The importance of a non-London specificity

Right. This post is not bemoaning the lack of non-London set drama. This is about specificity.

Everyone has a mental map of London, even if they've never been there (the Gherkin and banks are over there, theatres are somewhere else, the museums and parks and Buckingham Palace). Everyone in Britain has seen thousands of images of London, and, crucially, they have been labelled LONDON.

This is what London looks like.

The problem with the rest of England is that its images are seen, but they are rarely tagged to place.

There was an article about this in the LRB the other month. France is much better at giving its provincial towns identity. Here stories are either in London, or in a hazy non-London.

19th-century literature could represent life outside London only with vague gestures of generalisation, as if the naming or describing of actual towns in the provinces fell under a pudeur scarcely less than that obscuring sex... Middlemarch is the title of a great novel, but the town itself is an abstraction, whose relation to the Coventry at which scholars try to peer behind it is notional. Was ‘Coketown’ – one of Dickens’s few excursion outside London – based on Preston, as some believe? It hardly matters.North and South? Skirts drawn up around Manchester, set in ‘Milton’. In Hardy, the faux-archaism of ‘Wessex’ and its cod-toponyms – Casterbridge, Melchester, Christminster and the rest…
Even in modern times… Amis’s Lucky Jim tippexed Swansea, and Lodge’s ‘Rummidge’ trilogy could not bring itself to name Birmingham. The persistence of the convention speaks volumes for the low standing of urban life outside the capital, novels risking loss of audience if they speak too openly of a particular city, as unlikely to be of much interest to anyone outside it.

When you start thinking of more examples you can't stop. Lot of things have been filmed in Bradford (e.g. Billy Liar), very few are set there. A Kind of Loving is set in "a Lancashire town". Not Preston, not Blackburn, not Burnley. Just "The North". The Nottingham-ness of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is a big part of the book, considerably played down for the film. Even J.B. Priestley, Bradford's foremost literary son, talks of the amalgamous Bruddersford.

"The North" (actually Accrington)

Why I think this is important! 

Specificity confers legitimacy. Despite its complexity London is simply easier to visualise than anywhere else in the UK. Because of this (I theorise), and leaving economic considerations to one side, people are more likely to move there after university because they can picture themselves there. It becomes the only feasible destination for internal migration.

It's also subtly easier to support investment projects like Crossrail or a new airport as we can imagine what it might look like and how it'd fit in to our existing mental model. Consider a Crossrail which went from Liverpool to Hull. The national mental image would be something like:

Liverpool: Beatles -> Warrington… rugby league? -> Manchester… football/Oasis -> West Yorkshire… don't know -> Bradford: curry -> Leeds… don't they have a Harvey Nichols? -> Hull… Who knows anything about Hull? 

Without a strong mental picture it's a hard idea to get behind. Once these cities had football teams to represent them. With the globalisation of the Premiership these teams have become international brands who happen to have head offices these towns and cities.

And you know, the images we're missing don't even have to be positive. The Olympics is one thing, but deprivation in Tower Hamlets, gangsters, riots - it all adds to a solid idea of "LONDON" and an unvoiced suspicion that London is the only place which is actually, you know, real.

A nice counter example is Happy Valley. We watched the first episode last night. It was pretty good! The best thing about it was its accuracy. This wasn't "Yorkshire" it was the Upper Calder Valley. Things happened in Sowerby Bridge. Todmorden got a shout out. Until recently we lived in that valley, before moving 15 miles east to Bradford. We've never regretted that move, but last night the images on the TV, just because they were images on a TV, started to tug at me. Suddenly the place felt more real, just from being reflected in culture.

Hebden Bridge

I started to miss the place, even though it was portrayed as a picturesque hotbed of junkies and drunks. As I say, the best thing about it was its accuracy.

Reclaiming the British Hinterland for the mainstream

Did you see Hinterland? It's a Welsh detective series currently being shown on BBC4. We'll come back to that.

Its characters switch between English and subtitled Welsh. When was the last time you heard Welsh on television? Britain's second language, and it's never heard by non-Welsh speakers. 1% of the British population speak it, and the other 99% are never exposed to it. Ever. You could go your whole life watching British media and never be confronted with the beauties of Welsh. Not saying the rest of us should speak any, but to never hear it? 

Watching it I caught glimpses of another possible Britain, one in which we are used to hearing other British accents and languages, where they weren't presented as other and strange to an audience assumed to be from the South East of England.  

Hinterland looks beautiful, it's exciting. It's mainstream. Now, I'm not saying it's particularly good; the reviews have been very kind. It was a bit silly, and full of the usual crime series cliches. But it is mainstream. The only thing which is different is it's not entirely in English. It should be on BBC 1, and it was originally shown there (IN WALES) but for the rest of the country it's confined to BBC 4, home of the European drama series. Something which should be completely natural to us has been made niche. 

A similar story with The Fall, a crime drama set in Belfast. The best thing about it, by far, was its Belfast location. But that location wasn't presented matter-of-factly, as somewhere natural to tell a story, but instead made strange through the eyes of a visiting southern English detective, the way in for the assumed (English, Southern) viewer. 

The British countryside looks a lot more like this:

Yorkshire Dales

And this:

Bodmin Moor

And this:

Black Mountains

And this:

Peak District

And this:

Loch Lomond

And this:

Lake District

Than it does like this:

Don't know - England though, right?

Or this:

Kent

And our cities more like this:

Glasgow

And this:

Newcastle

And this:

Leeds

And this:

Belfast

Than this:

Not sure - not a British city by the looks of it

Yet all of Britain is presented as other compared to an assumed South East norm, undermining any sense of British identity. All of the regions feel alienated from "Britain" (i.e. the South East). There's been a decades long propaganda campaign to normalise the un-British ways of the greater London region. Enough! Time to point the finger the other way. We're not different, London, you are. You cockney fucks. 

There is such a thing as Britishness!

With Scottish independence and all that there's been focus on the idea of Britain, and what it means and all the rest of it.

There is a British identity, one which makes sense, with shared history and cultural values. The problem is that this Britain is ruled by, but doesn't culturally include, the English South East.

England just isn't a real country. The differences between northern England and Scotland or Wales are much smaller than the differences between northern England and the south east. The Russian dolls of identity make more sense as northern > British than English > British.

There's a natural brotherhood of the Scots, Welsh, Cornish, (Northern) Irish and Northern English. These guys all have loads in common. Landscape, sheep, post-industrial decline, an interest in folk and country music, tea, fish suppers, reserve, good humour, a shared hatred of London.

An independent Scotland would be sad for the rest of this Britain, but at least some of us will have got out. It's just a shame that it's the wrong bit going its way. That bit at the bottom, the England of Top Gear and Bake-Off and finance and media and royalty and morris dancing and London. We don't need that bit. Also, they hate us.

A nice Britain of 40million, with the capital in, say, York, would be lovely. We could just crack on being a medium-sized European country and relax. England-minor could go its way making money and being "global". Everyone would win.

We've really buggered up how we've organised this place.


ADDENDUM: I don't really know where the South-West fits in, or the Midlands. I'd like to take Birmingham with us but I guess it's up to them.