Stuck in the Midlands with you: Guardian geography
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Version 0 of 1. School’s out for ever! Or so I thought. So it was a surprise, on my first day as a trainee reporter at the Kent Messenger Group, to be given a geography lesson. Trottiscliffe was pronounced “Trosley”, Loose “Looze” and Leigh “Lie”. Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells were neighbours, but different places, although the first part of their name was pronounced the same. New Hythe was in mid-Kent; nothing to do with Hythe, on the coast, one of the historic Cinque (pronounced “Sink”) Ports, alongside Dover, New Romney, Sandwich and a couple of places in Sussex that we didn’t worry about because they were outside our circulation area. Such knowledge was to prove valuable when I and my fellow trainees were unleashed in our Kent Messenger minivans upon the hapless population of the county. Because if we didn’t know where a town or village was, or how local people pronounced its name, why should we expect them to take us seriously when we wrote about them? That rule still applies. And there’s no excuse for the Guardian to make as many geographical blunders as we do. Only last week we referred, not for the first time, to Zac Goldsmith as the Tory MP for “Richmond”. Richmond, in fact, is a lovely historic town in North Yorkshire; it is also a parliamentary constituency. Goldsmith’s seat is Richmond Park. If this seems a small mistake, that may be because you regard Richmond, if you have heard of it at all, as a faraway place of which we know little and care less – and besides, everyone knows when we say Richmond we mean Richmond in London, don’t we? We regularly trip up over the names of parliamentary constituencies. An analysis piece after the election noted how voters failed to switch from Tory to Labour in “constituencies in the Midlands, such as High Peak, Amber Valley and Nuneaton”. Nuneaton, fair enough; Amber Valley, at a pinch; but High Peak – bordered by Manchester to the west and Sheffield to the east – is, like much of Derbyshire, firmly in the north of England. Would it be easier if I said “oop north” somewhere, and therefore not really worth worrying about? The Midlands, perhaps seen as neither one thing nor the other, causes endless confusion. An article about a school in Newport, Shropshire, referred to parents of pupils “willing to trek in from Wolverhampton, Telford and as far as the Midlands” (later corrected to “east Midlands”). Not only are Telford and Wolverhampton in the Midlands, the former is less than 10 miles from Newport – not that much of a trek, and not that hard to check. Reducing an entire country to a cliche is lazy journalism. A rugby player was “the pride of the Valleys”, according to our sports section, prompting a reader to write: “Wales is only a small country but we have cities on the coast, hills, mountains, major towns in the north – and these are hours from the ‘Valleys’. I like the Guardian and this is only a small thing, but I’m afraid it cements your reputation as a London-based paper.” Another cliche is the phrase “north of Hadrian’s Wall” to refer to Scotland. This infuriates readers, including one who wrote (from Berwickshire, just over the Scottish border, 70 miles north of Hadrian’s Wall): “Hadrian’s Wall IS NOT and never has been the border between England and Scotland.” He blamed the recurring error on “southern ignoramuses” and suggested that this would not happen “if you still had the paper edited from Manchester”. This touches on a sore point for many Guardian readers (and, I can confirm, staff) who hail from north of Watford. This newspaper was the Manchester Guardian for the best part of 150 years. Its journalists, one imagines, not only knew where Ashton-under-Lyne was; they probably went there on Saturdays to get their tripe from the market. To their successors, the “north-west” is more likely to mean Kentish Town than Lancashire. Times change, and many of my colleagues on today’s global Guardian are based closer to Manchester, New Hampshire, than Manchester, England. But wherever they are, there is no excuse for not checking basic facts. There is hope: the new editor-in-chief of the Guardian comes from Yorkshire. If she needs someone to organise a few geography lessons for our colleagues, I am available. |