Member Article

Was North East England invented by TV?

North East England could be less than 50 years old and was quite possibly invented by a television company, claims new research released by the University of Teesside.

A major five-year research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council has been looking back as far as Anglo-Saxon times to discover when the two north-eastern counties of England - Durham and Northumberland - formed a recognisable region.

The region as it is now understood did not begin to take shape until the late 19th century when various employers’ associations in shipbuilding, engineering and iron-making named themselves North East Coast Federations. But it was only in 1959 that the idea of the region was widely established. This was the year of the first edition of Tyne/Tees Television’s The Viewer, which assured its readers that ‘the region stretching from beyond the Tees in the south to well beyond the Tyne in the north is a region with a culture, a tradition and a way of life entirely its own’.

Professor Anthony Pollard commented: “Regions can be defined spatially by their topography, landscapes and environments. They can also be characterised economically in terms of wealth creation. Then there is the political layer as determined by relationships with central government and the exercise of authority. Finally, there is an important cultural aspect which must take account of people’s shared and distinctive customs and traditions. All these layers make up what we mean by a region.

“Today’s culture, tradition and way of life draws on the collective memory and experience of the recent industrial past, especially on Tyneside and in Durham. And despite rivalries through the years, which in some instances are still quite marked today, the shared sense of the past, partial as it is, is a vital element in the modern creation of a regional identity just as in earlier centuries border ballads and the cult of St Cuthbert were integral to the shaping of sub-regional identities.”

Conclusions from the full research are being drawn together in a volume of essays entitled ‘Regional Identities in North East England, c. 1300 - 2000’, edited by Adrian Green and AJ Pollard. It will be published next year by Boydell and Brewer.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .