Explain to me "being Northern".

Well kind of, though not as much as some would have you believe.

2. But why?

Industrial base in North, further from metropolis.

Works on some levels, ie. predominantly working class, poorer, speak with comedy accents, etc.

But doesn't work on other levels - i.e. the US South is poor and working class because it is/was primarily agricultural, while the UK North is/was primarily industrial. I think probably a better analogy would be the midwest Rust Belt. Detroit = Manchester or Sheffield in so many ways.

The south (mainly London to be honest) is flash (for the working classes) and poncey (middle and upper), expensive and full of galleries exhibiting a brick and callling it art.

x-post

The North: Billy Liar, A Taste of Honey, Saturday Night Sunday Morning, The Full Monty, Billy Elliot.

The South: Blow Up, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Love Actually, Performance.

Jim, I also get the piss taken out of me when I go back to Wolverhampton ffor loosing my accent and wearing daft clothes (to be fair I wore a lot of really daft clothes as a teenager, but people seem to have forgotten that).

in the south people are more uptight and it still rains quite a bit, and people normally are less outspoken, but still rude. despise northern people. pronouces "bath" as "baaarrrrrthhhhhhh"

All of this is only half true, obviously.

to be fair I wore a lot of really daft clothes as a teenager, but people seem to have forgotten that

Me too! I was much more of a pretentious knobpot when I was 14 than I could ever bring myself to be now, but I got away with it then, and don't any more.

I guess the Midlands has more in common with the north than the south, in terms of the accents, industry, provincial attitudes? I don't really know as I've (shamefully) never been oop north!

Ah, but wait...that's a form of affection. It sort of means "we're good enough friends that I can say really offensive things to you and you'll know I don't mean them, so won't take offense". I think it's quite an important way of forming bonds in an environemt where actual affection is seen as "being soft".

wales: somewhere in the west, pronounces "bath" as "ballwwuuuyyggwnth". keep romances within the farmyard. crap at football (hopefully).

Actually, I've no idea.

Liverpool scally:
Youse look well gay in that, la. What you got on soft lad?

Posh bird:
You are *such* a crashing bore Mimi, but I do love you.

Upsides to the north = cheap, nicer countryside. Downsides = grindingly poor, not as cheap as it used to be.

I don't know if there's that much to stereotypes of the blunt northener anymore.

I must confess that if I were single, and had a decent job lined up, I'd move to London like a shot.

Actually, I'd look for work in W Europe if I were in that situation, but for the purposes of the n/s divide in the uk, blah.

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fucking traitors, that's what they are

(or fookin' traitors)

that's living in scotland for you. i've forgotten my roots.

Haha, as opposed to working class northerners who are known for their racial tolerance...

(also kidding!)

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I think when I was growing up, we still saw the london working classes as being better off than us northern working classes, and so still resented them (cf loadsamoney, etc). That was the 80s though. There's also a convenient blind eye turned by the north to any southerners who really are worse off...but that's not entirely the fault of northerners, since as far as cultural representaion goes, the south is very much overrepresented (most tv comes out of london, etc), but then despite that, the poor south is as underepresented as the north (there's eastenders/coronation street, but that's pretty much it). So the impression given is that yeah, everyone south of watford is rolling in it.

I think as soon as you do get out of the north, it becomes pretty apparent that's not really what things are like. But the majority of northerners never do. So it's just blinkered insularity really. But then that's one of the things that helps the sense of community, so I suppose it's swings and roundabouts.

(many xposts)

Wigan is probably the harshest northern town ive been outside scotland, and its full of thugs.

Well I was back in Worcester at the weekend and can confirm that racism is alive and well among working class West Midlanders as well. So yes, cunts all round.

I don't think of Scousers as Northern, they have their own special category. Mancs on the other hand are definitely Northern.

northens do plops on internet website and souths do plops on there toilets

― plops

Speaking as an actual genuine Geordie (Born in Jarrow), w/r/2 "Northener", I don't...care? It's not something I've given a second's thought in my life.

^^^ exactly. not northerner.

The real divide in England isn't North/South anyway, it's London and its environs/rest of England. Wales or the South-West peninsula is just as remote/other culturally/politically in england as Cumbria or Yorkshire as far as I can see. IDK what other countries in the world have this weird divide where the capital has ALL the cultural/political/media power, it seems weird to me, and I've always thought it was a bad thing for our country.

West Country folk are kind of neutral in the North/South war, I've always thought. They may have anti-London leanings, but they're not serious combatants. The Welsh are like some crazy rogue splinter cell neither side particularly wants to be associated with.

love the welsh tbh

Small, dark, and wyverns.

I recently discovered I'm 1/8th Welsh actually.

Controversial correlation of the UK north with the US south: the gollywog. Or do you find gollywogs all over the UK?

Are there still gollywogs in the North?

no

No. I cannot remember the last time I saw one of those.

I've seen gollywogs recently in Minehead (nominally South, but not really wrt this argument) and York (North, obv. in Yorkshire, but somehow doesn't really seen Northern)

IDK what other countries in the world have this weird divide where the capital has ALL the cultural/political/media power

wouldn't this be the norm? admittedly the norm means countries either the size/smaller than the UK, or without its uh "global status"...though it's a pretty interesting thing to think about

re: travel across countries - yeah i'm sure many british people have stories about US friends/relatives coming over and suggesting, like, day trips to scotland or wherever, because their conception of distance and ease of travel is so different.

i think of golliwogs as a south-west england thing - i'd guess that if i went home (somerset) and actually looked around i wouldn't have to look too hard for them.

I have a gollywog keyring from the 70's, my mum used to work for robinsons jam which was just down the road.
it's now flattened ready for new houses :(

wouldn't this be the norm?

I actually have no idea! I'm genuinely curious to know.

Robertsons, not robinsons.

i can't imagine the london/rest of UK (or even just england) imbalance being any greater than, say, that in...idk, sweden, finland, greece, austria. i could be wrong.

its just that "northern" is so often used to mean lancashire/yorkshire specifically

and in my case people from Potters Bar

it's only in the past year that i've actually been to the north (as opposed to travelling through it) - york, manchester, birmingham, liverpool

there's fucking golliwogs in shops in every seaside town up the East/North Yorkshire coast I've been to in the last 18 months, which is most of them. but I seem to remember seeing them in Devon seaside resorts recently too. think it's got more to do with seaside towns being full of reprehensible hicks.

The only seaside town I've been to in recent years is Whitby and i didn't see any there, although this doesn't prove anything as there might not have been room, what with all the tacky goth paraphenalia everywhere.

London is the biggest city in the UK by a huge margin (7 mil to Birmingham's 1 mil), dunno how usual that kind of discrepancy is.

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lol yeah Whitby shops have a whole 'nother thing going on.

Whitby is a little posher and has a bit wider catchment area than yr Withernseas or Bridlingtons too.

why IS whitby goth mecca, anyway? i never worked that one out.

It's where Dracula landed in England in the book 'Dracula'.

It's where Dracula's ship came ashore in Bram Stoker's novel (IIRC it's a fictionalised, though recognisable take on the place, I haven't read "Dracula" in like 20 years)

really?! i'm not sure whether i'm being really gullible here or not. christ.

xp i guess two answers have to be believed then!

Yeah, totally Dracula. google it if you don't believe people!

yeah I think it's transparently fictionalised. so they started having a bit of a goth festival in the summer I think and then the businesses spring up around this, self-feeding phenomena

I think "being northern" has something to do with pit ponies and being southern has something to do with shandy, but I haven't updated my Britishisms database since I read The Road to Wigan Pier.

It probably helps that the place looks more than somewhat gothic, what with the huge ruined cathedral on the cliff overlooking the town.

I thought Whitby was pretty cool when I went there as a kid.

can I be a pedantic twat and say it's an Abbey? Synod of Whitby (or whatever it was called) was a biggish moment in the orthodoxifying of Christianity in the UK. Got some nice pics on the other puter, it's v. beautiful up there.

Of course you can (you pedantic twat) yes it's an abbey, you're right. I like Whitby loads, it's a nice place to spend a couple of days.

Can also report gollywogs on Bury market

I have a gollywog keyring from the 70's, my mum used to work for robinsons jam which was just down the road.
it's now flattened ready for new houses :(

That must be a bloody big keyring.

I am the only southerner in my office (in the south; not London) and every day I have to listen to a series of hilarious jokes about how every stupid decision management have ever made is because they are southerners (half of them aren't even British) and therefore wasteful, rude, daft, etc

and listen to a guy who spent several years travelling round east Asia, didn't get a job until nearly 25, had a brand new car and bought a flat down south before starting said job, talking about how rich, posh, spoilt southerners are

sometimes I point out that my family are from near Plymouth which is further from London than Leeds is anyway, but mostly I just silently curse my lack of amusing, non-bitter retorts

(I didn't know what a "lawn jockey" was until I read one of ILX's many fine race threads, and then two months later I saw one on a garden subsiding down a cliff near Weymouth)

Grimsby sounds nice

hahahahahahahahaha

lololololo.olo

xp!

Leeds is the South of the North btw, psychologically speaking

dublin, obv, is the south of ireland. The west/northwest is the north, the southwest is wales and the north is another country

all this in a country the size of rhode island

we got issues, what can i say

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01578/likelylads_1578242c.jpg