High-speed trains won't close the North-South divide
Today, the Government are announcing how £34 billion will be splurged on the HS2 rail line, bringing Manchester and Leeds an hour closer to London.
It is crazily optimistic to think shrinking journey times will narrow the North-South gap. That gap may be geographical; but, much more powerfully, it is also historical, industrial, economical, emotional and intellectual. It won't be eradicated by faster trains.
The gap goes back nearly a 1,000 years. In the Canterbury Cathedral archives lies the 1072 Winchester Accord, signed with the mark of the illiterate William the Conqueror in the chapel of Winchester Castle. William agreed in the document that the southern province of Canterbury should take precedence over York. After his savage northern campaign in 1069-70 – the Harrying of the North – he appreciated that there was a real division between the rebellious north and the more easily pacified south.
Throughout the medieval period, the divide between north and south persisted. Fertile southern areas that were rich then, remain rich today. In 1334, Berkshire and Oxfordshire, then worth £20 per square mile, were two of the richest counties in England, as they still are.
Until the Industrial Revolution, the south was much more heavily populated than the north, and more generally in the swing of things – even in the late 17th century, only a quarter of the English population lived north-west of the line from Boston, Lincolnshire, to Gloucester.
Before the modern age, the north was considered remote, colder, on the way to the Arctic. To the south lay Europe – or pretty much the rest of the world, as we then knew it, until the discovery of America in the late 15th century, and the expansion of trade links with the east in the 16th century.
The Industrial Revolution populated the North, and made it richer. But, still, recessions struck the Midlands and the North that much more ferociously, from the 30s onwards. By 1933, half of Lancashire's pre-war cotton trade had disappeared. Blackburn became known as Dole Town. British steel and coal went the same way over the next half-century. This succession of body blows exacerbated the divide between north and south.
The north-south divide is deepened by the London effect – the magnetic power the capital has not just over Britain, but over the world. Before William the Conqueror invaded, London was neither the formal or informal capital of England. Canterbury was the religious capital, Winchester the secular one. It was only in the 11th century that London became first the informal capital of England – as the country's biggest, richest city – and then the formal one.
In the last 1,000 years, London's supremacy over the rest of England – and Europe – has only intensified. London has become a vortex for the young and talented, sucking them away from other English cities; and for immigrants, too, who think of England as London and vice versa.
London's economy moves independently of the rest of England. During recessions, London is always first in and first out of a housing downturn, with the regions usually lagging by a year or two. The richest 10 per cent in Britain are more than 100 times richer than the poorest 10 per cent; the richest 10 per cent in London are more than 250 times richer than the poorest 10 per cent.
Without London – taking out the richest and the poorest in the country – you end up with a much smaller divide between north and south. But that divide remains wide and deep – it won't be closed by carving a gold-plated railway line through some of Britain's prettiest countryside.
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