So I promised earlier in the week to talk a little about a couple of Grim Up North articles that I came across.  It was a rash promise made in the hasty assumption that I would actually have something to say about them.  Something academic and analytical, like. 

Well, that hope turned to custard.

The North has existed as a recognisably different part of England since around Tudor times.  And, Dave Russell has argued, how it is thought about today was cemented around 1840.  Yep, this is when the industrial towns are really taking off: we have a new working class, and we have massive migration for industrial jobs.  And of course this all happens against a backdrop of industrial landscapes.  So when Dickens serialises Mrs Gaskell's new novel in 1854, he talks her out of naming it for her heroine Margaret Hale.  Instead, it gets a name which expresses the social divide of industrialism: North and South.   

Andrew Martin's bash at the North looks at the 60s resurgence which Russell also identifies, but which Russell characterises it as a blip in an otherwise continuous process of stereotyping. 

Jackie Ashley's article on the decline of the North is far more interesting and without the grumpy old man factor, reflecting instead on her father's documentary on Hartlepool 50 years ago. 

And for something lighter, a review of The Road to Coronation Street.