Did religion play a part in some traditionally Labour seats being lost to the Conservatives in 2019? A new study considers northern identity in light of the collapse of the ‘red wall’

It’s a long time since I was driven home to Yorkshire up the M1, and they may have since gone, but I distinctly remember big blue signs pointing to “The North”. They began after Watford Gap service station, and suggested terra incognita, peopled by tribes speaking alien tongues and following a different way of life. I don’t recall any comparable signs to “The South”. That was presumably a given: motorists knew where they were going and what to expect.

But where is The North, and who are The Northerners? The region has produced many books, but they are usually affectionate portraits of their native heath, like Charles Nevin’s hugely entertaining Lancashire: Where Women Die of Love. They rarely seek to solve the conundrum of northern identity. That broad question began to be addressed in the 1960s, when regional political and economic development demanded a better answer, from northern writers. In 1960 itself, Arthur Smailes, son of a council-school headmaster in Haltwhistle, Northumberland, who went on to become an eminent professor of geography, published North England. Six years later, Graham Turner, the first economics ­correspondent of the BBC, a subject of which he knew nothing (“perhaps it was one of God’s jokes,” he later quipped), published The North Country, a strong brew of reportage, history, travel, anecdote and personal narrative.