The North Will Rise Again: In Search of the Future in Northern Heartlands

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Interview with Alex Niven “A sort of fierce, buried idealism and soulfulness is at the heart of northern culture” The North Will Rise Again covers the colourful adventures of its inhabitants, the expansiveness and optimism that defines Northern culture, and the recurrent sense of failure and despair that is at the heart of one of the West's most impoverished regions. Throughout The North Will Rise Again, Niven is fond of quoting the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin as a progressive ally. Yet Benjamin was no mere modernist, as Niven seems to insist. There was a deep and abiding romanticism to his work as well.

The North Will Rise Again by Alex Niven | Waterstones

Incorporating sharp questions and big ideas, Niven shifts deftly between history, politics, culture and literature to offer a fascinating and provocative analysis of the marginalisation of the North." Madeleine Bunting, author of Labours of Love: the Crisis of Care This song debuted on 28 June 1980. Just a few weeks previously, on 18th April 1980, Rhodesia became the Republic of Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe, following elections in February under the Lancaster House Agreement.

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You describe the tourism, leisure, agricultural and university sectors as “chocolate-box cottage industries”. London and the South East are powerful largely due to casino sectors like finance, banking and construction. What economic model could work for the North? How very perceptive of you Brendan, particularly as the headline states “The North East will rise again”. We welcome applications to contribute to UnHerd – please fill out the form below including examples of your previously published work.

The North Will Rise Again - Bloomsbury Publishing

Hi. I haven't spotted this yet. It kind of occurred to me that the "North" in this song could, among other things, also be a reference to the Northern Ireland / Ulster situation at the time? In some sense this would explain the revenge of Culloden dead. "But it would turn out wrong" might be a reference to the fact that Protestants won the battle, and killed thousands of Jacobite Irishmen and Scotsmen in the process. Meaning they've been screwed both ways really. Seems apt for a Mark E. Smith song of the period. Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother arrived at Royal Air Force Turnhouse this morning in an aircraft of The Queen's Flight and drove to the Palace of Holyroodhouse. The similarity of this "Chow! ch-chow-wow! Chow!" to the "Ch-chow! CHOW!" that MES is constantly yelping in The NWRA is quite odd. Is MES embracing the scruffed corpse of Mark Twain?!?! Historically, English mayors have presided over urban settlements, all the way from the Mayor of Casterbridge to the Lord Mayor of London (and yes, I know that one of those is fictional, but it’s a good illustration of the point). It’s not unreasonable to extend that title to the elected heads of urban settlements, such as the Mayor of London or the Mayor of Liverpool – especially since we’ve imported this concept from the USA, where elected mayors of major (and smaller) cities are the norm. The postwar years were for Niven ones of “bold egalitarian strides” when, driven by a “rare sense of optimism and renewal,” experiments in modern civic culture sprung up across the North. He presents T. Dan Smith, the modernizing leader of Newcastle City Council with his ultimately doomed attempt to turn his home city into the “Brasilia of the North,” as typifying these progressive social democratic dreams. Driven by an almost religious zeal, Smith fundamentally reshaped the city’s physical environment, demolishing vast rows of Newcastle’s slums and engaging in a series of ambitious modernist construction projects in their stead. The contrast between Britain’s brief social-democratic, popular-modernist interlude and the neoliberal era that followed was stark.In the song's introduction, we hear about helping the man in Darlington who is having trouble with kids smashing his windows. The swingeing cuts of the austerity years lead to a “civic cut and run,” in which public services retreated in the face of unrelenting government cuts: in many areas of the North, those cuts were twice as big as their southern equivalents. In the decade after the financial crisis of 2008, government spending per capita on public transport was 2.4 times greater in the culturally, economically, and politically dominant London than in the North, leading many areas to feel even more hopelessly cut-off from southern prosperity than before. Capitals of Modernity