Think the Midlands is just margarine in a north-south sandwich? Think again

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/07/midlands-north-south-england

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Related: West Midlands 'economic powerhouse' plan unveiled

Philip Larkin, package holidays, glam rock, Lea & Perrins, the industrial revolution, Cadbury’s chocolate, Shakespeare, canal boats, Darwin, the balti, Wedgwood, Vicky McClure, Ladybird Books and the Specials; this isn’t England. This is the Midlands.

From Lincoln to Leek, Redditch to Rugby, the Midlands is more than just a smear of margarine in the north-south sandwich that is England; it is a region all its own. Modern England, you could argue, was clawed out of the clay-heavy soil of Staffordshire and breathed into life by the bellows and pumps of Telford, Birmingham and Northampton. In fact, to talk of a north-south divide is to miss the point entirely, because England is a triptych. And if you think the north begins at Watford or that the south is anywhere under Sheffield, then it’s time to wake up and smell the stilton.

The news that leaders from Birmingham, Coventry, Dudley, Sandwell, Solihull, Walsall and Wolverhampton have come together to create a West Midlands “economic powerhouse” should come as no surprise. That the government is investing more than £19m to turn the Midlands into an “engine for growth” with a superfast railway should come as no surprise. The Midlands is already a powerhouse – perhaps not the industrial, economic and mechanical powerhouse it once was, but it has a culture, a language, an identity and a landscape all its own. It is the multicultural, agricultural torso of our national body. Not to mention its population of more than 10 million – giving it the ability to swing an election.

We all know the cultural output of the Midlands, of course. The films of Shane Meadows, actors like Samantha Morton, McClure and Jack O’Connell who trained at the Television Workshop, Victoria Wood and her long-time partner-in-laughs Julie Waters, they are all Midland born and bred. Dexys Midnight Runners, Black Sabbath, the Specials, Led Zeppelin, Steel Pulse and The Beat weren’t just Midlands bands – they made the Midlands the birthplace of 2Tone and heavy metal. Who but a Coventry band – born on the concrete streets of a bombed-out city – could write Ghost Town? Who but a Birmingham band – surrounded by the droning M6 and car factories of Aston – could write Iron Man?

The language of the Midlands, like its landscape and history, is neither northern nor southern. It is a brogue all of its own. Alan Sillitoe’s circumscribed universe of bike factories, goose fairs and “whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not” philosophy is Nottingham, made text. Philip Larkin’s cut-price crowd, who hanker after red kitchenware, sharp shoes and iced lollies are spied from the window of an east Midland’s train, speeding through the city where his “childhood was unspent”. Shakespeare, a man who arguably did more to form the English tongue than any other, did so from Stratford, making the Midlands the birthplace of hundreds of words from luggage to lustrous and rant to remorseless. Hell, he even made it the birthplace of the word birthplace. And where but the Midlands would you find such glorious, such ridiculous, such intrinsically English street names as Fanny Hands Lane, Crotch Crescent, Bell End and, of course, the many, many Gropecunts? Not to mention those specifically Midlandian terms of endearment like our kid and me duck, and their counterparts sket, nesh and getting a cob on.

'Forget the rugged north or pastoral south; the Midlands is what non-English people think of as England'

The Midlands wasn’t just the originator of world football championships, thanks to the football league and the package holiday, thanks to Thomas Cook, it also gave us DH Lawrence, Adrian Mole, Cambridge University, Lady Godiva, Alan Moore and Brookes saddles. It gave us some of the most quintessentially English food there is, from pork pies to Walkers crisps, Pot Noodles to Branston pickle, Worcester sauce to Shropshire Blue, as well as the glorious and much missed Mr Egg. Forget the rugged north or pastoral south; the Midlands is what non-English people think of as England. From the rolling rural landscape of The Archers to the neat red brick houses of Bournville, we have exported a thoroughly Midland image of England to all four corners of the world.

So if and when it comes, I won’t bother with HS2. I won’t be speeding my way to Birmingham. Because the Midlands isn’t an obstacle to get from north to south. It isn’t a border. It isn’t on the way, nor in the way. It is a third land all of its own. It is the beating heart of this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, as our kid Shakespeare once said.