manchester and
Leeds
Leeds () is a city and the administrative centre of the City of Leeds district in West Yorkshire, England. It is built around the River Aire and is in the eastern foothills of the Pennines. It is also the third-largest settlement (by popula ...
, nor the majority of Yorkshire. Northern England is not a homogeneous unit, and some have entirely rejected the idea that the North exists as a coherent entity, claiming that considerable cultural differences across the area overwhelm any similarities.
Geography
![Gaps through Pennine Mountains UK topographic map](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Gaps_through_Pennine_Mountains_UK_topographic_map.gif)
Through the North of England run the
Pennines, an
upland chain sometimes referred to as "the backbone of England", which stretches from the
Tyne Gap to the
Peak District
The Peak District is an upland area in England at the southern end of the Pennines. Mostly in Derbyshire, it extends into Cheshire, Greater Manchester, Staffordshire, West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire. It includes the Dark Peak, where moorla ...
. Other uplands in the North include the
Lake District with England's highest mountains, the
Cheviot Hills
The Cheviot Hills (), or sometimes The Cheviots, are a range of uplands straddling the Anglo-Scottish border between Northumberland and the Scottish Borders. The English section is within the Northumberland National Park. The range includes T ...
adjoining the border with Scotland, and the
North York Moors near the
North Sea
The North Sea lies between Great Britain, Norway, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. An epeiric sea, epeiric sea on the European continental shelf, it connects to the Atlantic Ocean through the English Channel in the south and the ...
coastline. The geography of the North has been heavily shaped by the
ice sheet
In glaciology, an ice sheet, also known as a continental glacier, is a mass of glacial ice that covers surrounding terrain and is greater than . The only current ice sheets are in Antarctica and Greenland; during the Last Glacial Period at La ...
s of the
Pleistocene
The Pleistocene ( , often referred to as the ''Ice age'') is the geological epoch that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations. Before a change was finally confirmed in ...
era, which often reached as far south as the Midlands.
Glacier
A glacier (; ) is a persistent body of dense ice that is constantly moving under its own weight. A glacier forms where the accumulation of snow exceeds its ablation over many years, often centuries. It acquires distinguishing features, such as ...
s carved deep, craggy valleys in the central uplands, and, when they melted, deposited large quantities of
fluvio-glacial
Fluvio refers to things related to rivers and glacial refers to something that is of ice. Fluvio-glacial refers to the meltwater created when a glacier melts. Fluvio-glacial processes can occur on the surface and within the glacier. The deposits t ...
material in lowland areas like the
Cheshire and
Solway Plain
The Solway Plain or Solway Basin is a coastal plain located mostly in northwest Cumbria in England, extending just over the Scottish border to the low-lying area around Gretna and Annan. It lies generally north and west of Carlisle along the Sol ...
s.
On the eastern side of the Pennines, a former
glacial lake forms the
Humberhead Levels: a large area of
fen
A fen is a type of peat-accumulating wetland fed by mineral-rich Groundwater, ground or surface water. It is one of the main types of wetlands along with marshes, swamps, and bogs. Bogs and fens, both peat-forming ecosystems, are also known as ...
land which drains into the
Humber
The Humber is a large tidal estuary on the east coast of Northern England. It is formed at Trent Falls, Faxfleet, by the confluence of the tidal rivers Ouse and Trent. From there to the North Sea, it forms part of the boundary between t ...
and which is very fertile and productive farmland.
![Scafell Pike](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/Scafell_Pike.JPG)
Much of the mountainous upland remains undeveloped, and of
the ten national parks in England, five – the Peak District, the Lake District, the North York Moors, the
Yorkshire Dales
The Yorkshire Dales is an upland area of the Pennines in the historic county of Yorkshire, England, most of it in the Yorkshire Dales National Park created in 1954.
The Dales comprise river valleys and the hills rising from the Vale of York w ...
, and
Northumberland National Park
Northumberland National Park is the northernmost national park in England. It covers an area of more than between the Scottish border in the north to just south of Hadrian's Wall, and it is one of least visited of the National Parks. The park ...
– are located partly or entirely in the North.
The Lake District includes England's highest peak,
Scafell Pike
Scafell Pike () is the highest and the most prominent mountain in England, at an elevation of above sea level. It is located in the Lake District National Park, in Cumbria, and is part of the Southern Fells and the Scafell massif.
Scafell P ...
, which rises to , its largest lake,
Windermere
Windermere (sometimes tautologically called Windermere Lake to distinguish it from the nearby town of Windermere) is the largest natural lake in England. More than 11 miles (18 km) in length, and almost 1 mile (1.5 km) at its wides ...
, and its deepest lake,
Wastwater. Northern England is one of the most
treeless areas in Europe, and to combat this the government plans to plant over 50 million trees in a new
Northern Forest across the region.
Urban
![British Isles at night by VIIRS (cropped)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/British_Isles_at_night_by_VIIRS_%28cropped%29.jpg)
Uniquely for such a large urban belt in Europe, these cities are all as recent as the Industrial Revolution; most of them previously scattered villages.
Vast urban areas have emerged along the coasts and rivers, and they run almost contiguously into each other in places. Near the east coast, trade fuelled the growth of major ports and settlements (
Kingston upon Hull
Kingston upon Hull, usually abbreviated to Hull, is a port city and unitary authority in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England.
It lies upon the River Hull at its confluence with the Humber Estuary, inland from the North Sea and south-ea ...
,
Newcastle upon Tyne
Newcastle upon Tyne ( RP: , ), or simply Newcastle, is a city and metropolitan borough in Tyne and Wear, England. The city is located on the River Tyne's northern bank and forms the largest part of the Tyneside built-up area. Newcastle is ...
,,
Middlesbrough
Middlesbrough ( ) is a town on the southern bank of the River Tees in North Yorkshire, England. It is near the North York Moors national park. It is the namesake and main town of its local borough council area.
Until the early 1800s, the a ...
,
Newcastle Newcastle usually refers to:
*Newcastle upon Tyne, a city and metropolitan borough in Tyne and Wear, England
*Newcastle-under-Lyme, a town in Staffordshire, England
*Newcastle, New South Wales, a metropolitan area in Australia, named after Newcastle ...
and
Sunderland) to create multiple urban areas.
Inland needs of trade and industry produced an almost continuous
urbanisation
Urbanization (or urbanisation) refers to the population shift from rural to urban areas, the corresponding decrease in the proportion of people living in rural areas, and the ways in which societies adapt to this change. It is predominantly the ...
from the
Wirral Peninsula
Wirral (; ), known locally as The Wirral, is a peninsula in North West England. The roughly rectangular peninsula is about long and wide and is bounded by the River Dee to the west (forming the boundary with Wales), the River Mersey to ...
to
Doncaster
Doncaster (, ) is a city in South Yorkshire, England. Named after the River Don, it is the administrative centre of the larger City of Doncaster. It is the second largest settlement in South Yorkshire after Sheffield. Doncaster is situated in ...
, taking in the cities of
Liverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough in Merseyside, England. With a population of in 2019, it is the 10th largest English district by population and its metropolitan area is the fifth largest in the United Kingdom, with a populat ...
,
Manchester
Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The t ...
,
Leeds
Leeds () is a city and the administrative centre of the City of Leeds district in West Yorkshire, England. It is built around the River Aire and is in the eastern foothills of the Pennines. It is also the third-largest settlement (by popula ...
, and
Sheffield
Sheffield is a city in South Yorkshire, England, whose name derives from the River Sheaf which runs through it. The city serves as the administrative centre of the City of Sheffield. It is historically part of the West Riding of Yorkshire a ...
, with a population of at least 7.6 million.
Analysis by
The Northern Way in 2006 found that 90% of the population of the North lived in and around:
Liverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough in Merseyside, England. With a population of in 2019, it is the 10th largest English district by population and its metropolitan area is the fifth largest in the United Kingdom, with a populat ...
,
Central Lancashire
Central Lancashire is an area of Lancashire, England.
Central Lancashire New Town
Central Lancashire New Town was the largest of the post-war English new towns, designated in 1970 and covering : the County Borough of Preston, parts of Chorley, ...
,
Manchester
Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The t ...
,
Sheffield
Sheffield is a city in South Yorkshire, England, whose name derives from the River Sheaf which runs through it. The city serves as the administrative centre of the City of Sheffield. It is historically part of the West Riding of Yorkshire a ...
,
Leeds
Leeds () is a city and the administrative centre of the City of Leeds district in West Yorkshire, England. It is built around the River Aire and is in the eastern foothills of the Pennines. It is also the third-largest settlement (by popula ...
,
Hull and Humber Ports,
Tees Valley and
Tyne and Wear
Tyne and Wear () is a metropolitan county in North East England, situated around the mouths of the rivers Tyne and Wear. It was created in 1974, by the Local Government Act 1972, along with five metropolitan boroughs of Gateshead, Newc ...
. At the 2011 census, 86% of the Northern population lived in urban areas as defined by the
Office for National Statistics
The Office for National Statistics (ONS; cy, Swyddfa Ystadegau Gwladol) is the executive office of the UK Statistics Authority, a non-ministerial department which reports directly to the UK Parliament.
Overview
The ONS is responsible for t ...
, compared to 82% for England as a whole.
Natural resources
Peat
Peat (), also known as turf (), is an accumulation of partially decayed vegetation or organic matter. It is unique to natural areas called peatlands, bogs, mires, moors, or muskegs. The peatland ecosystem covers and is the most efficient ...
is found in thick, plentiful layers across the Pennines and Scottish Borders, and there are many large coalfields, including the
Great Northern,
Lancashire
Lancashire ( , ; abbreviated Lancs) is the name of a historic county, ceremonial county, and non-metropolitan county in North West England. The boundaries of these three areas differ significantly.
The non-metropolitan county of Lancash ...
and
South Yorkshire Coalfields.
Millstone grit, a distinctive coarse-grained rock used to make
millstones, is widespread in the Pennines,
and the variety of other rock types is reflected in the architecture of the region, such as the bright red
sandstone
Sandstone is a clastic sedimentary rock composed mainly of sand-sized (0.0625 to 2 mm) silicate grains. Sandstones comprise about 20–25% of all sedimentary rocks.
Most sandstone is composed of quartz or feldspar (both silicates ...
seen in buildings in
Chester, the cream-buff
Yorkstone and the distinctive purple
Doddington sandstone. These sandstones also mean that apart from the east coast, most of Northern England has
very soft water, and this has influenced not just industry, but even the blends of tea enjoyed in the region.
Rich deposits of
iron ore are found in Cumbria and the North East, and
fluorspar and
baryte are also plentiful in northern parts of the Pennines.
Salt mining in Cheshire has a long history, and both remaining
rock salt
Halite (), commonly known as rock salt, is a type of salt, the mineral (natural) form of sodium chloride ( Na Cl). Halite forms isometric crystals. The mineral is typically colorless or white, but may also be light blue, dark blue, purple, pi ...
mines in Great Britain are in the North:
Winsford Mine in Cheshire and
Boulby Mine in North Yorkshire, which also produces half of the UK's
potash
Potash () includes various mined and manufactured salts that contain potassium in water-soluble form. .
Climate
![Rainy days (4979826462)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Rainy_days_%284979826462%29.jpg)
Northern England has a cool, wet
oceanic climate with small areas of
subpolar oceanic climate
An oceanic climate, also known as a marine climate, is the humid temperate climate sub-type in Köppen classification ''Cfb'', typical of west coasts in higher middle latitudes of continents, generally featuring cool summers and mild winters ...
in the uplands. Averaged across the entire region, Northern England is cooler, wetter and cloudier than England as a whole, and contains both England's coldest point (
Cross Fell
Cross Fell is the highest mountain in the Pennines of Northern England and the highest point in England outside the Lake District. It is located in the North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. It lies within the county of Cumbria and ...
) and its rainiest point (
Seathwaite Fell
Seathwaite Fell is an area of the Lake District in Cumbria, England. It stands above the hamlet of the same name at the head of Borrowdale.
Position of the summit
The fell is very rugged with several small tops along the summit of the ri ...
). Its temperature range and
sunshine duration is similar to the UK average and it sees substantially less rainfall than Scotland or Wales. These averages disguise considerable variation across the region, due chiefly to the upland regions and adjacent seas.
[ ]
The
prevailing winds
In meteorology, prevailing wind in a region of the Earth's surface is a surface wind that blows predominantly from a particular direction. The dominant winds are the trends in direction of wind with the highest speed over a particular point on ...
across the British Isles are
westerlies
The westerlies, anti-trades, or prevailing westerlies, are prevailing winds from the west toward the east in the middle latitudes between 30 and 60 degrees latitude. They originate from the high-pressure areas in the horse latitudes and trend t ...
bringing moisture from the Atlantic Ocean; this means that the west coast frequently receives strong winds and heavy rainfall while the east coast lies in a
rain shadow behind the Pennines. As a result, Teesside and the Northumbrian coast are the driest regions in the North, with around of rain per year, while parts of the Lake District receive over . Lowland regions in the more southern parts of Northern England such as Cheshire and South Yorkshire are the warmest, with average maximum July temperatures of over , while the highest points in the Pennines and Lake District reach only . The area has a reputation for cloud and fog – especially along its east coast, which experiences a distinctive
sea fog known as
fret – although the
Clean Air Act 1956 and decline of heavy industry have seen sunshine duration increase in urban areas in recent years.
Language and dialect
English
Dialect
![Foot-strut split](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/Foot-strut_split.svg)
The English spoken today in the North has been shaped by the area's history, and some dialects retain features inherited from
Old Norse
Old Norse, Old Nordic, or Old Scandinavian, is a stage of development of North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and their overseas settlemen ...
and the
local Celtic languages. Dialects spoken in the North include
Cumbrian (Cumbria),
Geordie (Tyneside),
Mackem
Mackem, Makem or Mak'em a nickname for residents of and people from Sunderland, a city in North East England. It is also a name for the local dialect and accent (not to be confused with Geordie); and for a fan, of whatever origin, of Sunderland ...
(Wearside),
Lancashire
Lancashire ( , ; abbreviated Lancs) is the name of a historic county, ceremonial county, and non-metropolitan county in North West England. The boundaries of these three areas differ significantly.
The non-metropolitan county of Lancash ...
(Lancashire),
Mancunian (Manchester),
Northumbrian (Northumberland and Durham),
Pitmatic (Great Northern Coalfield),
Scouse
Scouse (; formally known as Liverpool English or Merseyside English) is an accent and dialect of English associated with Liverpool and the surrounding county of Merseyside. The Scouse accent is highly distinctive; having been influenced he ...
(Liverpool) and
Tyke (Yorkshire). Linguists have attempted to define a Northern dialect area, corresponding to the area north of a line that begins at the Humber estuary and runs up the
River Wharfe and across to the
River Lune
The River Lune (archaically sometimes Loyne) is a river in length in Cumbria and Lancashire, England.
Etymology
Several elucidations for the origin of the name ''Lune'' exist. Firstly, it may be that the name is Brittonic in genesis and der ...
in north Lancashire. This area corresponds roughly to the ''
sprachraum
In linguistics, a sprachraum (; , "language area", plural sprachräume) is a geographical region where a common first language (mother tongue), with dialect varieties, or group of languages is spoken.
Characteristics
Many sprachräume are separ ...
'' of the
Old English
Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th c ...
Northumbrian dialect
The Northumbrian dialect refers to any of several English language varieties spoken in the traditional English region of Northumbria, which includes most of the North East England government region. The traditional Northumbrian dialect is a ...
, although the linguistic elements that defined this area in the past, such as the use of ''doon'' instead of ''down'' and substitution of an ''ang'' sound in words that end -''ong'' (''lang'' instead of ''long''), are now prevalent only in the more northern parts of the region. As speech has changed, there is little consensus on what defines a "Northern" accent or dialect.
Northern English accents have not undergone the
TRAP–BATH split, and a common
shibboleth
A shibboleth (; hbo, , šībbōleṯ) is any custom or tradition, usually a choice of phrasing or even a single word, that distinguishes one group of people from another. Shibboleths have been used throughout history in many societies as passwo ...
to distinguish them from Southern ones is the Northern use of the short a (the
near-open front unrounded vowel) in words such as ''bath'' and ''castle''. On the opposite border, most Northern English accents can be distinguished from
Scottish accents because they are
non-rhotic
Rhoticity in English is the pronunciation of the historical rhotic consonant by English speakers. The presence or absence of rhoticity is one of the most prominent distinctions by which varieties of English can be classified. In rhotic variet ...
, although some Lancashire and Northumberland accents remain rhotic. Other features common to many Northern English accents are the absence of the
FOOT–STRUT split (so ''put'' and ''putt'' are
homophone
A homophone () is a word that is pronounced the same (to varying extent) as another word but differs in meaning. A ''homophone'' may also differ in spelling. The two words may be spelled the same, for example ''rose'' (flower) and ''rose'' (p ...
s), the reduction of the
definite article
An article is any member of a class of dedicated words that are used with noun phrases to mark the identifiability of the referents of the noun phrases. The category of articles constitutes a part of speech.
In English, both "the" and "a(n)" a ...
''the'' to a
glottal stop (usually represented in writing as ''t'' or occasionally ''th'', although it is often not pronounced as a /t/ sound) or its total
elision, and the T-to-R rule that leads to the pronunciation of ''t'' as a
rhotic consonant in phrases like ''get up'' ().
The
pronouns ''thou'' and ''thee'' survive in some Northern English dialects, although these are dying out outside very rural areas, and many dialects have an informal second-person plural pronoun: either ''
ye'' (common in the North East) or ''
yous'' (common in areas with historical Irish communities). Many dialects use ''
me'' as a
possessive ("me car") and some treat ''
us'' likewise ("us cars") or use the alternative ''
wor'' ("wor cars"). Possessive pronouns are also used to mark the names of relatives in speech (for example, a relative called Joan would be referred to as "our Joan" in conversation).
With urbanisation, distinctive urban accents have arisen which often differ greatly from the historical accents of the surrounding rural areas and sometimes share features with Southern English accents. Northern English dialects remain an important part of the culture of the region, and the desire of speakers to assert their local identity has led to accents such as Scouse and Geordie becoming more distinctive and spreading into surrounding areas.
Literature
![Ullswater (geograph 3932818) (cropped)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/Ullswater_%28geograph_3932818%29_%28cropped%29.jpg)
The contrasting geography of Northern England is reflected in its literature. On the one hand, the wild moors and lakes have inspired generations of
Romantic authors: the poetry of
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (7 April 177023 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication '' Lyrical Ballads'' (1798).
Wordsworth's ' ...
and the novels of the
Brontë sisters are perhaps the most famous examples of writing inspired by these elemental forces. Classics of
children's literature
Children's literature or juvenile literature includes stories, books, magazines, and poems that are created for children. Modern children's literature is classified in two different ways: genre or the intended age of the reader.
Children's ...
such as ''
The Railway Children
''The Railway Children'' is a children's book by Edith Nesbit, originally serialised in ''The London Magazine'' during 1905 and published in book form in the same year. It has been adapted for the screen several times, of which the 1970 fil ...
'' (1906), ''
The Secret Garden'' (1911) and ''
Swallows and Amazons
''Swallows and Amazons'' is a children's adventure novel by English author Arthur Ransome and first published on 21 July 1930 by Jonathan Cape. Set in the summer of 1929 in the Lake District, the book introduces the main characters of John, S ...
'' (1930) portray these largely untouched landscapes as worlds of adventure and transformation where their protagonists can break free of the restrictions of society. Modern poets such as the
Poets Laureate Ted Hughes
Edward James "Ted" Hughes (17 August 1930 – 28 October 1998) was an English poet, translator, and children's writer. Critics frequently rank him as one of the best poets of his generation and one of the twentieth century's greatest wri ...
and Simon Armitage have found inspiration in the Northern countryside, producing works that take advantage of the sounds and rhythms of Northern English dialects.
Meanwhile, the industrialising and urbanising cities of the North gave rise to many masterpieces of
social realism
Social realism is the term used for work produced by painters, printmakers, photographers, writers and filmmakers that aims to draw attention to the real socio-political conditions of the working class as a means to critique the power structure ...
. Elizabeth Gaskell was the first in a lineage of female realist writers from the North that later included
Winifred Holtby
Winifred Holtby (23 June 1898 – 29 September 1935) was an English novelist and journalist, now best known for her novel '' South Riding'', which was posthumously published in 1936.
Biography
Holtby was born to a prosperous farming family in ...
,
Catherine Cookson
Dame Catherine Ann Cookson, DBE (''née'' McMullen; 20 June 1906 – 11 June 1998) was a British writer. She is in the top 20 of the most widely read British novelists, with sales topping 100 million, while retaining a relatively low profile i ...
,
Beryl Bainbridge and
Jeanette Winterson. Many of the
angry young men
The "angry young men" were a group of mostly working- and middle-class British playwrights and novelists who became prominent in the 1950s. The group's leading figures included John Osborne and Kingsley Amis; other popular figures included Jo ...
of post-war literature were Northern, and working-class life in the face of deindustrialisation is depicted in novels such as ''
Room at the Top'' (1959), ''
Billy Liar'' (1959), ''
This Sporting Life
''This Sporting Life'' is a 1963 British kitchen sink drama film directed by Lindsay Anderson. Based on the 1960 novel of the same name by David Storey, which won the 1960 Macmillan Fiction Award, it recounts the story of a rugby league footb ...
'' (1960) and ''
A Kestrel for a Knave'' (1968).
Other languages
There are no recognised minority languages in Northern England, although the Northumbrian Language Society campaigns to have the
Northumbrian dialect
The Northumbrian dialect refers to any of several English language varieties spoken in the traditional English region of Northumbria, which includes most of the North East England government region. The traditional Northumbrian dialect is a ...
recognised as a separate language. It is possible that traces of now-extinct
Brythonic Celtic languages from the region survive in some rural areas in the
Yan Tan Tethera
Yan Tan Tethera or yan-tan-tethera is a sheep-counting system traditionally used by shepherds in Northern England and some other parts of Britain. The words are numbers taken from Brythonic Celtic languages such as Cumbric which had died out in ...
counting systems traditionally used by shepherds.
Contact between English and
immigrant languages has given rise to new accents and dialects. For instance, the variety of English spoken by Poles in Manchester is distinct both from typical Polish-accented English and from Mancunian. At a local level, the diversity of immigrant communities means that some languages that are extremely rare in the country as a whole have strongholds in Northern towns:
Bradford for instance has the largest proportion of
Pashto
Pashto (,; , ) is an Eastern Iranian language in the Indo-European language family. It is known in historical Persian literature as Afghani ().
Spoken as a native language mostly by ethnic Pashtuns, it is one of the two official langua ...
speakers, while Manchester has most
Cantonese
Cantonese ( zh, t=廣東話, s=广东话, first=t, cy=Gwóngdūng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding ar ...
speakers.
History
The prehistoric North
![RudstonMonolith(StephenHorncastle)Apr2006](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/RudstonMonolith%28StephenHorncastle%29Apr2006.jpg)
During the
ice age
An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Earth's climate alternates between ice ages and gre ...
s, Northern England was buried under ice sheets, and little evidence remains of habitation – either because the climate made the area uninhabitable, or because glaciation destroyed most evidence of human activity. The northernmost
cave art in Europe is found at
Creswell Crags
Creswell Crags is an enclosed limestone gorge on the border between Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, England, near the villages of Creswell and Whitwell. The cliffs in the ravine contain several caves that were occupied during the last ice age ...
in northern Derbyshire, near modern-day Sheffield, which shows signs of
Neanderthal
Neanderthals (, also ''Homo neanderthalensis'' and erroneously ''Homo sapiens neanderthalensis''), also written as Neandertals, are an extinct species or subspecies of archaic humans who lived in Eurasia until about 40,000 years ago. While the ...
inhabitation 50 to 60 thousand years ago, and of a more modern occupation known as the
Creswellian culture around 12,000 years ago. Kirkwell Cave in
Lower Allithwaite
Lower Allithwaite is a civil parish in the South Lakeland district of the English county of Cumbria. It includes the villages of Allithwaite and Cartmel, the historic Cartmel Priory, Humphrey Head
Humphrey Head is a limestone outcrop situated ...
, Cumbria shows signs of the
Federmesser culture
''Federmesser'' group is an archaeological umbrella term
including the late Upper Paleolithic to Mesolithic cultures of the Northern European Plain, dating to between 14,000 and 12,800 years ago (the late Magdalenian). It is closely related to ...
of the
Paleolithic, and was inhabited some time between 13,400 and 12,800 years ago.
Significant settlement appears to have begun in the
Mesolithic era, with
Star Carr
Star Carr is a Mesolithic archaeological site in North Yorkshire, England. It is around five miles () south of Scarborough.
It is generally regarded as the most important and informative Mesolithic site in Great Britain. It is as important to ...
in North Yorkshire generally considered the most significant monument of this era.
The Star Carr site includes Britain's oldest known house, from around 9000 BC, and the earliest evidence of carpentry in the form of a carved tree trunk from 11000 BC.
The
Lincolnshire
Lincolnshire (abbreviated Lincs.) is a Counties of England, county in the East Midlands of England, with a long coastline on the North Sea to the east. It borders Norfolk to the south-east, Cambridgeshire to the south, Rutland to the south-we ...
and
Yorkshire Wolds
The Yorkshire Wolds are low hills in the counties of the East Riding of Yorkshire and North Yorkshire in north-eastern England. The name also applies to the district in which the hills lie.
On the western edge, the Wolds rise to an escarpment wh ...
around the Humber Estuary were settled and farmed in the
Bronze Age
The Bronze Age is a historic period, lasting approximately from 3300 BC to 1200 BC, characterized by the use of bronze, the presence of writing in some areas, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the second prin ...
, and the
Ferriby Boats
The Ferriby Boats are three Bronze-Age British sewn plank-built boats, parts of which were discovered at North Ferriby in the East Riding of the English county of Yorkshire. Only a small number of boats of a similar period have been found ...
– one of the best-preserved finds of the era – were discovered near Hull in 1937. In the more mountainous regions of the Peak District,
hillfort
A hillfort is a type of earthwork used as a fortified refuge or defended settlement, located to exploit a rise in elevation for defensive advantage. They are typically European and of the Bronze Age or Iron Age. Some were used in the post-Roma ...
s were the main Bronze Age settlement and the locals were most likely
pastoralists
Pastoralism is a form of animal husbandry where domesticated animals (known as "livestock") are released onto large vegetated outdoor lands (pastures) for grazing, historically by nomadic people who moved around with their herds. The animal s ...
raising livestock.
Iron Age and the Romans
![Hadrian's wall at Greenhead Lough](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Hadrian%27s_wall_at_Greenhead_Lough.jpg)
Roman histories name the Celtic tribe that occupied the majority of Northern England as the
Brigantes, likely meaning "Highlanders". Whether the Brigantes were a unified group or a looser federation of tribes around the Pennines is debated, but the name appears to have been adopted by the inhabitants of the region, which was known by the Romans as
Brigantia. Other tribes mentioned in ancient histories, which may have been part of the Brigantes or separate nations, are the
Carvetii
The Carvetii (Common Brittonic: *''Carwetī'') were a Brittonic Celtic tribe living in what is now Cumbria, in North-West England during the Iron Age, and were subsequently identified as a ''civitas'' (canton) of Roman Britain.
Etymology
The ...
of modern-day Cumbria and the
Parisi of east Yorkshire.
The Brigantes allied with the
Roman Empire
The Roman Empire ( la, Imperium Romanum ; grc-gre, Βασιλεία τῶν Ῥωμαίων, Basileía tôn Rhōmaíōn) was the post- Republican period of ancient Rome. As a polity, it included large territorial holdings around the Mediter ...
during the
Roman conquest of Britain:
Tacitus
Publius Cornelius Tacitus, known simply as Tacitus ( , ; – ), was a Roman historian and politician. Tacitus is widely regarded as one of the greatest Roman historians by modern scholars.
The surviving portions of his two major works—the ...
records that they handed the resistance leader
Caratacus
Caratacus (Brythonic ''*Caratācos'', Middle Welsh ''Caratawc''; Welsh ''Caradog''; Breton ''Karadeg''; Greek ''Καράτακος''; variants Latin ''Caractacus'', Greek ''Καρτάκης'') was a 1st-century AD British chieftain of the ...
over to the Empire in 51. Power struggles within the Brigantes made the Romans wary, and they were conquered in a war beginning in the 70s under the governorship of
Quintus Petillius Cerialis. The Romans created the province of "
Britannia Inferior" (Lower Britain) in the North, and it was ruled from the city of
Eboracum
Eboracum () was a fort and later a city in the Roman province of Britannia. In its prime it was the largest town in northern Britain and a provincial capital. The site remained occupied after the decline of the Western Roman Empire and ultimat ...
(modern
York
York is a cathedral city with Roman origins, sited at the confluence of the rivers Ouse and Foss in North Yorkshire, England. It is the historic county town of Yorkshire. The city has many historic buildings and other structures, such as a ...
). Eboracum and
Deva Victrix
Deva Victrix, or simply Deva, was a legionary fortress and town in the Roman province of Britannia on the site of the modern city of Chester. The fortress was built by the Legio II ''Adiutrix'' in the 70s AD as the Roman army advanced north ag ...
(modern Chester) were the main
legionary bases in the region, with other smaller forts including
Mamucium
Mamucium, also known as Mancunium, is a former Roman fort in the Castlefield area of Manchester in North West England. The ''castrum'', which was founded c. AD 79 within the Roman province of Roman Britain, was garrisoned by a cohort ...
(Manchester) and
Cataractonium
Cataractonium was a fort and settlement in Roman Britain. The settlement evolved into Catterick, located in North Yorkshire, England.
Name
Cataractonium likely took its name form the Latin word (ultimately derived from Greek , ), meaning eit ...
(
Catterick). Britannia Inferior extended as far north as
Hadrian's Wall, which was the northernmost
border of the Roman Empire. Although the Romans invaded modern-day Northumberland and part of Scotland beyond it, they never succeeded in conquering the reaches of Britain beyond the
River Tyne.
Anglo-Saxons and Vikings
![England 878](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/England_878.svg)
After the
end of Roman rule in Britain and the arrival of the
Angles
The Angles ( ang, Ængle, ; la, Angli) were one of the main Germanic peoples who settled in Great Britain in the post-Roman period. They founded several kingdoms of the Heptarchy in Anglo-Saxon England. Their name is the root of the name ...
, Yr
Hen Ogledd
Yr Hen Ogledd (), in English the Old North, is the historical region which is now Northern England and the southern Scottish Lowlands that was inhabited by the Brittonic people of sub-Roman Britain in the Early Middle Ages. Its population sp ...
(the "Old North") was divided into rival kingdoms,
Bernicia
Bernicia ( ang, Bernice, Bryneich, Beornice; la, Bernicia) was an Anglo-Saxon kingdom established by Anglian settlers of the 6th century in what is now southeastern Scotland and North East England.
The Anglian territory of Bernicia was ap ...
,
Deira
Deira ( ; Old Welsh/Cumbric: ''Deywr'' or ''Deifr''; ang, Derenrice or ) was an area of Post-Roman Britain, and a later Anglian kingdom.
Etymology
The name of the kingdom is of Brythonic origin, and is derived from the Proto-Celtic *''daru' ...
,
Rheged and
Elmet. Bernicia covered lands north of the Tees, Deira corresponded roughly to the eastern half of modern-day Yorkshire, Rheged to Cumbria, and Elmet to the western-half of Yorkshire. Bernicia and Deira were first united as
Northumbria
la, Regnum Northanhymbrorum
, conventional_long_name = Kingdom of Northumbria
, common_name = Northumbria
, status = State
, status_text = Unified Anglian kingdom (before 876)North: Anglian kingdom (af ...
by
Aethelfrith, a king of Bernicia who conquered Deira around the year 604.
Northumbria then saw a
Golden Age
The term Golden Age comes from Greek mythology, particularly the '' Works and Days'' of Hesiod, and is part of the description of temporal decline of the state of peoples through five Ages, Gold being the first and the one during which the G ...
in cultural, scholarly and monastic activity, centred on
Lindisfarne and aided by Irish monks. The north-west of England retains vestiges of a Celtic culture, and had its own Celtic language,
Cumbric
Cumbric was a variety of the Common Brittonic language spoken during the Early Middle Ages in the ''Hen Ogledd'' or "Old North" in what is now the counties of Westmorland, Cumberland and northern Lancashire in Northern England and the souther ...
, spoken predominately in Cumbria until around the 12th century.
Parts of the north and east of England were subject to Danish control (the
Danelaw
The Danelaw (, also known as the Danelagh; ang, Dena lagu; da, Danelagen) was the part of England in which the laws of the Danes held sway and dominated those of the Anglo-Saxons. The Danelaw contrasts with the West Saxon law and the Mercian ...
) during the
Viking era
The Viking Age () was the period during the Middle Ages when Norsemen known as Vikings undertook large-scale raiding, colonizing, conquest, and trading throughout Europe and reached North America. It followed the Migration Period and the Ger ...
, but the northern part of the old Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria remained under Anglo-Saxon control. Under the Vikings, monasteries were largely wiped out, and the discovery of
grave goods
Grave goods, in archaeology and anthropology, are the items buried along with the body.
They are usually personal possessions, supplies to smooth the deceased's journey into the afterlife or offerings to the gods. Grave goods may be classed as a ...
in Northern churchyards suggests that
Norse funeral rites replaced Christian ones for a time. Viking control of certain areas, particularly around Yorkshire, is recalled in the
etymology
Etymology ()The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) – p. 633 "Etymology /ˌɛtɪˈmɒlədʒi/ the study of the class in words and the way their meanings have changed throughout time". is the study of the history of the Phonological chan ...
of many
place names
Toponymy, toponymics, or toponomastics is the study of ''toponyms'' (proper names of places, also known as place names and geographic names), including their origins, meanings, usage and types. Toponym is the general term for a proper name of ...
: the ''
thorpe'' in town names such as
Cleethorpes and
Scunthorpe
Scunthorpe () is an industrial town and unparished area in the unitary authority of North Lincolnshire in Lincolnshire, England of which it is the main administrative centre. Scunthorpe had an estimated total population of 82,334 in 2016. A ...
, the ''
kirk
Kirk is a Scottish and former Northern English word meaning "church". It is often used specifically of the Church of Scotland. Many place names and personal names are also derived from it.
Basic meaning and etymology
As a common noun, ''kirk' ...
'' in
Kirklees
Kirklees is a local government district of West Yorkshire, England, governed by Kirklees Council with the status of a metropolitan borough. The largest town and administrative centre of Kirklees is Huddersfield, and the district also includes ...
and
Ormskirk
Ormskirk is a market town in the West Lancashire district of Lancashire, England, north of Liverpool, northwest of St Helens, southeast of Southport and southwest of Preston. Ormskirk is known for its gingerbread.
Geography and administr ...
and the ''
by'' of
Whitby
Whitby is a seaside town, port and civil parish in the Scarborough borough of North Yorkshire, England. Situated on the east coast of Yorkshire at the mouth of the River Esk, Whitby has a maritime, mineral and tourist heritage. Its East Clif ...
and
Grimsby
Grimsby or Great Grimsby is a port town and the administrative centre of North East Lincolnshire, Lincolnshire, England. Grimsby adjoins the town of Cleethorpes directly to the south-east forming a conurbation. Grimsby is north-east of L ...
all have Norse roots.
Norman Conquest and the Middle Ages
![Castlekeep](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Castlekeep.jpg)
The 1066 defeat of the Norwegian king
Harald Hardrada by the Anglo-Saxon
Harold Godwinson
Harold Godwinson ( – 14 October 1066), also called Harold II, was the last crowned Anglo-Saxon English king. Harold reigned from 6 January 1066 until his death at the Battle of Hastings, fighting the Norman invaders led by William the ...
at the
Battle of Stamford Bridge
The Battle of Stamford Bridge ( ang, Gefeoht æt Stanfordbrycge) took place at the village of Stamford Bridge, East Riding of Yorkshire, in England, on 25 September 1066, between an English army under King Harold Godwinson and an invading No ...
near York marked the beginning of the end of Viking rule in England, and the almost immediate defeat of Godwinson at the hands of the Norman
William the Conqueror
William I; ang, WillelmI (Bates ''William the Conqueror'' p. 33– 9 September 1087), usually known as William the Conqueror and sometimes William the Bastard, was the first House of Normandy, Norman List of English monarchs#House of Norman ...
at the
Battle of Hastings
The Battle of Hastings nrf, Batâle dé Hastings was fought on 14 October 1066 between the Norman-French army of William, the Duke of Normandy, and an English army under the Anglo-Saxon King Harold Godwinson, beginning the Norman Conque ...
was in turn the overthrow of the Anglo-Saxon order. The Northumbrian and Danish aristocracy resisted the
Norman Conquest
The Norman Conquest (or the Conquest) was the 11th-century invasion and occupation of England by an army made up of thousands of Norman, Breton, Flemish, and French troops, all led by the Duke of Normandy, later styled William the Con ...
, and to put an end to the rebellion, William ordered the
Harrying of the North. In the winter of 1069–1070, towns, villages and farms were
systematically destroyed across much of Yorkshire as well as northern Lancashire and County Durham.
The region was gripped by famine and much of Northern England was deserted. Chroniclers at the time reported a hundred thousand deaths – modern estimates place the total somewhere in the tens of thousands, out of a population of two million.
When the
Domesday Book
Domesday Book () – the Middle English spelling of "Doomsday Book" – is a manuscript record of the "Great Survey" of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086 by order of King William I, known as William the Conqueror. The manus ...
was compiled in 1086, much of Northern England was still recorded as wasteland,
although this may have been in part because the chroniclers, more interested in
manorial
Manorialism, also known as the manor system or manorial system, was the method of land ownership (or "tenure") in parts of Europe, notably France and later England, during the Middle Ages. Its defining features included a large, sometimes forti ...
farmland, paid little attention to pastoral areas.
![Fountains abbey 011 (19132005443)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Fountains_abbey_011_%2819132005443%29.jpg)
Following Norman subjugation, monasteries returned to the North as missionaries sought to "settle the desert". Monastic orders such as the
Cistercians became significant players in the economy of Northern England – the Cistercian
Fountains Abbey
Fountains Abbey is one of the largest and best preserved ruined Cistercian monasteries in England. It is located approximately south-west of Ripon in North Yorkshire, near to the village of Aldfield. Founded in 1132, the abbey operated for 40 ...
in North Yorkshire became the largest and richest of the Northern abbeys, and would remain so until the
Dissolution of the Monasteries. Other Cistercian abbeys are at
Rievaulx,
Kirkstall and
Byland. The 7th-century
Whitby Abbey
Whitby Abbey was a 7th-century Christian monastery that later became a Benedictine abbey. The abbey church was situated overlooking the North Sea on the East Cliff above Whitby in North Yorkshire, England, a centre of the medieval Northumbrian ...
was
Benedictine
, image = Medalla San Benito.PNG
, caption = Design on the obverse side of the Saint Benedict Medal
, abbreviation = OSB
, formation =
, motto = (English: 'Pray and Work')
, foun ...
and
Bolton Abbey
Bolton Abbey in Wharfedale, North Yorkshire, England, takes its name from the ruins of the 12th-century Augustinian monastery now known as Bolton Priory. The priory, closed in the 1539 Dissolution of the Monasteries ordered by King He ...
,
Augustinian. A significant
Flemish
Flemish (''Vlaams'') is a Low Franconian dialect cluster of the Dutch language. It is sometimes referred to as Flemish Dutch (), Belgian Dutch ( ), or Southern Dutch (). Flemish is native to Flanders, a historical region in northern Belgium; ...
immigration followed the conquest, which likely populated much of the desolated regions of Cumbria, and which was persistent enough that the town of
Beverley
Beverley is a market and minster town and a civil parish in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England, of which it is the county town. The town centre is located south-east of York's centre and north-west of City of Hull.
The town is known fo ...
in the East Riding of Yorkshire still had an
ethnic enclave
In sociology, an ethnic enclave is a geographic area with high ethnic concentration, characteristic cultural identity, and economic activity. The term is usually used to refer to either a residential area or a workspace with a high concentration ...
called Flemingate in the thirteenth century.
During
the Anarchy, Scotland invaded Northern England and took much of the land north of the
Tees. In
the 1139 peace treaty that followed, Prince
Henry of Scotland
Henry of Scotland (''Eanric mac Dabíd'', 1114 – 12 June 1152) was heir apparent to the Kingdom of Alba. He was also the 3rd Earl of Northumbria and the 3rd Earl of Huntingdon. He was the son of King David I of Scotland and Queen Maud, 2nd Cou ...
was made
Earl of Northumberland
The title of Earl of Northumberland has been created several times in the Peerage of England and of Great Britain, succeeding the title Earl of Northumbria. Its most famous holders are the House of Percy (''alias'' Perci), who were the most po ...
and kept the counties of Cumberland, Westmorland and Northumbria, as well as part of Lancashire. These reverted to English control in 1157, establishing for the most part the modern England–Scotland border. The region also saw violence during
The Great Raid of 1322
The Great Raid of 1322 was a major raid carried out by Robert the Bruce, during the First Scottish War of Independence, on Northern England between 30 September and 2 November 1322, resulting in the Battle of Old Byland. Numerous raids began ...
when
Robert the Bruce
Robert I (11 July 1274 – 7 June 1329), popularly known as Robert the Bruce (Scottish Gaelic: ''Raibeart an Bruis''), was King of Scots from 1306 to his death in 1329. One of the most renowned warriors of his generation, Robert eventual ...
invaded and raided the whole of Northern England. There was also the
Wars of the Roses
The Wars of the Roses (1455–1487), known at the time and for more than a century after as the Civil Wars, were a series of civil wars fought over control of the English throne in the mid-to-late fifteenth century. These wars were fought bet ...
, including the decisive
Battle of Wakefield, although the modern-day conception of the war as a conflict between Lancashire and Yorkshire is anachronistic –
Lancastrians recruited from across Northern England, including Yorkshire, even requiring mercenaries from
Scotland
Scotland (, ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a Anglo-Scottish border, border with England to the southeast ...
and
France
France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its metropolitan area ...
, while the
Yorkists drew most of their power from Southern England, Wales and Ireland. The
Anglo-Scottish Wars
The Anglo-Scottish Wars comprise the various battles which continued to be fought between the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland from the time of the Wars of Independence in the early 14th century through to the latter years of the ...
also touched the region, and in just 400 years,
Berwick-upon-Tweed
Berwick-upon-Tweed (), sometimes known as Berwick-on-Tweed or simply Berwick, is a town and civil parish in Northumberland, England, south of the Anglo-Scottish border, and the northernmost town in England. The 2011 United Kingdom census reco ...
– now the northernmost town in England – changed hands more than a dozen times. The wars also saw thousands of Scots settle south of the border, chiefly in the border counties and Yorkshire.
Early modern era
After the
English Reformation, the North saw several Catholic uprisings, including the
Lincolnshire Rising,
Bigod's Rebellion in Cumberland and Westmorland, and largest of all, the Yorkshire-based
Pilgrimage of Grace
The Pilgrimage of Grace was a popular revolt beginning in Yorkshire in October 1536, before spreading to other parts of Northern England including Cumberland, Northumberland, and north Lancashire, under the leadership of Robert Aske. The "most ...
, all against
Henry VIII.
His daughter
Elizabeth I
Elizabeth I (7 September 153324 March 1603) was List of English monarchs, Queen of England and List of Irish monarchs, Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death in 1603. Elizabeth was the last of the five House of Tudor monarchs and is ...
faced another Catholic rebellion, the
Rising of the North
The Rising of the North of 1569, also called the Revolt of the Northern Earls or Northern Rebellion, was an unsuccessful attempt by Catholic nobles from Northern England to depose Queen Elizabeth I of England and replace her with Mary, Queen of ...
. The region would become the centre of
recusancy
Recusancy (from la, recusare, translation=to refuse) was the state of those who remained loyal to the Catholic Church and refused to attend Church of England services after the English Reformation.
The 1558 Recusancy Acts passed in the reign ...
as prominent Catholic families in Cumbria, Lancashire and Yorkshire refused to convert to Protestantism. Royal power over the region was exercised through the
Council of the North
The Council of the North was an administrative body first set up in 1484 by King Richard III of England, to improve access to conciliar justice in Northern England. This built upon steps by King Edward IV of England in delegating authority in the ...
at
King's Manor
The King's Manor is a Grade I listed building in York, England, and is part of the University of York. It lies on Exhibition Square, in the city centre.
History
King's Manor was originally built to house the abbots of St Mary's Abbey, York. ...
, York, which was founded in 1484 by Richard III. The Council existed intermittently for the next two centuries – its final incarnation was created in the aftermath of the Pilgrimage of Grace and was chiefly an institution for providing order and dispensing justice.
Northern England was a focal point for fighting during the
Wars of the Three Kingdoms
The Wars of the Three Kingdoms were a series of related conflicts fought between 1639 and 1653 in the kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland, then separate entities united in a personal union under Charles I. They include the 1639 to 1640 B ...
. The border counties were invaded by Scotland in the
Second Bishops' War, and at the 1640
Treaty of Ripon
The Treaty of Ripon was an agreement signed by Charles I, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the Scottish Covenanters on 28 October 1640, in the aftermath of the Second Bishops' War.
The Bishops' Wars were fought by the Covenanters to ...
King Charles I was forced to temporarily cede Northumberland and County Durham to the Scots and pay to keep the Scottish armies there. To raise enough funds and ratify the final peace treaty, Charles had to call what became the
Long Parliament
The Long Parliament was an English Parliament which lasted from 1640 until 1660. It followed the fiasco of the Short Parliament, which had convened for only three weeks during the spring of 1640 after an 11-year parliamentary absence. In Septem ...
, beginning the process that led to the
First English Civil War
The First English Civil War took place in England and Wales from 1642 to 1646, and forms part of the 1639 to 1653 Wars of the Three Kingdoms. They include the Bishops' Wars, the Irish Confederate Wars, the Second English Civil War, the Anglo ...
. In 1641, the Long Parliament abolished the Council of the North for perceived abuses during the
Personal Rule
The Personal Rule (also known as the Eleven Years' Tyranny) was the period from 1629 to 1640, when King Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland ruled without recourse to Parliament. The King claimed that he was entitled to do this under the Roya ...
period.
By the time war broke out in 1642, King Charles had moved his court to York, and Northern England was to become a major base of the
Royalist
A royalist supports a particular monarch as head of state for a particular kingdom, or of a particular dynastic claim. In the abstract, this position is royalism. It is distinct from monarchism, which advocates a monarchical system of governm ...
forces until they were routed at the
Battle of Marston Moor
The Battle of Marston Moor was fought on 2 July 1644, during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms of 1639 – 1653. The combined forces of the English Parliamentarians under Lord Fairfax and the Earl of Manchester and the Scottish Covenanters und ...
.
Industrial Revolution
![Salts Mill](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Salts_Mill.jpeg)
At the beginning of the
Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States, that occurred during the period from around 1760 to about 1820–1840. This transition included going f ...
, Northern England had plentiful coal and
water power
Hydropower (from el, ὕδωρ, "water"), also known as water power, is the use of falling or fast-running water to produce electricity or to power machines. This is achieved by converting the gravitational potential or kinetic energy of a ...
while the poor agriculture in the uplands meant that labour in the area was cheap. Mining and milling, which had been practised on a small scale in the area for generations, began to grow and centralise.
The boom in
industrial textile manufacture is sometimes attributed to the damp climate and
soft water making it easier to wash and work fibres, although the success of Northern fabric mills has no single clear source.
Readily available coal and the discovery of large iron deposits in Cumbria and
Cleveland
Cleveland ( ), officially the City of Cleveland, is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. Located in the northeastern part of the state, it is situated along the southern shore of Lake Erie, across the U.S. ...
allowed ironmaking and, with the invention of the
Bessemer process
The Bessemer process was the first inexpensive industrial process for the mass production of steel from molten pig iron before the development of the open hearth furnace. The key principle is removal of impurities from the iron by oxidation ...
,
steelmaking
Steelmaking is the process of producing steel from iron ore and carbon/or scrap. In steelmaking, impurities such as nitrogen, silicon, phosphorus, sulfur and excess carbon (the most important impurity) are removed from the sourced iron, and alloy ...
to take root in the region. High quality steel in turn fed the
shipyards that opened along the coasts, especially on Tyneside and at
Barrow-in-Furness
Barrow-in-Furness is a port town in Cumbria, England. Historic counties of England, Historically in Lancashire, it was incorporated as a municipal borough in 1867 and merged with Dalton-in-Furness Urban District in 1974 to form the Borough of B ...
.
![Liverpool Pier Head](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Liverpool_Pier_Head.jpg)
The
Great Famine in Ireland of the 1840s drove migrants across the
Irish Sea
The Irish Sea or , gv, Y Keayn Yernagh, sco, Erse Sie, gd, Muir Èireann , Ulster-Scots: ''Airish Sea'', cy, Môr Iwerddon . is an extensive body of water that separates the islands of Ireland and Great Britain. It is linked to the Ce ...
, and many settled in the industrial cities of the North, especially Manchester and Liverpool – at the
1851 census, 13% of the population of Manchester and
Salford
Salford () is a city and the largest settlement in the City of Salford metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England. In 2011, Salford had a population of 103,886. It is also the second and only other city in the metropolitan county afte ...
were Irish-born, and in Liverpool the figure was 22%. In response there was a wave of
anti-Catholic
Anti-Catholicism is hostility towards Catholics or opposition to the Catholic Church, its clergy, and/or its adherents. At various points after the Reformation, some majority Protestant states, including England, Prussia, Scotland, and the Uni ...
riots and Protestant
Orange Orders proliferated across Northern England, chiefly in Lancashire, but also elsewhere in the North. By 1881 there were 374 Orange organisations in Lancashire, 71 in the North East, and 42 in Yorkshire. From further afield, Northern England saw immigration from European countries such as Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia and Scandinavia. Some immigrants were well-to-do industrialists seeking to do business in the booming industrial cities, some were escaping poverty, some were servants or slaves, some were sailors who chose to settle in the port towns, some were Jews fleeing
pogrom
A pogrom () is a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, particularly Jews. The term entered the English language from Russian to describe 19th- and 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russia ...
s on the continent, and some were migrants originally stranded at Liverpool after attempting to catch an onwards ship to the United States or to colonies of the
British Empire
The British Empire was composed of the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates, and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom and its predecessor states. It began with the overseas possessions and trading posts e ...
.
At the same time, hundreds of thousands from depressed rural areas of the North emigrated, chiefly to the US, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
Deindustrialisation and modern history
![The River Tyne & Baltic Flour Mills (7880784038)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/The_River_Tyne_%26_Baltic_Flour_Mills_%287880784038%29.jpg)
The
First World War
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
was the turning point for the economy of Northern England. In the
interwar years
In the history of the 20th century, the interwar period lasted from 11 November 1918 to 1 September 1939 (20 years, 9 months, 21 days), the end of the First World War to the beginning of the Second World War. The interwar period was relative ...
, the Northern economy began to be eclipsed by the South – in 1913–1914, unemployment in "outer Britain" (the North, plus Scotland and Wales) was 2.6% while the rate in Southern England was more than double that at 5.5%, but in 1937 during the
Great Depression the outer British unemployment rate was 16.1% and the Southern rate was less than half that at 7.1%. The weakening economy and
interwar unemployment caused several episodes of social unrest in the region, including the
1926 general strike
The 1926 general strike in the United Kingdom was a general strike that lasted nine days, from 4 to 12 May 1926. It was called by the General Council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in an unsuccessful attempt to force the British governme ...
and the
Jarrow March
The Jarrow March of 5–31 October 1936, also known as the Jarrow Crusade, was an organised protest against the unemployment and poverty suffered in the English town of Jarrow, near Newcastle upon Tyne, during the 1930s. Around 200 men (or "Cru ...
. The Great Depression highlighted the weakness of Northern England's specialised economy: as world trade declined, demand for ships, steel, coal and textiles all fell. For the most part, Northern factories were still using nineteenth-century technology, and were not able to keep up with advances in industries such as motors, chemicals and electricals, while the expansion of the
electric grid
An electrical grid is an interconnected network for electricity delivery from producers to consumers. Electrical grids vary in size and can cover whole countries or continents. It consists of:Kaplan, S. M. (2009). Smart Grid. Electrical Power ...
removed the North's advantages in terms of power generation and meant it was now more economic to build new factories in the Midlands or South.
The industrial concentration in Northern England made it a major target for
Luftwaffe
The ''Luftwaffe'' () was the aerial-warfare branch of the German ''Wehrmacht'' before and during World War II. Germany's military air arms during World War I, the ''Luftstreitkräfte'' of the Imperial Army and the '' Marine-Fliegerabtei ...
attacks during the
Second World War
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...
.
The Blitz
The Blitz was a German bombing campaign against the United Kingdom in 1940 and 1941, during the Second World War. The term was first used by the British press and originated from the term , the German word meaning 'lightning war'.
The Germa ...
of 1940–1941 saw major raids on
Barrow-in-Furness
Barrow-in-Furness is a port town in Cumbria, England. Historic counties of England, Historically in Lancashire, it was incorporated as a municipal borough in 1867 and merged with Dalton-in-Furness Urban District in 1974 to form the Borough of B ...
,
Hull,
Leeds
Leeds () is a city and the administrative centre of the City of Leeds district in West Yorkshire, England. It is built around the River Aire and is in the eastern foothills of the Pennines. It is also the third-largest settlement (by popula ...
,
Manchester
Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The t ...
,
Merseyside
Merseyside ( ) is a metropolitan and ceremonial county in North West England, with a population of 1.38 million. It encompasses both banks of the Mersey Estuary and comprises five metropolitan boroughs: Knowsley, St Helens, Sefton, Wi ...
,
Newcastle Newcastle usually refers to:
*Newcastle upon Tyne, a city and metropolitan borough in Tyne and Wear, England
*Newcastle-under-Lyme, a town in Staffordshire, England
*Newcastle, New South Wales, a metropolitan area in Australia, named after Newcastle ...
and
Sheffield
Sheffield is a city in South Yorkshire, England, whose name derives from the River Sheaf which runs through it. The city serves as the administrative centre of the City of Sheffield. It is historically part of the West Riding of Yorkshire a ...
with thousands killed and significant damage to the cities. Liverpool, a vital port for supplies from North America, was especially hard hit – the city was the most bombed in the UK outside London and Hull, with around 4,000 deaths across Merseyside and most of the city centre destroyed. Hull, the worst bombed city outside of London suffered damage to 98% of all buildings, the highest percentage of any town or city. The rebuilding that followed, and the simultaneous
slum clearance that saw whole neighbourhoods demolished and rebuilt, transformed the faces of Northern cities. Immigration from the "
New Commonwealth
The Commonwealth of Nations, simply referred to as the Commonwealth, is a political association of 56 member states, the vast majority of which are former territories of the British Empire. The chief institutions of the organisation are the Co ...
", especially
Pakistan
Pakistan ( ur, ), officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan ( ur, , label=none), is a country in South Asia. It is the world's fifth-most populous country, with a population of almost 243 million people, and has the world's second-lar ...
and
Bangladesh
Bangladesh (}, ), officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh, is a country in South Asia. It is the eighth-most populous country in the world, with a population exceeding 165 million people in an area of . Bangladesh is among the mos ...
, starting in the 1950s reshaped Northern England once more, and there are now significant populations from the
Indian subcontinent
The Indian subcontinent is a list of the physiographic regions of the world, physiographical region in United Nations geoscheme for Asia#Southern Asia, Southern Asia. It is situated on the Indian Plate, projecting southwards into the Indian O ...
in towns and cities such as Bradford, Leeds,
Preston and Sheffield.
Deindustrialisation continued and unemployment gradually increased during the 1970s, but accelerated during the government of
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher (; 13 October 19258 April 2013) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She was the first female British prime ...
, who chose not to encourage growth in the North if it risked growth in the South.
The era saw the
1984–85 miners' strike, which brought hardship for many Northern mining towns. Northern
metropolitan county councils, which were Labour strongholds often with very left-wing leadership (such as
Militant-dominated Liverpool and the so-called "
People's Republic of South Yorkshire"), had high-profile conflicts with the national government. The increasing awareness of the North–South divide strengthened the distinct Northern English identity, which, despite regeneration in some of the major cities, remains to this day.
The region saw several
IRA
Ira or IRA may refer to:
*Ira (name), a Hebrew, Sanskrit, Russian or Finnish language personal name
*Ira (surname), a rare Estonian and some other language family name
*Iran, UNDP code IRA
Law
*Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, US, on status of ...
attacks during
the Troubles
The Troubles ( ga, Na Trioblóidí) were an ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland that lasted about 30 years from the late 1960s to 1998. Also known internationally as the Northern Ireland conflict, it is sometimes described as an " ...
, including the
M62 coach bombing, the
Warrington bomb attacks
The Warrington bombings were two separate bomb attacks that took place during early 1993 in Warrington, Cheshire, England. The first attack happened on 26 February, when a bomb exploded at a gas storage facility. This first explosion caused e ...
and the
1992 and
1996 Manchester bombing
The 1996 Manchester bombing was an attack carried out by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) on Saturday, 15 June 1996. The IRA detonated a lorry bomb on Corporation Street in the centre of Manchester, England. It was the biggest ...
s. The latter was the largest bomb detonation in Great Britain since the end of the Second World War, and damaged or destroyed much of central Manchester. The attack led to Manchester's ageing infrastructure being rebuilt and modernised, sparking the regeneration of the city and making it a leading example of post-industrial redevelopment followed by other cities in the region and beyond.
Demographics
![NorthernEnglandPopulationPie](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/NorthernEnglandPopulationPie.svg)
At the 2011 census, Northern England had a population of 14,933,000 – a growth of 5.1% since 2001 – in 6,364,000 households, meaning that Northerners comprise 28% of the English population and 24% of the UK population. Taken overall, 8% of the population of Northern England were born overseas (3% from the European Union including Ireland and 5% from elsewhere), substantially less than the England and Wales average of 13%, and 5% define their nationality as something other than a UK or Irish identity. 90.5% of the population described themselves as white, compared to an England and Wales average of 85.9%; other ethnicities represented include Pakistani (2.9%), Indian (1.3%), Black (1.3%), Chinese (0.6%) and Bangladeshi (0.5%). The broad averages hide significant variation within the region:
Allerdale and
Redcar and Cleveland
Redcar and Cleveland is a borough with unitary authority status in North Yorkshire, England. Its main settlements are Redcar, South Bank, Eston, Brotton, Guisborough, the Greater Eston part of Middlesbrough, Loftus, Saltburn and Skelton. Th ...
had a greater percentage of the population identifying as White British (97.6% each) than any other district in England and Wales, while Manchester (66.5%), Bradford (67.4%) and
Blackburn with Darwen (69.1%) had among the lowest proportions of White British outside London.
Languages
![Nelson Street sign, Liverpool (2)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Nelson_Street_sign%2C_Liverpool_%282%29.jpg)
95% of the Northern population speak English as a first language – compared to an England and Wales average of 92% – and another 4% speak
English as a second language
English as a second or foreign language is the use of English by speakers with different native languages. Language education for people learning English may be known as English as a second language (ESL), English as a foreign language (EFL ...
well or very well.
The 5% of the population who have another native language are chiefly speakers of European or South Asian languages. At the 2011 census, the largest languages apart from English were
Polish (spoken by 0.7% of the population),
(0.6%) and
Punjabi (0.5%), and 0.4% of the population speak a
variety of Chinese
Chinese, also known as Sinitic, is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of hundreds of local varieties, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast of m ...
: a similar distribution to that in the whole of England.
Redcar and Cleveland has the largest proportion of the population speaking English as a first language in England, with 99.3%.
Religion
At the 2011 census, the North East and North West had the largest proportion of Christians in England and Wales; 67.5% and 67.3% respectively (the proportion in Yorkshire and the Humber was lower at 59.5%). Yorkshire and the Humber and the North West both had significant populations of Muslims – 6.2% and 5.1% respectively – while Muslims in the North East made up only 1.8% of the population. All other faiths combined comprised less than 2% of the population in all regions.
The census question on religion has been criticised by the
British Humanist Association
Humanists UK, known from 1967 until May 2017 as the British Humanist Association (BHA), is a charitable organisation which promotes secular humanism and aims to represent "people who seek to live good lives without religious or superstitious b ...
as
leading, and other surveys of religion tend to find very different results. The 2015 British Election Survey found 52% of Northerners identified as Christian (22%
Anglican, 14%
non-denominational Christian, 12%
Roman Catholic
Roman or Romans most often refers to:
*Rome, the capital city of Italy
* Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD
* Roman people, the people of ancient Rome
*'' Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a let ...
, 2%
Methodist
Methodism, also called the Methodist movement, is a group of historically related denominations of Protestant Christianity whose origins, doctrine and practice derive from the life and teachings of John Wesley. George Whitefield and John's ...
, and 2% other Christian denominations), 40% as non-religious, 5% as Muslim, 1% as Hindu and 1% as Jewish.
Health
![EWHealthMap](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/EWHealthMap.svg)
One major manifestation of the North–South divide is in health and
life expectancy
Life expectancy is a statistical measure of the average time an organism is expected to live, based on the year of its birth, current age, and other demographic factors like sex. The most commonly used measure is life expectancy at birth ...
statistics. All three Northern England statistical regions have lower than average life expectancies and higher than average rates of
cancer
Cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body. These contrast with benign tumors, which do not spread. Possible signs and symptoms include a lump, abnormal b ...
,
circulatory disease,
respiratory disease
Respiratory diseases, or lung diseases, are pathological conditions affecting the organs and tissues that make gas exchange difficult in air-breathing animals. They include conditions of the respiratory tract including the trachea, bronchi, bro ...
and
obesity
Obesity is a medical condition, sometimes considered a disease, in which excess body fat has accumulated to such an extent that it may negatively affect health. People are classified as obese when their body mass index (BMI)—a person's ...
.
Blackpool has the lowest life expectancy at birth in England – male life expectancy at birth between 2012 and 2014 was 74.7, against an England-wide average of 79.5 – and the majority of English districts in the bottom 50 were in the North East or the North West. However, regional differences do seem to be slowly narrowing: between 1991 and 1993 and 2012–2014, life expectancy in the North East increased by 6.0 years and in the North West by 5.8 years, the fastest increases in any region outside London, and the gap between life expectancy in the North East and South East is now 2.5 years, down from 2.9 in 1993.
These health inequalities manifested during the
COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identi ...
in high infection rates, death rates and
excess mortality
Excess may refer to:
* Angle excess, in spherical trigonometry
* Insurance excess, similar to a deductible
* Excess, in chemistry, a reagent that is not the limiting reagent
* "Excess", a song by Tricky from the album '' Blowback''
* ''Excess' ...
in Northern England, and in severe job losses in the following
Great Lockdown recession.
By June 2020, the infection rate in Northern England was nearly double that in London,
and a study by the Northern Health Science Alliance found that of the six worst affected areas in
England during the pandemic in their study, five were located in the North.
Education
Before the 19th century, there were no universities in Northern England. The first was the
University of Durham
Durham University (legally the University of Durham) is a collegiate university, collegiate public university, public research university in Durham, England, Durham, England, founded by an Act of Parliament in 1832 and incorporated by royal charte ...
, founded in 1832 and sometimes counted with the
ancient universities
The ancient universities are British and Irish medieval universities and early modern universities founded before the year 1600. Four of these are located in Scotland, two in England, and one in Ireland. The ancient universities in Britain and I ...
of
Oxford
Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...
and
Cambridge
Cambridge ( ) is a College town, university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cam ...
, although it post-dates them by many centuries. The next universities built in the North were part of the wave of
redbrick universities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, there are seven Northern institutions in the
Russell Group of leading research universities: Durham, the redbricks of
Leeds
Leeds () is a city and the administrative centre of the City of Leeds district in West Yorkshire, England. It is built around the River Aire and is in the eastern foothills of the Pennines. It is also the third-largest settlement (by popula ...
,
Liverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough in Merseyside, England. With a population of in 2019, it is the 10th largest English district by population and its metropolitan area is the fifth largest in the United Kingdom, with a populat ...
,
Manchester
Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The t ...
,
Newcastle Newcastle usually refers to:
*Newcastle upon Tyne, a city and metropolitan borough in Tyne and Wear, England
*Newcastle-under-Lyme, a town in Staffordshire, England
*Newcastle, New South Wales, a metropolitan area in Australia, named after Newcastle ...
and
Sheffield
Sheffield is a city in South Yorkshire, England, whose name derives from the River Sheaf which runs through it. The city serves as the administrative centre of the City of Sheffield. It is historically part of the West Riding of Yorkshire a ...
and the later
plate glass university
The term plate glass university or plateglass university refers to a group of universities in the United Kingdom established or promoted to university status in the 1960s. The original plate glass universities were established following decisi ...
of
York
York is a cathedral city with Roman origins, sited at the confluence of the rivers Ouse and Foss in North Yorkshire, England. It is the historic county town of Yorkshire. The city has many historic buildings and other structures, such as a ...
. These universities, together with plate-glass
Lancaster, form the
N8 Research Partnership
The N8 Research Partnership is a partnership created in 2006 of the eight most research-intensive universities in Northern England – Durham, Lancaster, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield and York. The N8 Research Partnership ...
.
There is a significant attainment gap between Northern and Southern schools, and pupils in the three Northern regions are less likely than the national average to achieve five higher-tier
GCSEs, although this may be down to economic disadvantages faced by Northern pupils rather than an actual difference in school quality. Northern students are under-represented at
Oxbridge, where three times as many places go to Southerners as to Northerners, and other Southern universities while Southerners are under-represented at leading Northern universities such as Sheffield, Manchester and Leeds. Due to the educational attainment and university admission disparities between north and south, there are calls for the government to invest in education in disadvantaged parts of Northern England to redress this.
Economy
Like the UK as a whole, the Northern English economy is now dominated by the
service sector – in September 2016, 82.2% of workers in the Northern statistical regions were employed in services, compared to 83.7% for the UK as a whole. Manufacturing now employs 9.5%, compared to the national average of 7.6%. The unemployment rate in Northern England is 5.3% compared to an England-wide and UK-wide average of 4.8%, and the North East has the highest unemployment rate in the UK, at 7.0% in December 2016, more than one
percentage point higher than any other region. In 2015, the
gross value added
In economics, gross value added (GVA) is the measure of the value of goods and services produced in an area, industry or sector of an economy. "Gross value added is the value of output minus the value of intermediate consumption; it is a measure o ...
(GVA) of the Northern English economy was £316 billion, and if it were an independent nation, it would be the tenth largest economy in Europe. The region does have poor growth and
productivity
Productivity is the efficiency of production of goods or services expressed by some measure. Measurements of productivity are often expressed as a ratio of an aggregate output to a single input or an aggregate input used in a production proces ...
rates compared to Southern England and to other EU countries.
Growth, employment and household income have lagged behind the South, and the five most
deprived districts in England are all in Northern England, as are ten of the twelve most declining major towns in the UK. The picture is not clear-cut, as the North has areas which are as wealthy as, if not wealthier than, fashionable Southern areas such as
Surrey. Yorkshire's
Golden Triangle which extends from north Leeds to
Harrogate
Harrogate ( ) is a spa town and the administrative centre of the Borough of Harrogate in North Yorkshire, England. Historically in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the town is a tourist destination and its visitor attractions include its spa w ...
and across to York is an example, as is Cheshire's
Golden Triangle, centred on
Alderley Edge
Alderley Edge is a village and civil parish in Cheshire, England. In 2011, it had a population of 4,780.
Alderley Edge is northwest of Macclesfield and south of Manchester, at the base of a steep and thickly wooded sandstone escarpment, Alder ...
.
There are major disparities even across individual cities:
Sheffield Hallam is one of the wealthiest constituencies in the country, and is the richest outside London and the South East, while
Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough
Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough is a List of United Kingdom Parliament constituencies, constituency represented in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, UK Parliament by Gi ...
, just on the other side of the city, is one of the most deprived.
Housing in Northern England is
more affordable than the UK average: the median house price in most Northern cities was below £200,000 in 2015 with typical increases of below 10% over the previous five years. However, some areas have seen house prices fall considerably, putting inhabitants at risk of
negative equity
Negative equity is a deficit of owner's equity, occurring when the value of an asset used to secure a loan is less than the outstanding balance on the loan. In the United States, assets (particularly real estate, whose loans are mortgages) with ne ...
.
The decline of coal mining and manufacturing in Northern England has led to comparisons with the
Rust Belt
The Rust Belt is a region of the United States that experienced industrial decline starting in the 1950s. The U.S. manufacturing sector as a percentage of the U.S. GDP peaked in 1953 and has been in decline since, impacting certain regions an ...
in the United States. To stimulate the Northern economy, the government has organised a series of programmes to invest in and develop the region, of which the latest as of 2017 is the
Northern Powerhouse
The Northern Powerhouse is a proposal to boost economic growth in the North of England by the 2010–15 coalition government and 2015–2016 Conservative government in the United Kingdom, particularly in the " Core Cities" of Hull, Manchester ...
. The North has also been a significant recipient of
European Union Structural Funds. Between 2007 and 2013, EU funds created around 70,000 jobs in the region, and the majority of Northern Powerhouse funding comes from the
European Regional Development Fund
The European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) is one of the European Structural and Investment Funds allocated by the European Union. Its purpose is to transfer money from richer regions (not countries), and invest it in the infrastructure and s ...
and the
European Investment Bank. The loss of these funds following
Brexit
Brexit (; a portmanteau of "British exit") was the withdrawal of the United Kingdom (UK) from the European Union (EU) at 23:00 GMT on 31 January 2020 (00:00 1 February 2020 CET).The UK also left the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC ...
, combined with potential reductions in exports to the EU, has been identified as a threat to Northern growth.
Public sector
The
public sector
The public sector, also called the state sector, is the part of the economy composed of both public services and public enterprises. Public sectors include the public goods and governmental services such as the military, law enforcement, inf ...
is a major employer in Northern England. Between 2000 and 2008, the majority of new jobs created in Northern England were for the government and its suppliers and contractors.
All three Northern regions have public sector employment above the national average, and North East has the highest level in England with 20.2% of the workforce in the public sector as of 2016 – down from 23.4% a decade earlier. The
austerity programme under the government of
David Cameron saw significant cuts to public services, and the reduction in public sector employment resulted in job losses for around 3% of the Northern England workforce with significant impact on the regional economy.
Agriculture and fisheries
![Track of Railway, from Ingleby Incline at Bank Foot Farm - geograph](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/Track_of_Railway%2C_from_Ingleby_Incline_at_Bank_Foot_Farm_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1594044.jpg)
There are of farmland in Northern England.
The rough Pennine terrain means that most of Northern England is unsuited for growing crops; like Scotland, Northern farming was traditionally dominated by
oat
The oat (''Avena sativa''), sometimes called the common oat, is a species of cereal grain grown for its seed, which is known by the same name (usually in the plural, unlike other cereals and pseudocereals). While oats are suitable for human con ...
s, which grow better than
wheat
Wheat is a grass widely cultivated for its seed, a cereal grain that is a worldwide staple food. The many species of wheat together make up the genus ''Triticum'' ; the most widely grown is common wheat (''T. aestivum''). The archaeologi ...
in poor soil.
Today, the mix of cereals and vegetables grown is similar to that of the UK as a whole, but only a minority of land is
arable. Only 32% of Northern farmland is primarily used for growing crops, compared to 49% for England as a whole. Conversely, 57% of the land is given over to rearing
livestock
Livestock are the domesticated animals raised in an agricultural setting to provide labor and produce diversified products for consumption such as meat, eggs, milk, fur, leather, and wool. The term is sometimes used to refer solely to animal ...
, and 33% of England's cattle, 43% of its pigs and 46% of its sheep and lambs are reared in the North.
The only part of the region that is predominantly given over to crops is the land around the Humber estuary, where the well-drained fens result in excellent quality land.
The lowland Cheshire Plain is mostly given over to dairy farming, while in the Pennines and Cheviots grazing sheep play an important role not just in agriculture but also in land management more generally.
Heather moorland in the Pennine uplands is home to
driven grouse shooting
Driven grouse shooting is the hunting of the red grouse, a field sport of the United Kingdom. The grouse-shooting season extends from 12 August, often called the " Glorious Twelfth", to 10 December each year. Large numbers of grouse are driven to ...
from 12 August (the
Glorious Twelfth
The Glorious Twelfth is the twelfth day of August, the start of the shooting season for red grouse (''Lagopus lagopus scotica''), and to a lesser extent the ptarmigan (''Lagopus muta'') in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This is one of the bu ...
) until 10 December every year. The number of grouse moors in Northern England is a major threat to natural predators, which are often killed by gamekeepers to protect grouse, and as a result, the
Cumbria Wildlife Trust
Cumbria Wildlife Trust is a wildlife trust covering the county of Cumbria, England. It runs more than 40 nature reserves, and aims to broaden the awareness and knowledge of the wildlife in the county.
History
The trust was established in 1962 as ...
describes the North's moors as a "black hole" for the endangered hen harrier.
Sea fishing is an important industry for Northern coastal towns. Major fishing ports include Fleetwood, Grimsby, Hull and Whitby. At its height, Grimsby was the largest fishing port in the world, but the Northern fishing industry suffered greatly from a series of events in the second half of the twentieth century: the Cod Wars with Iceland and establishment of the exclusive economic zone ended British access to rich North Atlantic fishing grounds, while the North Sea was badly overfishing, overfished and the European Common Fisheries Policy put strict quotas on catches to protect the almost depleted stocks.
Grimsby is now transitioning to the processing of imported seafood and to offshore wind to replace its fishing fleet.
Manufacturing and energy
Northern England has a strong export-based economy, with balance of trade, trade more balanced than the UK average, and the North East is the only region of England to regularly export more than it imports.
Chemicals, vehicles, machinery and other manufactured goods make up the majority of Northern exports, just over half of which go to EU countries.
Major manufacturing plants include car plants at Vauxhall Ellesmere Port, Halewood Body & Assembly, Jaguar Land Rover Halewood and Nissan Motor Manufacturing UK, Nissan Sunderland, the Leyland Trucks factory, the Hitachi Newton Aycliffe train plant, the Humber Refinery, Humber, Lindsey Oil Refinery, Lindsey and Stanlow Refinery, Stanlow oil refineries, the North East of England Process Industry Cluster, NEPIC cluster of chemical works based around Teesside, and the nuclear processing facilities at Springfields and Sellafield.
Offshore drilling, Offshore oil and gas from North Sea and Irish Sea, and more recently offshore wind power, are significant components in Northern England's energy mix. Although Coal mining in the United Kingdom, deep-pit coal mining in the UK ended in 2015 with the closure of Kellingley Colliery, North Yorkshire, there are still several Open-pit coal mining in the United Kingdom, open-pit mines in the area. Shale gas is especially prevalent across Northern England, although plans to extract it through hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") have proven to be controversial.
Retail and services
![Leeds CBD at night](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Leeds_CBD_at_night.jpg)
Around 10% of the Northern England workforce is employed in retail.
[IPPR North (2012), pp. 190–192] Of the List of supermarket chains in the United Kingdom, Big Four supermarkets in the UK, two – Asda and Morrisons – are based in the North. Northern England was the birthplace of the modern cooperative movement, and the Manchester-based Co-operative Group has the highest revenue of any firm in the North West.
[Wilson, J. F., Webster, A. and Vorberg-Rugh, R. (2013) "Building Co-operation: A business history of The Co-operative Group", Oxford University Press, Oxford] The area is also home to many online retailers, with startups emerging around tech hubs in Northern cities.
With urban regeneration, high-value service sector industries such as corporate services and financial services have taken root in Northern England, with major hubs around Leeds and Manchester.
Call centres – attracted by low labour costs and a preference for Northern English accents among the public – have replaced heavy industry as major employers of unskilled workers, with more than 5% of workers in all Northern England regions working in one.
High-tech and research
Together, the N8 research universities have over 190,000 students and contribute more to the Northern economy in terms of GVA than agriculture, car manufacturing or media.
Discoveries and inventions at these universities have resulted in University spin-off, spin-offs worth hundreds of millions to local economies: the discovery of graphene at the University of Manchester produced the National Graphene Institute and the Sir Henry Royce Institute for Advanced Materials, while robotics research at the University of Sheffield led to the development of the Advanced Manufacturing Park.
Recent decades have seen the growth of high-tech companies based around Northern England's major cities. There are eleven high-tech firms worth over $1 billion based in the region, and digital industries support around 300,000 jobs.
Game development, online retail, health technology and analytics are among the major high-tech sectors in the North.
Leisure and tourism
The expansion of the railway network in the second half of the nineteenth century meant most in the North lived within reach of the coast, and seaside towns saw a major tourism boom. By around 1870 Blackpool on the Lancashire coast had become overwhelmingly the most popular destination – not just for Northern families, but many from the Midlands and Scotland as well. Other resorts popular with Northerners included Morecambe in northern Lancashire, Whitley Bay near Newcastle, Whitby in
North Yorkshire
North Yorkshire is the largest ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county (lieutenancy area) in England, covering an area of . Around 40% of the county is covered by National parks of the United Kingdom, national parks, including most of ...
, and New Brighton, Merseyside, New Brighton on the
Wirral Peninsula
Wirral (; ), known locally as The Wirral, is a peninsula in North West England. The roughly rectangular peninsula is about long and wide and is bounded by the River Dee to the west (forming the boundary with Wales), the River Mersey to ...
, as well as Rhyl over the border in North Wales.
The same social forces that had built these resorts in the nineteenth century proved to be their undoing in the twentieth. Transport links continued to improve and it became possible to travel overseas quickly and affordably. The Belgian coast at Ostend became popular with Northern working-class tourists in the first half of the twentieth century, and the introduction of package holidays in the 1970s was the death of most Northern seaside resorts. Blackpool has maintained a focus on tourism, and remains one of the most visited towns in England, but visitor numbers are far below their peak and the town's economy has suffered – both employment rates and average earnings remain below the regional average.
The wild landscapes of the North are a major draw for tourists, and many urban areas are looking for regeneration through industrial tourism, industrial, heritage tourism, heritage and cultural tourism: of the 24 National Museums of the United Kingdom, national museums and galleries in England outside London, 14 are located in the North. In 2015, Northern England received around a quarter of all domestic tourism within the UK, with 28.7 million visitors in 2015, but only 8% of international tourists to the United Kingdom visit the region.
Media
Television
As part of a drive to reduce media centralisation in London, the BBC and ITV have moved much of their programme production to MediaCityUK in Salford and Channel 4 has moved its headquarters to Leeds. Of the four national evening soap operas, three are set and filmed in Northern England (''Coronation Street'' in Manchester, ''Emmerdale'' in the Yorkshire Dales and ''Hollyoaks'' in Liverpool but set in Chester) and these are important to the local TV industry – the commitment to ''Emmerdale'' saved ITV Yorkshire's Leeds Studios from closure.
The region also has a reputation for drama serials and has produced some the most successful and acclaimed series of recent decades, including ''Boys from the Blackstuff'', ''Our Friends in the North'', ''Clocking Off'', ''Shameless (UK TV series), Shameless'', ''Waterloo Road (TV series), Waterloo Road'' and ''Last Tango in Halifax''.
Newspapers
Since ''The Guardian'' (formerly ''The Manchester Guardian'') moved to London in 1964, no major national paper is based in the North, and Northern news stories tend to be poorly covered in the national press.
''The Yorkshire Post'' promotes itself as "Yorkshire's national paper" and covers some national and international stories, but is primarily focused on news from Yorkshire and the North East. An attempt in 2016 to create a dedicated North-focused national newspaper, ''24'', failed after six weeks. Across Northern England as a whole, ''The Sun (United Kingdom), The Sun'' is the best selling newspaper, but the Hillsborough disaster#The Sun, ongoing boycott around Merseyside following the newspaper's coverage of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster has seen the paper fall behind both the ''Daily Mail'' and the ''Daily Mirror'' in the North West.
In general national readership in the North drags behind that of the South; the ''Mirror'' and the ''Daily Star (British newspaper), Daily Star'' are the only national papers with more readers in Northern England than in the South East and London.
Local newspapers are the top-selling titles in both the North East and Yorkshire and the Humber, although Northern regional newspapers have seen steep declines in readership in recent years.
Only seven daily Northern papers had circulation figures above 25,000 in June 2016: ''Manchester Evening News'', ''Liverpool Echo'', ''Hull Daily Mail'', ''Newcastle Chronicle'', ''The Yorkshire Post'' and ''The Northern Echo''.
Communications
![BDUK Cumbria Fell End21 (14040070556)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/BDUK_Cumbria_Fell_End21_%2814040070556%29.jpg)
Manchester Network Access Point is the only internet exchange point in the UK outside London, and forms the main hub for the region. Household internet access in Northern England is at or above the UK average, but speeds and broadband penetration vary greatly. In 2013 the average speed in central Manchester was 60 Mbit/s, while in nearby Warrington the average speed was only 6.2 Mbit/s. Hull, which is unique in the UK in that KCOM Group, its telephone network was never nationalised, has simultaneously some of the fastest and slowest internet speeds in the country: many households have "ultrafast" fibre optic broadband as standard, but it is also one of only two places in the UK where over 30% of businesses receive less than 10 Mbit/s. Speeds are especially poor in the rural parts of the North, with many small towns and villages completely without high speed access. Some areas have therefore formed their own community enterprises, such as Broadband 4 Rural North in Lancashire and Cybermoor in Cumbria, to install high-speed internet connections. Mobile broadband coverage is similarly patchy, with 3G and 4G almost universal in cities but unavailable in large parts of Yorkshire, the North East and Cumbria.
Culture and identity
![Fly-Angel](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/Fly-Angel.jpg)
The individual regions of the North have had their own identities and cultures for centuries, but with industrialisation, mass media and the opening of the North–South divide, a common Northern identity began to develop. This identity was initially a reactionary response to Southern prejudices—the North of the nineteenth century was largely depicted as a dirty, wild and uncultured place, even in sympathetic depictions such as Elizabeth Gaskell's 1855 novel ''North and South (Gaskell novel), North and South''—but became an affirmation of what Northerners saw as their own personal strengths. Traits stereotypically associated with Northern England are Honesty, straight-talking, Grit (personality trait), grit and warmheartedness, as compared to the supposedly effete Southerners. Northern England—especially Lancashire, but also Yorkshire and the North East—has a tradition of matriarchy, matriarchal families, where the Housewife, woman of the house runs the home and controls the family's finances. This too has its roots in industrialisation, when mills offered well-paid work for women: during depressions when demand for coal and steel were low, women were often the main breadwinners. Northern women are still stereotyped as strong-willed and independent, or affectionately as Battle-axe (woman), battle-axes.
"It's grim up north"
The phrase ''it's grim up north'' is associated with coal mining, industrial mills, weather and the way of life in the north of England during the Victorian and post World War I eras, when mills and coal mining, as well railways, child labour and slums were common. The phrase is often used by those who are not from the north of England, who paint the north as being different to the south of England. The current mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham has quoted the north as being grim, but not a bad thing. The phrase was quoted in 1991 when the band The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu a.k.a. The KLF used it in relation to a lot of places in the north of England including
Cheshire,
Greater Manchester
Greater Manchester is a metropolitan county and combined authority area in North West England, with a population of 2.8 million; comprising ten metropolitan boroughs: Manchester, Salford, Bolton, Bury, Oldham, Rochdale, Stockport, Tam ...
,
Lancashire
Lancashire ( , ; abbreviated Lancs) is the name of a historic county, ceremonial county, and non-metropolitan county in North West England. The boundaries of these three areas differ significantly.
The non-metropolitan county of Lancash ...
,
Merseyside
Merseyside ( ) is a metropolitan and ceremonial county in North West England, with a population of 1.38 million. It encompasses both banks of the Mersey Estuary and comprises five metropolitan boroughs: Knowsley, St Helens, Sefton, Wi ...
and Yorkshire. As well as parts of the East Midlands Region and
Cumbria
Cumbria ( ) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in North West England, bordering Scotland. The county and Cumbria County Council, its local government, came into existence in 1974 after the passage of the Local Government Act 1972. C ...
and they use the phrase repeatedly in their It's Grim Up North, song of the same name.
Clothing
![Flat-cap](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Flat-cap.jpg)
The North of England is often stereotypically represented through the clothing worn by working-class men and women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Working men would wear a heavy jacket and trousers held up by suspenders, braces, an overcoat, and a hat, typically a flat cap, while women would wear a dress, or a skirt and blouse, with an apron on top as protection from dirt; in colder months they would often wear a shawl or headscarf.
The Maud (plaid), maud, a woollen plaid woven in a pattern of small black and white checks, was also popular in Northern England until the early twentieth century.
If not wearing leather lace-up shoes, some men and women would have worn Clog (British), English clogs, which were hardwearing and had replaceable soles and tips.
Factory workers tapping their feet in time with the click of machinery developed a type of folk clog dance referred to as ''Clog dancing, clogging'', which was intricately developed in the North.
In the second half of the twentieth century, these traditional clothes fell out of fashion. Other styles such as "Casual (subculture), casual clobber" (mainland European designer clothing brought back by touring football fans) and Sportswear (fashion), sportswear became more popular, and the influence of Northern bands and football teams helped spread them across the country.
In the twenty-first century, some traditional Northern items of clothing have begun to make a comeback – in particular, the flat cap.
Cuisine
Impressions of Northern English cuisine are still shaped by the working-class diet of the early twentieth century, which was heavy on offal, high in calories and often not particularly healthy. Dishes such as black pudding, tripe, mushy peas and meat pie remain stereotypical Northern English foods in the national imagination. As a result, there is a concerted effort among Northern chefs to improve the region's image.
Some Northern dishes such as Yorkshire pudding and Lancashire hotpot have spread across the UK, and only their names now hint at their origin. Among the Northern delicacies that have achieved Geographical indications and traditional specialities in the European Union, Protected Geographical Status are Cumberland sausage, traditional Cumberland sausage, traditional Grimsby smoked fish, Swaledale cheese, Rhubarb Triangle, Yorkshire forced rhubarb and Wensleydale cheese, Yorkshire Wensleydale.
The North is known for its often crumbly cheeses, of which Cheshire cheese is the earliest example. Unlike Southern cheeses like Cheddar cheese, Cheddar, Northern cheeses typically use uncooked milk and a pre-salted curd pressed under enormous weights, resulting in a moist, sharp-tasting cheese. Wensleydale, another crumbly cheese, is unusual in that it is often served as a side to sweet cakes, which are themselves well represented in Northern England. Parkin (cake), Parkin, an oatmeal cake with black treacle and ginger, is a traditional treat across the North on Bonfire Night, and the fruity scone-like singing hinny and fat rascal are popular in the North East and Yorkshire respectively.
While a variety of beers are popular across Northern England, the region is especially associated with brown ales such as Newcastle Brown Ale, Double Maxim Beer Company, Double Maxim and Samuel Smith's Nut Brown Ale. Beer in the North is usually served with a thick Beer head, head which accentuates the nutty, malty flavours preferred in Northern beers. On the non-alcoholic side, the North – in particular, Lancashire – was the hub of the temperance bar movement which popularised soft drinks such as dandelion and burdock, Tizer and Vimto.
According to ''The Tab'', the bakery chain Greggs is an integral part of Northern identity, using the number of people per Greggs as an indicator as to whether a town should be considered Northern.
Immigration to Northern England has shaped its cuisine. The Teesside parmo is one example, derived from chicken parmigiana, escalope Parmesan brought to the area by an Italian-American immigrant and adapted to the region's taste. There are large Chinatowns in Chinatown, Liverpool, Liverpool, Chinatown, Manchester, Manchester and Chinatown, Newcastle, Newcastle, and communities from the
Indian subcontinent
The Indian subcontinent is a list of the physiographic regions of the world, physiographical region in United Nations geoscheme for Asia#Southern Asia, Southern Asia. It is situated on the Indian Plate, projecting southwards into the Indian O ...
in all major towns.
Bradford has won the Federation of Specialist Restaurant's "Curry Capital" title six years in a row as of 2016, while the Curry Mile in Manchester formerly had the largest concentration of curry restaurants in the UK and now offers a wide range of South Asian cuisine, South Asian and Middle Eastern cuisine.
Music
Traditional folk music in Northern England is a combination of styles of England and Scotland – what is now called the Anglo-Scottish border ballad was once prevalent as far south as Lancashire.
In the Middle Ages, much of Northern folk was accompanied by bagpipes, with styles including the Lancashire bagpipe, Yorkshire bagpipe and Northumbrian smallpipes. These disappeared in the early nineteenth century from the industrialising south of the region, but remain in the music of Northumbria. The British brass band tradition began in Northern England at around the same time: the dismissal of the Cheshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire military bands after the Napoleonic Wars, combined with the desire of industrial communities to better themselves, led to the founding of civilian bands. These bands provided entertainment at community events and led protest marches during the era of Radicalism (historical)#Popular agitation, radical agitation.
Although the style has since spread across much of Great Britain, brass bands remain a stereotype of the North, and the Whit Friday#Brass band contests, Whit Friday brass band contests draw hundreds of bands from across the UK and further afield.
Northern England also has a thriving popular music scene. Influential movements include Merseybeat from the Liverpool area, which produced The Beatles, Northern soul, which brought Motown to England, and Madchester, the precursor to the rave scene. Across the Pennines, Sheffield is the birthplace of influential electronic pop bands from Cabaret Voltaire (band), Cabaret Voltaire to Pulp (band), Pulp, the New Yorkshire indie rock movement of the 2000s gave the country the Kaiser Chiefs and the Arctic Monkeys, and Teesside has a rock scene stretching from Chris Rea to Maxïmo Park.
The press frequently frames music stories and reviews in terms of cultural and class differences between North and South, notably in the 1960s Beatles and Rolling Stones rivalry, rivalry between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the 1990s Britpop#"The Battle of Britpop", Battle of Britpop between Oasis (band), Oasis and Blur (band), Blur.
File:Northumbrian pipers at Alwinton Border Shepherds Show October 2009 - geograph.org.uk - 1529325.jpg, Northumbrian pipers at Alwinton Border Shepherds Show.
File:Harrogate Band in Leeds.jpg, The Harrogate Band playing in Leeds, alt=A marching band with a variety of horns and drums.
Sport
![HeadingleyOblique](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/HeadingleyOblique.jpg)
Sport has been both one of the most unifying cultural forces in Northern England and, thanks to local rivalries such as the Lancashire–Yorkshire Roses rivalry, one of the most divisive. As huge numbers of people moved into recently built cities with little cultural heritage, local sports teams offered the population a sense of place and identity that was otherwise absent.
[ Adapted from ]
Many early Northern sports players were working class and needed to miss work to play, with their teams compensating them for lost wages. By contrast, Southern teams, drawing from the traditions of Public school (United Kingdom), public schools and
Oxbridge, put great emphasis on Amateur sports, amateurism and the Southern-dominated governing bodies forbade payments to players. This tension shaped the sports of association football and cricket (sport), cricket, and led to the schism between the two main forms of Rugby football, rugby. The North is also associated with the animal sports of dog racing with whippets, pigeon racing and ferret legging, although these are now far more popular in stereotype than in reality.
Manchester hosted the 2002 Commonwealth Games, which left it a legacy of sporting facilities including the City of Manchester Stadium, Manchester Aquatics Centre and the National Cycling Centre, headquarters of British Cycling. The List of Tour de France Grands Départs, Grand Départ for the 2014 Tour de France was in Leeds, and every year since Yorkshire has hosted the Tour de Yorkshire cycling event, part of the UCI Europe Tour. Tyneside meanwhile hosts the Great North Run, the UK's biggest mass-participation sporting event and the most popular half marathon in the world.
Association football
![Luis Suarez runs at Distin 5](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/Luis_Suarez_runs_at_Distin_5.jpg)
The first football club in the UK was Sheffield F.C., founded in 1857. Early Northern football teams tended to adopt the Sheffield Rules rather than the Laws of the Game (association football), Football Association Rules, but the two codes were merged in 1877. Many of the innovations of Sheffield Rules are now part of the global game, including Corner kick, corners, throw-ins, and Indirect free kick, free kicks for fouls.
1883 FA Cup Final, In 1883 Blackburn Olympic F.C., Blackburn Olympic, a team composed mainly of factory workers, became the first Northern team to win the FA Cup, and the next year Preston North End F.C., Preston North End won an FA Cup match against London-based Upton Park F.C., Upton Park.
Upton Park protested that Preston had broken FA rules by paying their players. In response, Preston withdrew from the competition and fellow Lancashire clubs Burnley F.C., Burnley and Great Lever F.C., Great Lever followed suit. The protest gathered momentum to the point where more than 30 clubs, predominantly from the North, announced that they would set up a rival British Football Association if the FA did not permit professionalism.
A schism was avoided in July 1885 when Professionalism in association football, professionalism was formally legalised in English football.
The English Football League, Football League was founded in 1888, and marked its independence from the London-based Football Association (FA) by establishing headquarters in Preston – the League retained a Northern identity even after it accepted several Southern teams into its ranks. Organised Women's association football, women's football followed as the workforces of majority-female factories of Northern England in the First World War entered the 1917–18 Tyne, Wear & Tees Munition Girls Cup – the world's first women's football tournament. However, the FA did not support women's football and Women's football in England#Banning, decline, and reappearance, banned it altogether in 1921. Intense List of sports rivalries in the United Kingdom, local derbies between neighbouring teams mean that there is less of a North–South rivalry than in some other sports.
![Funeral Procession (5969830903)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/Funeral_Procession_%285969830903%29.jpg)
Many of the powerhouses of English football came from the North – as of the 2020–21 Premier League, 2020–21 season, of the 123 top-flight league titles since 1888, 83 (67%) have been won by teams based north of Crewe.
[ Since this article, which quotes 116 league titles, there have been seven more titles, four won by a Northern team.] Everton F.C., Everton, Liverpool F.C., Liverpool, Manchester United F.C., Manchester United and Manchester City F.C., Manchester City are among the mainstays of the Premier League, while teams like Blackburn Rovers F.C., Blackburn Rovers, Middlesbrough F.C., Middlesbrough, Newcastle United F.C., Newcastle United and Sunderland A.F.C., Sunderland have had more inconsistent runs in recent years, regularly being promoted and relegated from the top flight.
Northern England is also the birthplace of the largest proportion the country's top players – as of Euro 2016, 537 Northerners had played for the England national football team, England team, compared to 266 Midlanders and 367 Southerners, and 15 of the 23 man squad for the 2018 FIFA World Cup, 2018 World Cup, as well as 14 of the 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup, 2019 Women's World Cup squad, were born in the region.
Rugby football
![Tetley's Festive Challenge (26th December 2014) 002](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/Tetley%27s_Festive_Challenge_%2826th_December_2014%29_002.JPG)
The Rugby Football Union, which enforced amateurism, suspended teams who compensated their players for missed work and injury, leading teams from Lancashire, Yorkshire and surrounding areas to split away in 1895 and form the Rugby Football League. Over time, the RFU and RFL adopted different rules and the two forms of the game – rugby union and rugby league – diverged. Rugby league's stronghold remains Northern England along the "M62 motorway, M62 corridor" between Liverpool and Hull.
As of the Super League XXVI, 2021 season, 11 of the 12 teams in the Super League (the highest level of rugby league in the Northern Hemisphere) are from Northern England, with one team from France, and the 14-team Championship (rugby league), Championship below it has 12 Northern teams, one London team and 1 French team.
Rugby union was not entirely driven from Northern England, and in the 1970s the region was home to several strong teams.
The high-water mark of rugby union in Northern England was the 1979 New Zealand rugby union tour of England, Scotland and Italy, 1979 New Zealand tour during which the English Northern Division was the only team to defeat the All Blacks. In the 21st century the region's club sides have become less popular, with association football, cricket and rugby league attracting more spectators and talent.
In the 2020–21 Premiership Rugby, 2020–21 season, Sale Sharks and Newcastle Falcons play in the Premiership Rugby, English Premiership, and Doncaster R.F.C. play in the RFU Championship.
Cricket
![Old Trafford Pavilion](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5e/Old_Trafford_Pavilion.JPG)
Cricket has a strong following in Northern England, and three counties are represented by first-class cricket, first-class
county cricket teams: Durham County Cricket Club, Durham, Lancashire County Cricket Club, Lancashire and Yorkshire County Cricket Club, Yorkshire. The Roses Match (named for the Red Rose of Lancaster and the White Rose of York) between Lancashire and Yorkshire is one of the hardest fought rivalries in the sport – the pride of both sides, and their determination not to lose, resulted in the teams developing a slow, stubborn and defensive style that proved unpopular elsewhere in the country.
The London-based Marylebone Cricket Club, which controlled the game at the time, selected few Northern players for Test cricket, Test matches, and this was perceived as a snub to their playing style – the anger united Lancashire and Yorkshire against the South and helped cast a shared Northern identity that transcended the Roses rivalry.
This divide was illustrated in the 1924 County Championship, when Yorkshire beat London-based Middlesex County Cricket Club, Middlesex to claim the title. Surrey County Cricket Club, Surrey accused Yorkshire of scuffing the pitch and intimidating the bowling (cricket), bowlers, while the match with Middlesex was so vicious that the team threatened to never play in Yorkshire again.
The Lancashire captain Jack Sharp on the other hand was quoted as saying "I'm real glad a rose won it. Red or white, it doesn't matter."
Durham are a recent addition to top-flight cricket, having only achieved first-class status in 1992, but have won the County Championship three times.
Although Yorkshire and Lancashire were traditionally more relaxed about professionalism than other counties, cricket did not see the same regional schisms on the topic that rugby and football did – there were debates over amateur status in first-class cricket, but these tensions were given release in the Gentlemen v Players fixture. Nevertheless, the annual North v South games were among the most popular and competitive in the sport, running annually from 1849 until 1900 and intermittently thereafter.
Politics
![2019 UK general election constituency map](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/2019_UK_general_election_constituency_map.svg)
Northern England, as the first area in the world to industrialise, was the birthplace of much modern political thought. Marxism and, more generally, socialism were shaped by reports into the lives of the Northern working class, from Friedrich Engels' ''The Condition of the Working Class in England'' to George Orwell's ''The Road to Wigan Pier''.
Meanwhile, enterprise and trade at the North's ports influenced the birth of
Manchester Liberalism, a ''laissez-faire'' free trade philosophy. Expounded by C. P. Scott and the ''Manchester Guardian'', the movement's greatest success was the repeal of the Corn Laws, protests against which had led to the 1819 Peterloo Massacre in Manchester.
![Durham Miners Gala 2007 - geograph](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/Durham_Miners_Gala_2007_-_geograph.org.uk_-_494378.jpg)
The first Trades Union Congress was held in Manchester in 1868, and as of 2015 trade union membership in Northern England remained higher than in Southern England, although it is lower than in the other Home Nations. Since the Thatcher era, the Conservative Party (UK), Conservative Party struggled to gain support in the area.
Today, Northern England is generally described as a stronghold of the Labour Party (UK), Labour Party – although the Conservatives hold some rural seats, they traditionally held almost no urban seats and as of the 2021 United Kingdom local elections, 2021 local elections there are no Conservative councillors on Liverpool City Council, Manchester City Council or Newcastle City Council, and only one on Sheffield City Council.
During the 2019 United Kingdom general election, 2019 general election, many traditionally Labour constituencies in Northern England swung heavily towards the Conservatives, and the collapse of the "Red wall (British politics), red wall" of Northern Labour seats was a major factor in the Conservative victory. Historically the region was also a heartland for the Liberal Party (UK), Liberals, and between the 1980s and the 2010s their successors in the Liberal Democrats (UK), Liberal Democrats benefited from Conservative unpopularity by positioning themselves as the centrist alternative to Labour in the North.
At the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, 2016 EU membership referendum, all three Northern England regions voted to leave, as did all English regions outside London. The largest Northern Remain vote was 60.4% in Manchester; the largest Leave vote was 69.9% in
North East Lincolnshire.
In total, the Leave vote in the Northern England regions was 55.9% – higher than in the Southern England regions and the other Home Nations, but lower than in the Midlands or the East of England.
The Eurosceptic UK Independence Party (UKIP) positioned themselves as the main challenger to Labour in Northern constituencies, and came second in many at the 2015 United Kingdom general election, 2015 general election. UKIP originally struggled in the region due to vote splitting with the far-right British National Party (BNP), who exploited racial tensions in the wake of the 2001 Bradford riots and other riots in Northern towns. In 2006, 40% of BNP voters lived in Northern England and both BNP Member of the European Parliament, MEPs elected at the 2009 European Parliament election in the United Kingdom, 2009 European elections came from Northern constituencies. After 2013, BNP support in the region collapsed as most voters swung to UKIP. The Northern UKIP vote in turn collapsed following the EU referendum, with most UKIP voters returning to their former allegiances.
Campaigns for Northern English devolution in the United Kingdom, devolution have seen little electoral support. Plans by Labour under Tony Blair to create devolution, devolved regional assembly (England), regional assemblies for the three Northern regions were abandoned after the government lost the 2004 North East England devolution referendum against a No vote of 78%. The Regionalism (politics), regionalist Yorkshire Party and North East Party only hold seats at the local council level, and the Northern Party, which campaigned for a devolved Northern government with the power to make laws and full control of taxation and spending, was wound up in 2016.
The Northern Independence Party was founded in October 2020, a secessionist and democratic socialist political party that seeks to make Northern England an independent nation, under the name of
Northumbria
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Religion
Christianity
Christianity has been the largest religion in the region since the Early Middle Ages; its existence in Britain dates back to the late Roman era and the arrival of Celtic Christianity. The Holy Island of
Lindisfarne played an essential role in the Christianisation of Northumbria, after Aidan of Lindisfarne, Aidan from Connacht founded a monastery there as the first Bishop of Lindisfarne at the request of King Oswald of Northumbria, Oswald. It is known for the creation of the Lindisfarne Gospels and remains a place of pilgrimage. Saint Cuthbert, a monk of Lindisfarne, was venerated from Nottinghamshire to Cumberland, and is today sometimes named the patron saint of Northern England. The Synod of Whitby saw Northumbria break from Celtic Christianity and return to the Roman Catholic church, as Computus, calculations of Easter and tonsure rules were brought into line with those of Rome.
![Catholics in England 1715-20](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Catholics_in_England_1715-20.svg)
After the English Reformation Northern England became a centre of Catholicism, and Irish migration to Great Britain, Irish immigration increased its numbers further, especially in North West cities like Liverpool and Manchester.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the area underwent a Christian revival, religious revival that ultimately produced Primitive Methodism in the United Kingdom, Primitive Methodism, and at its peak in the 19th century Methodism was the dominant faith in much of Northern England.
As of 2016, the list of places of worship registered for marriage for Northern England included at least 1,960 that are Methodist or Independent Methodist Connexion, Independent Methodist, 1,200 Roman Catholic, 370 United Reformed Church, United Reformed, 310 Baptist or Particular Baptist, 250 Jehovah's Witness and 240 Salvation Army, as well as many hundreds of churches from smaller denominations.
[ Not all places of worship are registered, and some defunct churches remain on the list.]
In the ecclesiastical administration of the Church of England the entire North is covered by the Province of York, which is represented by the Archbishop of York – the second-highest figure in the Church after the Archbishop of Canterbury. The unusual situation of having two archbishops at the top of Church hierarchy suggests that Northern England was seen as a ''sui generis''. Likewise, with the exception of parts of the Diocese of Shrewsbury and Roman Catholic Diocese of Nottingham, Diocese of Nottingham, the North is covered in Catholic Church in England and Wales, Roman Catholic Church administration by the Province of Liverpool, represented by the Archbishop of Liverpool.
Other faiths
![Armley Sikh Temple Tong Road 2016](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Armley_Sikh_Temple_Tong_Road_2016.jpg)
Small Jewish communities arose in Beverley, Doncaster, Grimsby, Lancaster, Lancashire, Lancaster, Newcastle, and York in the wake of the Norman Conquest but suffered massacres and pogroms, of which the largest was the York Massacre in 1190. Jews were forcibly banished from England by the 1290 Edict of Expulsion until the Resettlement of the Jews in England in the seventeenth century, and the first synagogue in the North appeared in Liverpool in 1753. History of the Jews in Manchester, Manchester also has a long-standing Jewish community: the now-demolished 1857 Manchester Reform Synagogue was the second Movement for Reform Judaism, Reform synagogue in the country, and Greater Manchester has the only eruv in the United Kingdom outside London. Traditionally, there is also a large Jewish presence in Gateshead. In total, there are 84 synagogues in Northern England registered for marriages.
Spiritualism flourished in Northern England in the nineteenth century, in part as a backlash to the fundamentalist Primitive Methodist movement and in part driven by the influence of Owenism, Owenist socialism. There remain 220 Spiritualist churches registered in the North, of which 40 identify as Spiritualism (beliefs)#Christian Spiritualism, Christian Spiritualist.
The first mosque in the United Kingdom was founded by the convert Abdullah Quilliam in the Liverpool Muslim Institute in 1889.
Today, there are around 500 mosques in Northern England.
Indian religions are also represented: there are at least 45 gurdwaras, of which the largest is the Sikh Temple in Leeds, and 30 mandirs, of which the largest is Bradford Lakshmi Narayan Hindu Temple.
Transport
Transport in the North has been shaped by the Pennines, creating strong north–south axes along each coast and an east–west axis across the moorland passes of the southern Pennines.
Northern England is a centre of freight transport and handles around one third of all British cargo. Both passenger and freight links between Northern cities remain poor, which is a major weakness of the Northern economy.
The passenger transport executive (PTE) has become a major player in the organisation of public transport within Northern city regions; of the six PTEs in England, five (Transport for Greater Manchester, Merseytravel, South Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive, Travel South Yorkshire, Tyne and Wear Passenger Transport Executive, Nexus Tyne and Wear and West Yorkshire Metro) are located in the North. These coordinate bus services, local trains and light rail in their regions. Following the passage of the Cities and Local Government Devolution Act 2016, Transport for the North became a statutory body in 2018 with powers to coordinate services and offer integrated ticketing throughout the region.
Road
![Stagecoach in Manchester bus 19472 (MX58 VBO), 4 February 2012 (cropped)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Stagecoach_in_Manchester_bus_19472_%28MX58_VBO%29%2C_4_February_2012_%28cropped%29.jpg)
The Preston By-pass, opened in 1958, was the first motorway in the UK, and today an extensive network connects the major cities of the North. The main western route through the North is the M6 motorway, M6, part of a chain of motorways from London to Glasgow, while the main eastern motorway is the M1 motorway, M1/A1(M) motorway, A1(M), which runs as far north as Newcastle. The M62 motorway, M62 links Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Hull across the Pennines. Other trans-Pennine roads are comparatively minor, and the lack of any dual-carriageway connection between the east and west coasts anywhere in England north of the M62 has been identified by the Department for Transport as a significant hindrance to the Northern economy. In many cases, modern roads still follow ancient routes: the M62 motorway effectively duplicates the Roman roads in Britain, Roman road between York and Chester, while the Great North Road (Great Britain), Great North Road, the stagecoach route from London to Scotland, became the modern A1 road (Great Britain), A1 road.
Buses are an important part of the Northern transport mix, with bus ridership above the England and Wales average in all three Northern regions. Many of the municipal bus company, municipal bus companies were located in Northern England, and the region saw intense competition and bus wars following Bus deregulation in Great Britain, deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s. Increasing car ownership in the same era caused bus use to decline, although it remains higher than in most areas of the South.
Rail
![Preston - FTPE 350403 and Northern 142058](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Preston_-_FTPE_350403_and_Northern_142058.JPG)
The North of England pioneered rail transport. Milestones include the 1758 Middleton Railway in Leeds, the first railway authorised by Act of Parliament and the oldest continually operating in the world; the 1825 Stockton and Darlington Railway, the first public railway to use steam locomotives; and the 1830 Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the first modern main line. Today the region retains many of its original railway lines, including the East Coast Main Line, East Coast and West Coast Main Line, West Coast main lines and the Cross Country Route. Passenger numbers on Northern routes increased over 50% between 2004 and 2016, and Northern England handles over half of total UK rail freight, but infrastructure is poorly funded compared to Southern railways: railways in London received £5426 per resident in 2015 while those in the North East received just £223 per resident, and journeys between major cities are slow and overcrowded.
To combat this, the Department of Transport has devolved many of its powers to Rail North, an alliance of local authorities from the Scottish Borders down to Staffordshire which manages the Northern (train operating company), Northern Rail and TransPennine Express franchises that operate many routes in Northern England.
Meanwhile, new build such as the Northern Hub around Manchester, High Speed 2 from Manchester and Leeds to London and Northern Powerhouse Rail from Liverpool to Hull and Newcastle is planned to increase capacity on important Northern routes and decrease travel times.
The first tram line in the United Kingdom was built in Birkenhead and Birkenhead Corporation Tramways, opened on 30 August 1860 (partially open intermittently as Wirral Tramway, a heritage tramway). Trams turned out to be especially well suited for Northern cities, with their growing working-class suburbs, and by the turn of the century, most Northern towns had an extensive interconnected electric tram network.
At the network's height, it was possible to travel entirely by tram from Liverpool Pier Head to the village of Summit, outside Rochdale, a distance of , and a gap of only separated the North-Western network from the West Yorkshire network.
Starting in the 1930s, these were largely replaced by motor buses and trolley buses.
With the closure of Sheffield Tramway in 1960 and Glasgow Corporation Tramways, Glasgow Tramway in 1962, Blackpool Tramway – popular as a tourist attraction as much as a means of transport – was left as the only public tram system in the UK until the Manchester Metrolink opened in 1992. Today there are four light rail systems in the North – Blackpool Tramway, Manchester Metrolink, Sheffield Supertram and Tyne & Wear Metro.
Air
Manchester Airport serves as the main international hub for Northern England and is the busiest airport anywhere in the UK outside London, handling 27.8 million people in 2017.
In total, there are eight international airports in the North; these are (in descending order of passenger traffic) Manchester Airport, Manchester, Newcastle International Airport, Newcastle, Liverpool John Lennon Airport, Liverpool John Lennon, Leeds Bradford Airport, Leeds Bradford, Doncaster Sheffield Airport, Doncaster Sheffield, Humberside Airport, Humberside, Teesside Airport, Teesside and Carlisle Lake District Airport, Carlisle Lake District.
Many of these airports were developed during the boom in Low-cost carrier, low-cost air travel during the early 2000s, but have suffered since the Great Recession – Teesside is running at just 3% of its maximum capacity, and Blackpool Airport closed as an international airport in 2014. The devolution of Air Passenger Duty to Scotland represents a further possible threat to Northern English airports, allowing Scottish airports to offer cheaper flights than their English rivals. Few Spoke–hub distribution paradigm, spoke flights operate between Northern airports and the national hubs at London Heathrow Airport, Heathrow and London Gatwick Airport, Gatwick, putting further strain on the smaller Northern airports and forcing connecting passengers to travel via continental European airports. The planned High Speed 2 station at Manchester Airport will offer direct high-speed services to London, allowing spare capacity at Manchester Airport to take some of the flights which currently serve busy London airports.
Water
![MV Horizon and Manannan, Liverpool Cruise Terminal (geograph 4581187)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/MV_Horizon_and_Manannan%2C_Liverpool_Cruise_Terminal_%28geograph_4581187%29.jpg)
The first modern canal in England was Sankey Canal, Sankey Brook, opened in 1757 to connect Liverpool's ports to the St Helens, Merseyside, St Helens coalfields.
By 1777, the Trent and Mersey Canal, Grand Trunk Canal had opened, linking the rivers Mersey and Trent and making it possible for boats to travel directly from Liverpool on the west coast to Hull on the east coast.
Manchester, inland, was connected to the Irish Sea by the Manchester Ship Canal in 1894, although the canal never saw the success that was hoped for. The North retains many navigable canals, including the Cheshire Ring, Cheshire, North Pennine Ring, North Pennine and South Pennine Ring, South Pennine canal rings, although they are now used mostly for pleasure rather than transport – the Aire and Calder Navigation, which carries over 2 million tons of oil, sand and gravel per year, is a rare exception.
Many Northern coastal towns were built on trade, and retain large sea ports. The Humber ports of Port of Grimsby, Grimsby and Port of Immingham, Immingham (counted as a single port for statistical purposes) are the busiest in the UK in terms of tonnage, serving 59.1 million tons as of 2015, and Teesport and the Port of Liverpool are also among the country's largest – in total, 35% of British freight was shipped through Northern ports.
Roll-on/roll-off ferries offer passenger and freight connections to the Isle of Man and Ireland along the west coast, while east coast ports connect to Belgium and the Netherlands, although Northern ports handle only a small percentage of the UK's vehicle traffic.
Liverpool Cruise Terminal opened in 2007, cruises also operate out of Port of Hull and Newcastle International Ferry Terminal.
See also
* Black Country
* Cornwall
* Devolution to the North of England
* East Anglia
* Greater London
* Home counties
* The Midlands
* Southern England
* Welsh Marches
* West Country
* West of England
Explanatory notes
References
Citations
General and cited references
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Further reading
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{{Authority control
Northern England,
Cultural regions
Geography of England
Northumbria
Regions of England