WHERE IS THE BORDER?

The dividing line between the North and the South is an arbitrary one, but that certainly hasn’t stopped people trying to identify it. (YouGov once had a go, based on the number of people who call their evening meal ‘dinner’ [southern], or ‘tea’ [northern].) While some regions are placed firmly in one camp or the other (Scousers know they are Northerners, Londoners know they are Southerners), plenty of others lie somewhere in the middle and the Midlands gets tossed about from map to map.

In 2017, Danny Dorling, then professor of human geography at the University of Sheffield, set out to draw a line based on a range of factors, including life expectancy, poverty, education and skills, employment and wealth.

The resulting line runs diagonally across England, weaving through towns and villages and cutting through counties. It rests above Gloucestershire, Warwickshire, Leicestershire and Lincolnshire, and runs below West and MidWorcestershire, Loughborough, Scunthorpe, Cleethorpes and Great Grimsby.

Other attempts to draw similar lines have been more controversial. Mark Tewdwr-Jones, a professor at Newcastle University, caused some consternation in 2018 when he appeared on Radio 4 and divided the UK based on London’s sphere of influence, which, according to him, led to Leeds and York being defined as in the South.

The division that seems to be most commonly used in academic papers is the so-called ‘Severn-Wash’ line. Broadly similar to Danny Dorling’s line, although it respects county borders, it divides the population of England roughly in two, running diagonally from the Severn Estuary to the Wash – the rectangular bay located in the northwest corner of East Anglia.