Kevin Schürer

“When you go to the industrial North you are conscious, quite apart from the unfamiliar scenery, of entering a strange country. This is partly because of the North-South antithesis which has been rubbed into us for such a long time past... The Northerner has ‘grit’, he is grim, ‘dour’, plucky, warm-hearted and democratic; the Southerner is snobbish, effeminate and lazy – that at any rate is the theory.” 

Thus wrote the Eton-educated George Orwell (real name Eric Blair) in The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937.  

The Angel of the North and the surrounding landscape in Gateshead, England.

Fundamental differences between the north and south can be seen across a number of socioeconomic measures in present-day England. In terms of mortality, for example, between 1965 and 2015 those living in the north had on average a 20 percent higher chance of dying under the age of 75 than those in the south. This gap initially decreased (or narrowed) from 1965 through to the mid-1990s, but from the late 1990s the mortality gap between north and south further increased (or widened).

In addition to mortality, a divergence of experience can also be seen in education provision and attainment, investment in transport infrastructures, unemployment rates, income levels and housing. In part, these differences formed the backdrop to the previous government’s Levelling Up programme, centred around generating greater investment for the north.  

However, as the quote from Orwell suggests, the north-south divide is not a modern phenomenon. So, when did this geographical divide emerge?  

From Roman conquest to industrial revolution 

The most commonly held view is that the underlying differences between north and south were brought about by the industrial revolution, during which the divided nation took different economic paths (of which, more later). However, one recent suggestion is that the root of the divide might be linked to William the Conqueror’s so-called Harrying of the North, in which the new king launched a vicious campaign of looting and pillage in an attempt to subdue the north in the winter of 1069-70. This, so the theory goes, created an economic imbalance between north and south from which the former never quite recovered. It also created a cultural divide between the two.  

William I and Alan Rufus, who led the harrying of the north. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Lyell 22.

Yet it is possible to look even further back in history for evidence of a divide. 

Following the Roman conquest, the province was initially divided for administrative purposes into Britannia Superior (the ‘south’) and Britannia Inferior (the ‘north’) – the names themselves are very telling – with London acting as the administrative capital of the south, and York the north. 

After the Roman evacuation from Britain and the incursion of the Anglo-Saxons from the beginning of the 5th century, England was divided into a number of separate kingdoms, with the boundaries between them in a state of flux as power and territorial control shifted. But with the coming of the Vikings from the late 9th century England was again divided into north and south for legal purposes under Danelaw. An earlier blog has shown how even today, remnants of the Danelaw divide can still be seen in surname distributions. However, unlike the dividing line for today’s north-south divide which is generally agreed to run roughly from the river Severn in the south-west to the Wash on the east coast (or even further north into Lincolnshire), the Danelaw division ran from the river Mersey in the north-west down to London and eastwards along the Thames.  

The Danelaw. American, British and Slovak Studies I – Scientific Figure on ResearchGate.

Changes in population

For the period leading up to the ‘traditional’ industrial revolution in Britain (between approximately 1750 and 1850), Campop co-founder Tony Wrigley has demonstrated that England experienced significant and important regional changes in population. Between 1600 and 1700 the counties of the ‘north’ recorded growth rates in population of 126.9 compared to the southern counties growth rate of 118.1.

The north growth rate of 126.9 from 1600-1700 means that the population in 1700 (1,780,370) was 1.269 times that of 1600 (1,402,900). So for every 100 people in 1600, there were 126.9 in 1700. Looking at this differently, the absolute growth between the two dates (an increase of 377,470) is 26.9% of the initial population.

For the period 1700 to 1750, the northern counties recorded a staggering growth rate of 421.6 compared to the south’s 128.4. In the same period Lancashire and the west Riding of Yorkshire, often seen as the heartland of industrial growth, recorded a growth rate of 135.0, whilst at the same the metropolitan area of London held its own, with growth rates of 145.6 between 1600 and 1700 and 167.1 between 1700 and 1750. 

Overall, the population of the north was two-thirds the size of the population of the south in 1600, but by 1801 was fractionally more populous than the south. Importantly, however, this redistribution of the country’s population was well underway before what is traditionally seen as the classic period of industrialisation. Indeed, recent work by Campop’s Leigh Shaw-Taylor suggests that in occupational terms, England’s transition to an industrialised economy was largely complete by 1700 rather than starting thereafter. 

The overall effect of the redistribution of the country’s population in the four hundred years between 1600 and 2001 can be shown in the map below, which tracks the ‘weighted mean centre’ of the country in terms of population. One way of interpreting this is to think of the ‘mean centre’ as the balancing point of England, the point at which England would pivot in terms of its population distribution. Between 1600 and 1700 the pivot point moved a relatively short distance, just under a kilometre or so. This is because the growth in the northern counties (especially in ‘coal’ counties of Northumberland and Durham)  was largely counter-weighted by the growth of metropolitan London.  

Map created by Tony Wrigley and Max Satchell (2008).

By 1750, the balancing point had moved some 2.5 kilometres to the north as population growth in the northern countries outstripped that in the south, despite the continued rapid growth of London. Thereafter, in each of the three 50-year periods between 1700 and 1901, the pivot point moved progressively north, reaching a point just over 30 kilometres from the starting point of 1600.  

Moving towards the present, remarkably, in the 50 years between 1951 and 2001, the pivot point returned only a little north (but interestingly, somewhat to the east) of its initial position. The shifting mean centre of the country’s population over this 400-year period might be seen as tracking the north’s industrial rise and subsequent decline. 

Migration

The north-south divide, however, runs deeper than just economic and population distribution and location. As Orwell intimated in 1937 it can also be seen as being culturally ingrained and determined.  

One way of examining this has been to analyse the birthplaces of individuals migrating to London in the period 1851 to 1911 as recorded in the censuses. Usually in migration studies, migration is measured or mapped from the perspective of the place to which the migrants have moved. Thus, in the case of London, say, x percent of migrants in the capital are said to have migrated from Devon, and y percent from Durham. However, having access to the birthplaces of all individuals in the historic censuses regardless of where they lived allows the migration equation to be turned around, measuring instead the proportion of individuals born in place x living in London. This is done in the maps which follow, where each map shows the proportions of those living in London, yet born elsewhere, as a proportion of the population of the parish or place of origin (as opposed to the population of London).  

Lifetime migrants living in London by place of birth as a proportion of those born in that place: 1851 to 1911.

These maps indicate that from 1851 onwards – and importantly increasingly so – London was seemingly relatively unattractive or unimportant as a place to move to for those from large areas of the ‘north’, including parts of north Yorkshire, Northumbria, Cumbria and especially the industrial heartlands of south Lancashire and west Yorkshire, as well as almost all of Wales.

Competing and intervening opportunities offered by other growing industrial areas can explain some of this pattern, but given that absolute distance from London was not necessarily the main factor in determining migration, it can also be seen as a significant cultural divide, one which intensifies overtime, so much so that by 1911 a clear geographical dichotomy had evolved. By this date a distinct dividing line was in evidence running approximately from the southern part of the Wash in the east to the mouth of the River Severn and the Bristol Channel in the west. 

The message is clear. The growth of greater London in the second half of the 19th century was fuelled disproportionately by southerners – as defined as those living south of the Wash-Severn line.  

Today’s politicians may agonise about how to break down the disparities and inequalities of the north-south divide currently evident in many aspects of the country’s economic and social makeup, but in so doing, they face the task of undoing historical processes that have lasted and endured for centuries. 

Further reading

• Acheson, D., Barker, D., Chambers, J., Graham, H., Marmot, M., and Whitehead, M. (eds.), Report of the independent inquiry into inequalities in health (London: Stationery Office, 1998). 
• Kontopantelis, E., Sperrin, M., Chandola, T., and Doran, T., ‘North-South disparities in English mortality 1965–2015: longitudinal population study’, Epidemiol Community Health 71 (2017), 928-936. 
• Schürer, K., and Day, J., ‘Migration to London and the development of the north–south divide, 1851–1911’, Social History 44:1 (2019), 26–56. 
• Wrigley, E. A., Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 2010). 
• Wrigley, E. A., ‘Rickman revisited: the population growth rates in English counties in the early modern period’, Economic History Review 62 (2009), 711-35.  
• UK’s north-south divide dates back to Vikings, says archaeologist | North-south divide | The Guardian 
• ‘How Norman Rule Reshaped England’, The Economist, 24 December 2016.

Tags: industrial revolution, migration, north-south divide, population size

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