Northerners: The bestselling history of the North of England

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Brian Groom is one of the leading experts on Britain’s regions and nations and a perceptive analyst. This book provides a sweeping and vivid narrative, starting from the earliest times, coupled with cross-cutting chapters on fascinating social and cultural themes. Groom does an excellent job of bouncing around topics, and his skills really flourish in later chapters. Brian went to Manchester Grammar School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he got a first-class BA in English Lang.

Still, it’s great to see a book concentrating on northern history, as so many British history books gloss over the north and almost completely focus on the south. Being a northerner myself, I was pleased to realise how much I already knew about the north, although if you’re new to the subject you could find all the names and places mentioned a bit overwhelming. As I said, this is not an analytical account, and some of the thornier issues of northern identity are side stepped. But does it actually help to continue to talk about a north-south divide or does this merely perpetuate the myth that it’s all cloth caps and whippets up north? To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.A pop-history survey of Northern English identity, it was very interesting to someone who has lived in the North. However, I would have liked to have seen a chapter on Queer figures from the North to give this book its full potential. I wish the book had decided on either a thematic approach *or* a timeline, as the chronology of events was frequently difficult to keep track of, but was otherwise a very engaging read.

It could hardly be more topical, given tensions over Brexit, the “red wall” and forces threatening to drive the country apart. But overall, I would recommend reading this if you want to understand what makes the North special and interesting and why people like me love living here. A visitor to some of the more affluent areas of the North East might find there is actually more of an affinity with kindred villages and towns in the south than there is within the varied communities of the north of England. Too often it devolves into very dry lists of dates, people and percentages, lacking the context and analysis that would really pull a reader in and make all the disparate facts feel more real and connected. As you can imagine, packing that much history into 432 pages means it’s a bit of a whistle stop tour, so we never get into too much depth.The chapters covering the Middle Ages were especially draining, seeming to be one long list of battles with little to no supporting framework. I kept trying to identify what it was that was lacking in the book that made it more of a chore to read than a pleasure, before deciding that what the book was lacking was a bit of heart. In conclusion, Groom debates the north-south divide; a division that, he says, “casts the north as the back end of the English economy pantomime horse”.