Andrew Martin grew up in York, upped sticks to London and never moved back north. This week he swam against the tide of migration to the south-east, and went home
When I read the news this week about the migration of talented young people from "the regions" to London and the south-east, where four out of every five new private-sector jobs were created between 2010 and 2012, my first thought was: "That's scandalous." My second thought was: "That's exactly what I did."
I grew up in York. After university, I moved to London to study law, and I never moved back north. I drifted into media work, and my southern wife (in the same profession) said, "You need a London phone number to get the work"– a statement possibly invalidated now by the universality of mobile phone use. I set up shop in a small way as a professional northerner, for which living in the south actually seemed a pre-requisite, whether one thinks of JB Priestley, Keith Waterhouse or Victoria Wood. I mean, anybody can be a northerner in the north.
My speciality was springing to the defence of the north. When people attacked Blackpool, as they often did, I would write a piece enthusing that you could see the Illuminations from outer space. "Not strictly true," a Blackpudlian wrote to say. It's a good job those articles pre-dated the slag-off-the-author-online "comments" facility, because they might have come over as patronising.
My assignments often began on a train from King's Cross, and I went there on Wednesday for this one. I know the Cross intimately. As a young man, I regarded it as a sort of embassy of the north. It was built by the Great Northern Railway. The street immediately east of it is called York Way, and I associated the station with that very northern product: coal. When I was born, in 1962, hundreds of tons of coal were coming into King's Cross from the north every day. These trains rolled like an endless black river, convenient for the dumping of bodies in The Ladykillers (1955). Today, no coal comes from the north to King's Cross nor, I believe, to anywhere in London, and the Victorian coal drops of the Cross are about to become "boutique retail". So the reciprocity has gone: the gritty north no longer fuels the effete activities of London.
That said, northernness was immediately asserted on the train. The guard, a Geordie, touched my arm when reassuring me that my ticket was valid. Later, on the bus from York station to my dad's house, a sign said: "Have a safe and comfy journey." I don't think there would be any question of having a "comfy" journey on a London bus. The north is different; just not as radically different as it used to be, so much of the industry having gone, and with it, perhaps, the magnetism. Then again, the young northern heroes of fiction from the late 1950 and early 60s, when the north was briefly "hot"– Billy Liar, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Kind of Loving – rebelled against the industrial monolith. They didn't actually leave their home towns, but Billy comes close, boarding the train to London before chickening out. I have a northern friend who rather bitterly says, "It's a longer journey from London to Edinburgh than it is the other way", meaning Londoners need a very good reason to go north. In the early 60s, the opposite was perhaps true, the bonds of family and work being strong in northern towns.
In the salubrious, light-filled offices of York council, the head of economic development, Kate Stewart, told me of all the city's recent successes. York is doing well; unemployment is just 2%; it has a good skills base because of the university. Is there a brain drain of young people? "Not as much as in other cities, perhaps." York council is particularly pleased that the insurance firm, Hiscox, is building an office that will provide 500 jobs. It annoyed me, but not Stewart, that Hiscox will run the York office in tandem with their London office, where 600 people are employed.
The press release about Hiscox states: "The firm were swayed by York's unique combination of … " and the next line was too faint to read, but I could easily fill in the gap. York is beautiful. It already has a high-speed rail link to London in the east coast main line; and today it has 300 restaurants, as against about three when I was a boy. This is what York calls its "offer" to the companies it hopes to attract, and it annoys me that London doesn't need to trouble about "an offer".
Perhaps Stewart is inwardly seething that in 2012-13 Arts Council England (ACE) spent £69 per head of population in London, compared with £4.60 per head elsewhere. ACE's argument is that London is bound to require more funding, since the major public arts institutions are in the capital. Public spending on transport runs at £545 per head in London as against £236 in the Midlands and the north. It is said that two-thirds of the materials for London's £16bn Crossrail project are supplied by British companies outside the capital, which is like London saying: "Look at all the crumbs falling off our table for you." These arguments are circular. The more investment London gets, the more it is apparently justified in receiving.
It's true that there are big transport investments in the north, but Stephen Joseph, of Campaign for Better Transport, would like to see "a sustained programme of investment in new and better trains for the north". There'd be no guarantee that British firms would get the contracts, though, because our governments do not defend our manufacturing as fiercely against EC competition rules as those of France and Germany – perhaps because manufacturing is in the north of a country run from the south. Joseph is "on the fence" about HS2, as are most railway specialists I know. Why spend £42bn on a project that runs any risk of helping the south more than the north?
But the cities that will be connected to the proposed route are very keen to receive it, such as Leeds. If I had returned to the north, it would have been to live in Leeds. So I took a train there, luxuriating in the Yorkshire accents around me. I do not like cockney accents, which is why I am allergic to EastEnders. Perhaps the impending gentrification of Albert Square will draw me in, but every character in EastEnders reminds me of Cockney Wanker in Viz. "Wankah", as he is known to his friends, is a vicious taxi driver in tinted glasses. He epitomises the loud-mouthed sole trader, a species rare in the north, where industry created a communitarian life. Boris Johnson would have us believe that London owes its success to the inherent dynamism of Londoners, but he sits atop an empire created by socialistic economic policies. London owes its present vast form to a scheme for the alleviation of unemployment during the Depression of the 1920s and 30s. London Underground, and the Southern Railway, were given financial incentives to extend their lines in the knowledge that the house builders would follow. If London can be boosted artificially, then so can the north.
Leeds is south of York, but more northern, by which I mean, less prim. Whole buildings, perilously close to the centre of town, are left to fall down. In Leeds, as in York, the departure of young people is "a challenge", but the city is rallying well from recession. On the train, I received a text from Tom Riordan, chief executive of Leeds city council: "Make sure you visit Trinity, our excellent new shopping centre. 18 million visitors in 9 months!"
Trinity Leeds is the biggest shopping centre in Europe. It looks like … a shopping centre, albeit an upmarket one. The first thing I saw was the Apple shop, with that usual half-creepy, half-impressive symposium going on above the gadgets between staff and young customers. Trinity's high glass roof is said to put it into the Leeds tradition of arcades, and I walked from it to an earlier example of one of these: Kirkgate Market. This always strikes me as an epicentre of northernness: you can buy "cinder toffee", which I never see in London; liquorice is called "Spanish"; you can have a "beaker" of tea, or cheese and chips in a sandwich.
Whether the availability of a cheese-and-chip sandwich would keep people in the north or drive them away is, I suppose, moot. I called Riordan and asked whether it bothered him that there was nothing northern about Trinity Leeds. "It's global brands. That's the economy and that's the market." On the matter of northerness, he notes that Leeds remains the third-largest manufacturing centre outside London, a fact often forgotten amid the real story of modern Leeds: the huge growth of "financial and professional services" occupying high-rise offices that were not there in my day. Adjacent to these is Victorian Park Square, where, in 1989, I was offered a tenancy in a barristers' chambers. The head of the chambers, who looked and indeed spoke like the bald, incredibly tough Yorkshire cricketer Brian Close, said: "Now, this is a 25-year touch. I'm not 'avin yer buggerin' off back to London at the first opportunity." He was also a Crown Court judge, and it was like being sentenced to 25 years. So I declined the offer.
Sitting in Park Square, with its Audis and Range Rovers, its branches of Bonhams and Coutts, I reflected on that choice. By now I would probably be living in a converted barn in nearby Wetherby with a border collie and a Land Rover. I would be experiencing all the vaunted "quality of life" the north offers … and that so many young people relinquish for the daily hell that is a London commute.
Britain today is constructed on a slope, with much of the money and talent rolling towards Boris Johnson. That can't be right. Tom Riordan in Leeds wants "some form" of greater devolution for the regions. Only the regions can help themselves. "In job creation, the blanket approach is not the best," he adds.
Professor Paul Salveson says much the same. He has founded the Hannah Mitchell Foundation (named after a northern suffragette) to campaign for "an England of the regions … not unelected combined authorities like Greater Manchester, but elected assemblies". Ten years ago, the north-east rejected by ballot a plan for a local assembly. I speak, admittedly, as a Londoner, but that decision looks to me like a mistake. Reported by guardian.co.uk 15 hours ago.
When I read the news this week about the migration of talented young people from "the regions" to London and the south-east, where four out of every five new private-sector jobs were created between 2010 and 2012, my first thought was: "That's scandalous." My second thought was: "That's exactly what I did."
I grew up in York. After university, I moved to London to study law, and I never moved back north. I drifted into media work, and my southern wife (in the same profession) said, "You need a London phone number to get the work"– a statement possibly invalidated now by the universality of mobile phone use. I set up shop in a small way as a professional northerner, for which living in the south actually seemed a pre-requisite, whether one thinks of JB Priestley, Keith Waterhouse or Victoria Wood. I mean, anybody can be a northerner in the north.
My speciality was springing to the defence of the north. When people attacked Blackpool, as they often did, I would write a piece enthusing that you could see the Illuminations from outer space. "Not strictly true," a Blackpudlian wrote to say. It's a good job those articles pre-dated the slag-off-the-author-online "comments" facility, because they might have come over as patronising.
My assignments often began on a train from King's Cross, and I went there on Wednesday for this one. I know the Cross intimately. As a young man, I regarded it as a sort of embassy of the north. It was built by the Great Northern Railway. The street immediately east of it is called York Way, and I associated the station with that very northern product: coal. When I was born, in 1962, hundreds of tons of coal were coming into King's Cross from the north every day. These trains rolled like an endless black river, convenient for the dumping of bodies in The Ladykillers (1955). Today, no coal comes from the north to King's Cross nor, I believe, to anywhere in London, and the Victorian coal drops of the Cross are about to become "boutique retail". So the reciprocity has gone: the gritty north no longer fuels the effete activities of London.
That said, northernness was immediately asserted on the train. The guard, a Geordie, touched my arm when reassuring me that my ticket was valid. Later, on the bus from York station to my dad's house, a sign said: "Have a safe and comfy journey." I don't think there would be any question of having a "comfy" journey on a London bus. The north is different; just not as radically different as it used to be, so much of the industry having gone, and with it, perhaps, the magnetism. Then again, the young northern heroes of fiction from the late 1950 and early 60s, when the north was briefly "hot"– Billy Liar, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Kind of Loving – rebelled against the industrial monolith. They didn't actually leave their home towns, but Billy comes close, boarding the train to London before chickening out. I have a northern friend who rather bitterly says, "It's a longer journey from London to Edinburgh than it is the other way", meaning Londoners need a very good reason to go north. In the early 60s, the opposite was perhaps true, the bonds of family and work being strong in northern towns.
In the salubrious, light-filled offices of York council, the head of economic development, Kate Stewart, told me of all the city's recent successes. York is doing well; unemployment is just 2%; it has a good skills base because of the university. Is there a brain drain of young people? "Not as much as in other cities, perhaps." York council is particularly pleased that the insurance firm, Hiscox, is building an office that will provide 500 jobs. It annoyed me, but not Stewart, that Hiscox will run the York office in tandem with their London office, where 600 people are employed.
The press release about Hiscox states: "The firm were swayed by York's unique combination of … " and the next line was too faint to read, but I could easily fill in the gap. York is beautiful. It already has a high-speed rail link to London in the east coast main line; and today it has 300 restaurants, as against about three when I was a boy. This is what York calls its "offer" to the companies it hopes to attract, and it annoys me that London doesn't need to trouble about "an offer".
Perhaps Stewart is inwardly seething that in 2012-13 Arts Council England (ACE) spent £69 per head of population in London, compared with £4.60 per head elsewhere. ACE's argument is that London is bound to require more funding, since the major public arts institutions are in the capital. Public spending on transport runs at £545 per head in London as against £236 in the Midlands and the north. It is said that two-thirds of the materials for London's £16bn Crossrail project are supplied by British companies outside the capital, which is like London saying: "Look at all the crumbs falling off our table for you." These arguments are circular. The more investment London gets, the more it is apparently justified in receiving.
It's true that there are big transport investments in the north, but Stephen Joseph, of Campaign for Better Transport, would like to see "a sustained programme of investment in new and better trains for the north". There'd be no guarantee that British firms would get the contracts, though, because our governments do not defend our manufacturing as fiercely against EC competition rules as those of France and Germany – perhaps because manufacturing is in the north of a country run from the south. Joseph is "on the fence" about HS2, as are most railway specialists I know. Why spend £42bn on a project that runs any risk of helping the south more than the north?
But the cities that will be connected to the proposed route are very keen to receive it, such as Leeds. If I had returned to the north, it would have been to live in Leeds. So I took a train there, luxuriating in the Yorkshire accents around me. I do not like cockney accents, which is why I am allergic to EastEnders. Perhaps the impending gentrification of Albert Square will draw me in, but every character in EastEnders reminds me of Cockney Wanker in Viz. "Wankah", as he is known to his friends, is a vicious taxi driver in tinted glasses. He epitomises the loud-mouthed sole trader, a species rare in the north, where industry created a communitarian life. Boris Johnson would have us believe that London owes its success to the inherent dynamism of Londoners, but he sits atop an empire created by socialistic economic policies. London owes its present vast form to a scheme for the alleviation of unemployment during the Depression of the 1920s and 30s. London Underground, and the Southern Railway, were given financial incentives to extend their lines in the knowledge that the house builders would follow. If London can be boosted artificially, then so can the north.
Leeds is south of York, but more northern, by which I mean, less prim. Whole buildings, perilously close to the centre of town, are left to fall down. In Leeds, as in York, the departure of young people is "a challenge", but the city is rallying well from recession. On the train, I received a text from Tom Riordan, chief executive of Leeds city council: "Make sure you visit Trinity, our excellent new shopping centre. 18 million visitors in 9 months!"
Trinity Leeds is the biggest shopping centre in Europe. It looks like … a shopping centre, albeit an upmarket one. The first thing I saw was the Apple shop, with that usual half-creepy, half-impressive symposium going on above the gadgets between staff and young customers. Trinity's high glass roof is said to put it into the Leeds tradition of arcades, and I walked from it to an earlier example of one of these: Kirkgate Market. This always strikes me as an epicentre of northernness: you can buy "cinder toffee", which I never see in London; liquorice is called "Spanish"; you can have a "beaker" of tea, or cheese and chips in a sandwich.
Whether the availability of a cheese-and-chip sandwich would keep people in the north or drive them away is, I suppose, moot. I called Riordan and asked whether it bothered him that there was nothing northern about Trinity Leeds. "It's global brands. That's the economy and that's the market." On the matter of northerness, he notes that Leeds remains the third-largest manufacturing centre outside London, a fact often forgotten amid the real story of modern Leeds: the huge growth of "financial and professional services" occupying high-rise offices that were not there in my day. Adjacent to these is Victorian Park Square, where, in 1989, I was offered a tenancy in a barristers' chambers. The head of the chambers, who looked and indeed spoke like the bald, incredibly tough Yorkshire cricketer Brian Close, said: "Now, this is a 25-year touch. I'm not 'avin yer buggerin' off back to London at the first opportunity." He was also a Crown Court judge, and it was like being sentenced to 25 years. So I declined the offer.
Sitting in Park Square, with its Audis and Range Rovers, its branches of Bonhams and Coutts, I reflected on that choice. By now I would probably be living in a converted barn in nearby Wetherby with a border collie and a Land Rover. I would be experiencing all the vaunted "quality of life" the north offers … and that so many young people relinquish for the daily hell that is a London commute.
Britain today is constructed on a slope, with much of the money and talent rolling towards Boris Johnson. That can't be right. Tom Riordan in Leeds wants "some form" of greater devolution for the regions. Only the regions can help themselves. "In job creation, the blanket approach is not the best," he adds.
Professor Paul Salveson says much the same. He has founded the Hannah Mitchell Foundation (named after a northern suffragette) to campaign for "an England of the regions … not unelected combined authorities like Greater Manchester, but elected assemblies". Ten years ago, the north-east rejected by ballot a plan for a local assembly. I speak, admittedly, as a Londoner, but that decision looks to me like a mistake. Reported by guardian.co.uk 15 hours ago.