England is divided into north and south, but it’s not always easy to locate the border. Here’s a recent attempt to draw the real dividing line. East Leake, the village to which we moved when I was 11, and where my parents still live, is very slightly to the north the line on the map. It’s between Nottingham and Leicester.
The divide is the result of a study conducted at Sheffield University. Sheffield, firmly in the north, is the city in which both my parents were born, and is probably best known in the USA now for the Arctic Monkeys connection. The image is my Picniking of StrangeMap 193.
Looks like an attempt by northerners to take more territory to me. J I am from Cheshire and I would not have associated Birmingham with the north. Was this a divide between north and south, or the southeast and southwest and the rest of the country? I once lived in Hampshire for a year, and it was definitively a different place from the Greater Manchester area, but not so different from Cheshire. What do you think of the study; did you consider growing up in the north or the south? Or did your parent’s background cause you cultural confusion?
Thanks for the comment, John. I think of Birmingham as neither south or north.
Perhaps there really is such a thing as the Midlands, going as far south as Warwick, and as far north as… Nottingham? East Leake?
Andrew, I totally agree Birmingham is in the midlands.
Why the researchers dropped the concept of the midlands I don’t know. I think the researchers should have used different terms other than north and south. There is so much cultural identity tied up in the terms, North and South in England, and the midlands has its own cultural identity. Still I think the map is really cool!