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Heimat, or perhaps Hyemat
Jan. 5th, 2022 08:17 pmBook Review: The Northumbrians - North-East England and its People - A New History, by Dan Jackson
It is about 10 years since I visited the north-east, and 20 years since my parents moved away. Although it will always instil a sense of home, I suspect I would also feel something of an outsider. I've lived in Berkshire for more than 25 years, but it's mostly just "the place I live". I suppose I am a Citizen of Nowhere. Indeed the introductory pages of Jackson's book wrestle with the difficulty of defining "Northumbria" - choosing a practical if slightly unconventional definition that broadly corresponds to the original ITV Tyne-Tees region (Northumberland, Tyne and Wear, County Durham, and Cleveland north of the Tees); so much for "north of the Humber" or the ancient kingdom's reach as far as Edinburgh. And that's before you get on to "Geordie" - a word of indefinite etymology that may have encompassed both Newcastle and Sunderland (surely a contemporary heresy), the rivalry between these two cities dating at least as far back as the English Civil War.
Jackson's book was surprisingly dense to read, never difficult, but the sort that requires proper digestion. Trying to be broad in scope, famous historical figures such as Grace Darling and Admiral Collingwood, and more recent footballers, get only brief mentions. Being highly selective, there is only brief discussion of the Marches and the Border Reivers. Yet the region surely has been shaped by these and their leading families, such as the Percys and the Armstrongs, as much as by Hadrian, whose wall actually runs across its later midriff. More space is devoted to George Stephenson and the proletariat of the mining, railway, shipbuilding and engineering industries of the region's heyday.
For all that might have been omitted, the book contains plenty of myth-busting and interesting material. Although Lindisfarne was infamously raided by the Vikings, the region (as defined by Jackson) was never settled by them, unlike Yorkshire. The Tyneside Electrics railway was one of the earliest electrified railways in the country. Knott's Flats in North Shields was designed by Charles Holden, more famous to me as the architect of Piccadilly and Central Line stations. Newcastle's Civic Centre is consciously modelled on the Stockholm Stadshus.
Later chapters contain some introspection on the region's post-industrial decline. Whilst avoiding partisanship, Jackson notes the strong communitarian nature of the region, emerging from military and industrial necessity (the danger inherent in mining, shipbuilding and seafaring) and speculates on this legacy as a cause of relatively low levels of entrepreneurialism and (perhaps unconscious) reliance on the state as an employer. Not so much psycho-geography, as geo-psychology.
It is about 10 years since I visited the north-east, and 20 years since my parents moved away. Although it will always instil a sense of home, I suspect I would also feel something of an outsider. I've lived in Berkshire for more than 25 years, but it's mostly just "the place I live". I suppose I am a Citizen of Nowhere. Indeed the introductory pages of Jackson's book wrestle with the difficulty of defining "Northumbria" - choosing a practical if slightly unconventional definition that broadly corresponds to the original ITV Tyne-Tees region (Northumberland, Tyne and Wear, County Durham, and Cleveland north of the Tees); so much for "north of the Humber" or the ancient kingdom's reach as far as Edinburgh. And that's before you get on to "Geordie" - a word of indefinite etymology that may have encompassed both Newcastle and Sunderland (surely a contemporary heresy), the rivalry between these two cities dating at least as far back as the English Civil War.
Jackson's book was surprisingly dense to read, never difficult, but the sort that requires proper digestion. Trying to be broad in scope, famous historical figures such as Grace Darling and Admiral Collingwood, and more recent footballers, get only brief mentions. Being highly selective, there is only brief discussion of the Marches and the Border Reivers. Yet the region surely has been shaped by these and their leading families, such as the Percys and the Armstrongs, as much as by Hadrian, whose wall actually runs across its later midriff. More space is devoted to George Stephenson and the proletariat of the mining, railway, shipbuilding and engineering industries of the region's heyday.
For all that might have been omitted, the book contains plenty of myth-busting and interesting material. Although Lindisfarne was infamously raided by the Vikings, the region (as defined by Jackson) was never settled by them, unlike Yorkshire. The Tyneside Electrics railway was one of the earliest electrified railways in the country. Knott's Flats in North Shields was designed by Charles Holden, more famous to me as the architect of Piccadilly and Central Line stations. Newcastle's Civic Centre is consciously modelled on the Stockholm Stadshus.
Later chapters contain some introspection on the region's post-industrial decline. Whilst avoiding partisanship, Jackson notes the strong communitarian nature of the region, emerging from military and industrial necessity (the danger inherent in mining, shipbuilding and seafaring) and speculates on this legacy as a cause of relatively low levels of entrepreneurialism and (perhaps unconscious) reliance on the state as an employer. Not so much psycho-geography, as geo-psychology.
The Building of the Tyne Bridge, by Edward Montgomery O'Rorke Dickey (1894–1977)