North West Of England

North West England is one of nine official regions of England and consists of the administrative counties of Cheshire, Cumbria, Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Merseyside. The North West had a population of 7,052,000 in 2011. It is the third-most-populated region in the United Kingdom, after the South East and Greater London. The largest settlements are Manchester and Liverpool.

Subdivisions

The official region consists of the following subdivisions:

After abolition of the Greater Manchester and Merseyside County Councils in 1986, power was transferred to the metropolitan boroughs, making them equivalent to unitary authorities. In April 2011, Greater Manchester gained a top-tier administrative body in the form of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, which means the 10 Greater Manchester boroughs are once again second-tier authorities.

Geography

North West England is bounded to the east by the Pennines and to the west by the Irish Sea. The region extends from the Scottish Borders in the north to the West Midlands region in the south. To its southwest is North Wales. Amongst the better known of the North West's physiographical features are the Lake District and the Cheshire Plain. The highest point in North West England (and the highest peak in England) is Scafell Pike, Cumbria, at a height of .

Windermere is the largest natural lake in England, while Broad Crag Tarn on Broad Crag is England's highest lake. Wast Water is England's deepest lake, being 74 metres deep.

A mix of rural and urban landscape, two large conurbations, centred on Liverpool and Manchester, occupy much of the south of the region. The north of the region, comprising Cumbria and northern Lancashire, is largely rural, as is the far south which encompasses parts of the Cheshire Plain and Peak District.

The region includes parts of three National parks (all of the Lake District, and small parts of the Peak District and the Yorkshire Dales) and three areas of Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (all of Arnside and Silverdale and the Solway Coast, and almost all of the Forest of Bowland).

Weather

The North West is generally regarded as having the most average weather in the UK. Temperatures are generally close to the national average. Cumbria usually experiences the most severe weather, with high precipitation in the mountainous regions of the Lake District and Pennines. In winter, the most severe weather occurs in the more exposed and elevated areas of the North West, once again mainly the Lake District and Pennine areas.

Parts of the North West experienced a White Christmas in 2009, and again in 2010, where sleet and snow fell on December 25.

The A635 was closed for almost a month in January 2010 due to high amounts of snowfall.

Demographics

Population, density, and settlements

''Source: Office for National Statistics Mid Year Population Estimates in 2008''

North West England's population accounts for just over 13% of England's overall population. 37.86% of the North West's population resides in Greater Manchester, 21.39% in Lancashire, 20.30% in Merseyside, 14.76% in Cheshire and 7.41% live in the largest county by area, Cumbria.

Ethnicity

According to 2009 Office for National Statistics estimates, 91.6% (6,323,300) of people in the region describe themselves as 'White': 88.4% (6,101,100) White British, 1.0% (67,200) White Irish and 2.2% (155,000) White Other. During the Industrial Revolution hundreds of thousands of Welsh people migrated to the North West of England to work in the coal mines. Parts with notably high populations with Welsh ancestry as a result of this include Liverpool, Chester, Skelmersdale, Widnes, Halewood, Wallasey, Ashton-in-Makerfield and Birkenhead.

The Mixed Race population makes up 1.3% (93,800) of the region's population. There are 323,800 South Asians, making up 4.7% of the population, and 1.1% Black (80,600). 0.6% of the population (39,900) are Chinese and 0.5% (36,500) of people belong to another ethnic group.

North West England is a very diverse region, with Manchester and Liverpool amongst the most diverse cities in Europe. 19.4% of Blackburn with Darwen's population are Muslim, the third-highest among all local authorities in the United Kingdom and the highest outside London. Areas such as Moss Side in Greater Manchester are home to a 30%+ Black British population. In contrast, the town of St. Helens in Merseyside, unusually for a city area, has a very low percentage of ethnic minorities with 98% identifying as White British. The City of Liverpool, over 800 years old, is one of the few places in Britain where ethnic minority populations can be traced back over dozens of generations: being the closest major city in England to Ireland, it is home to a significant ethnic Irish population, with the city being home to one of the first ever Afro-Caribbean communities in the UK, as well as the oldest Chinatown in Europe.

; Summarised
* There are around 400,000 people living in the North West of any Asian ethnicity
* Around 125,000 people from the North West are of full or partial Sub-African and/or Caribbean descent
* The single largest non-white ethnic group in the North West are Pakistanis, numbering at least 144,400

Place of birth

The list below is not how many people belong to each ethnic group (e.g. there are over 25,000 ethnic Italians in Manchester alone, whilst only 6,000 Italian-born people live in the North West). The fifteen most common countries of birth in 2001 for North West citizens were as follows (2008 estimates, where available, in brackets)

*England – 6,169,753
*Scotland – 109,163
*Wales – 73,850
*Ireland – 56,887 (51,000 in 2008)
*Pakistan – 46,529 (58,000 in 2008)
*Poland – (37,000 in 2008)
*Northern Ireland – 34,879
*India – 34,600 (48,000 in 2008)
*Germany – 19,931 (25,000 in 2008)
*China and Hong Kong – 15,491
*Bangladesh – 13,746
*South Africa – 7,740
*United States – 7,037
*Jamaica – 6,661
*Italy – 6,325
*Australia – 5,880
*Eritrea & Ethiopia – 4,000

Religion

The table below is based on the 2011 UK Census.

One in five of the population in the North West is Catholic, a result of large-scale Irish emigration in the nineteenth century as well as the high number of English recusants in Lancashire.

Social deprivation

Of the nine regions of the England, the North West has the fourth-highest GVA per capita—the highest outside southern England. Despite this the region has above average multiple deprivation with wealth heavily concentrated on very affluent areas like rural Cheshire, rural Lancashire, and south Cumbria. As measured by the Indices of deprivation 2007, the region has many more Lower Layer Super Output Areas in the 20% most deprived districts than the 20% least deprived council districts. Only North East England shows more indicators of deprivation than the North West, but the number of affluent areas in the North West is very similar to Yorkshire and the Humber.

The most deprived local authority areas in the region (based on specific wards within those borough areas) are, in descending order—Liverpool, Manchester, Knowsley, Blackpool, Salford, Blackburn with Darwen, Burnley, Rochdale, Barrow-in-Furness, Halton, Hyndburn, Oldham, Pendle, St Helens, Preston, Bolton, Tameside, Wirral, Wigan, Copeland, Sefton, and Rossendale.

In 2007 when Cheshire still had district councils, the least deprived council districts in the region by council district, in descending order, were—Congleton, Ribble Valley, Macclesfield, and South Lakeland. These areas have Conservative MPs, except South Lakeland has a Lib Dem and Labour MPs. At county level, before it was split into two, Cheshire was the least deprived, followed by Trafford, and by Warrington and Stockport.

In March 2011, the overall unemployment claimant count was 4.2% for the region. Inside the region the highest was Liverpool with 6.8%, followed by Knowsley on 6.3%, Halton with 5.5% and Rochdale with 5.1%. The lowest claimant count is in Eden (Cumbria) and Ribble Valley (Lancashire) each with 1.3%, followed by South Lakeland with 1.4%.

Elections

In the 2019 general election, the Conservatives gained ten seats, from the Labour Party, with no other seats changing hands. Labour held 42 of their 52 seats, albeit many with slimmed down majorities. They remain the dominant party in the region by seat count, with the Conservatives total now standing at 27. The Conservatives made two gains in Cheshire, three gains in Lancashire, five gains in Greater Manchester, notably including Andy Burnham's former seat of Leigh.

In the 2017 general election, the area was dominated by the Labour Party. Fifty-five percent of the region's electorate voted Labour, 36.3% Conservative, 5.4% Liberal Democrat, 1.9% UKIP and 1.1% Greens; however, by number of parliamentary seats, Labour have 54, the Conservatives have 20, and the Liberal Democrats have 1. The Lib Dems' North West seat is in south Cumbria; Labour dominates Greater Manchester, and the Conservatives' vote is concentrated in affluent suburban areas such as Cheadle, Hazel Grove and Altrincham and Sale West. Labour seats also predominate in Merseyside. In Cheshire the 2015 result was reversed, with Labour winning seven seats and the Conservatives four, whilst Lancashire is competitive between Labour and Conservative (8 seats each); the Labour seats in Lancashire are concentrated in the south of the county along the M65. For the region, the Labour gained 3 seats; there was a 5.2% swing from Conservative to Labour.

In the 2015 general election, Liverpool Walton was the safest seat in the UK, with a 72% majority, and in 2017 this was repeated with a 77% majority for Dan Carden (Labour), when an astonishing 85.7% of the electorate voted for him (the Conservatives came second with 8.6%). In the by-election of 2012, Manchester Central has the record for the lowest turnout in the UK—18%. Gwyneth Dunwoody, for Crewe and Nantwich, was the longest serving female MP until her death in 2008.

In the final European Elections in the UK in 2019, 31.23% voted for the Brexit Party, with Labour polling 21.91%, the Liberal Democrats 17.15% and the Green Party 12.48%. The Conservatives came fifth in the region with 7.55% of votes cast.

Language and dialect

The earliest known language spoken in the North West was a dialect of the Brythonic language spoken across much of Britain from at least the Iron Age up to the arrival of English in the first millennium AD. Fragments of this early language are seen in the inscriptions and place names of the Roman era. In some parts of the region, the Brythonic dialect developed into the medieval language known today as Cumbric, which continued to be spoken perhaps as late as the 12th century in the north of Cumbria. This early Celtic heritage remains today in place names such as Carlisle, Penrith and Eccles, and many river names such as Cocker, Kent and Eden.

English may have been spoken in the North West from around the 7th century AD, when the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria first appears to have made inroads west of the Pennines. The language at this time would have been the Northumbrian dialect of Old English. The high percentage of English place names in the region as a whole suggests English became almost ubiquitous over the coming centuries, particularly in the area south of the Lake District. Manchester, Liverpool, Lancaster, Blackburn and Preston are among the region's many English place names. In the 9th to the 11th centuries, Danes from the east and Norsemen from Ireland and Scotland began settling in the area. The North West is really the only area of England where Norse settlement was significant and their influence remains in the place names and dialect of the region. Elements like ''fell'', ''thwaite'' and ''tarn'', which are particularly common in Cumbria, are all Norse. The numerous Kirkbys and place names with "holm" and "dale" show the Scandinavian influence throughout the North West.

Through the Middle Ages the dialects of the North West would have been considerably different from those spoken in the Midlands and south. It was only with the spread of literacy (particularly with the publication of the King James Bible) that Standard English spread to the region. Even so, local dialects continued to be used and were relatively widespread until the 19th and 20th centuries.

In modern times, English is the most spoken language in the North West, with a large percentage of the population fluent in it, and close to 100% conversational in it. To the north-east of the region, within the historic boundaries of Cumberland, the Cumbrian dialect is dominant. The historical county of Lancashire covered a vast amount of land, and the Lancashire dialect and accent is still predominant throughout the county, and stretches as far north as Furness in South Cumbria to parts of north Greater Manchester and Merseyside in the south of the region. The region boasts some of the most distinctive accents in the form of the Scouse accent, which originates from Liverpool and its surrounding areas, and the Manc accent, deriving from the central Manchester district. Both of these descend from the Lancashire dialect but have some distinctions from it, especially Scouse. The region's accents are among those referred to as ' Northern English'.

Large immigrant populations in the North West result in the presence of significant immigrant languages. South Asian languages such as Urdu

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