Fifty Great Things to Come Out of the Midlands

Fifty Great Things to Come Out of the Midlands
Robert Shore

Celebrate the heart of Britain in this fun and informative mini-ebook.Rugby, Walkers Crisps, Conkers. These are just a handful of the many great things to have come out of the Midlands. In this celebratory list, journalist and loyal Midlander Robert Shore counts down fifty of the best gifts the Midlands has given the world.Knowledge no Midlander – nay, Brit! – should be without.From the author of Bang in the Middle.

Fifty Great Things to Come Out of the Midlands

BY ROBERT SHORE

Contents

Title Page (#u19cf1866-a42a-5a83-8309-82227d547ccb)

Fifty Great Things to Come Out of The Midlands

Bang in the Middle (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher

Fifty Great Things to Come Out of The Midlands (#u35dee77d-8ca0-57c1-a9cf-af5aa890ac01)

Everyone knows what they think about the North and South of England; the clichés abound. But what about that big, anonymous stretch of land in between: the Midlands? Despite being home to a vast swathe of the English population, it’s a region that has neither identity nor purpose. Or that’s how it can sometimes seem, anyway. But, as the following list reveals, quietly, without fanfare, the Midlands has been the source of almost everything that is good about English – and, indeed, world – culture and history.

Here, in order of ascending stupendousness, are my top fifty things to come out of the Midlands:

50) Watchmen

Americans may have created Superman and Batman, but it was a Midlander who reinvented the superhero genre for the post-Cold War era. Alan Moore’s Watchmen even made Time magazine’s top 100 novels of all time in 2005 – the only graphic novel to do so. Despite his success, Moore continues to live in his native Northampton. When he was invited to appear in The Simpsons in 2007, a producer had to fly from LA to the Midlands to record his part. Rorschach, Doctor Manhattan, Silk Spectre – secretly, behind those masks and disguises, they’re all Midlanders.

49) Gravity

Midlanders are very grounded people, so it should come as little surprise that it was a Midlander who first discovered gravity. Former Grantham schoolboy Sir Isaac Newton first hypothesised the inverse-square law of universal gravitation in his 1687 page-turner Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. As the noted versifier Alexander Pope wrote: ‘Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; / God said “Let Newton be” and all was light.’The Royal Society recently named humble Midlander Newton as the most influential scientist of all time (Einstein came second). Beat that, smarty-pants London!

48) The Sistine Chapel

Did you know that the Midlands is home to what archaeologists have recently dubbed ‘the Sistine Chapel of the Ice Age’? Creswell Crags, an unassuming-looking limestone gorge on the Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire border, contains the most extensive cache of prehistoric bas-reliefs anywhere in the world. The subject matter of the engraved images – created by modifying the natural limestone topography of the caves – includes animals as well as what appear to be the earliest human nudes in the history of British art. That’s right: Ice Age Midlanders invented Britart.

47) Mercians

The recent recovery of the Staffordshire Hoard from a field in Hammerwich has provided a useful reminder that Mercia (the Anglo-Saxon antecedent of the modern Midlands) was politically, culturally and militarily far superior to Northumbria (precursor of the modern North) and Wessex (the South). Mercian pre-eminence was most visibly set forth in the great earthwork that King Offa had built from the Bristol Channel to the river Dee. ‘Offa’s Dyke’ is quite simply one of the wonders of the medieval world.

46)Christmas

Everyone knows that Santa Claus, aka Father Christmas, aka Kris Kringle, was born in Leicester.* But that’s not the only, or even the main, reason why the festive season is so quintessentially Midland. Think about it – how do you know each year when it’s Christmas (or Xmas) again? It’s when you first hear Walsall boy Noddy Holder screaming ‘It’s Chriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiistmaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaas!’ at the climax of Slade’s festive evergreen ‘Merry Xmas Everyone, of course.

* That is to say, he’s as likely to have been born in Leicester as anywhere else. He doesn’t really exist, you know.

45) Jonathan Agnew

He may have been born in Cheshire (i.e. in the North) but few have done more to promote the splendours of the Midland landscape than Jonathan Agnew, who has fearlessly used his platform as England’s leading cricket broadcaster to promote the beauties of the Vale of Belvoir in the East Midlands. Not only a great commentator (he was responsible for rendering Brian Johnston helpless on air with his famous Ian Botham ‘leg over’ line), Aggers, as regular listeners to Test Match Special know him, was a fine bowler in his day too – he played for Leicestershire, naturally. It’s not his fault we lost the Ashes.

44) A Sense of Centredness

In the little village of Meriden, situated on the outskirts of Coventry, a sandstone pillar carries the following announcement: ‘This ancient wayside cross has stood in the village for some 500 years and by tradition it marks the Centre of England.’ The Ordnance Survey doesn’t agree – it thinks the geographical heart of the country is eighteen miles away, at Fenny Drayton in Leicestershire; the Midland Oak in Leamington Spa likewise stakes a plausible claim to standing at the centre of England. But however you calculate it, England’s heart is somewhere around here. If you want to feel really centred, this is where you need to be.

43) Walkers Crisps

Where is Leicester, and what is Leicester all about? Well, it’s in the East Midlands (and where exactly is the East Midlands?) and about 11 million bags of crisps are produced in the Walkers factory there every day, so you could say it’s all about deep-fried slices of potato. Mansfield exile Henry Walker first set up shop there in the 1880s, but his business only diversified into crisp production in 1948. It was a shrewd move – Walkers currently holds around 50 per cent of the British crisp market.

42) America

The idea of the USA was first cooked up in Scrooby in North Nottinghamshire by a group of religious Separatists who would eventually set sail for America on the Mayflower. The Pilgrim Fathers have bequeathed several important legacies to the modern US, beginning with the ‘Mayflower Compact’. As President John Quincy Adams would later claim, the Compact was the foundation stone of the 1787 US Constitution, perhaps the most influential document ever enacted in the name of ‘the people’. You could say, then, that those first persecution-fleeing Midlanders invented the concept of the Land of the Free.

41) Spaghetti Junction

As we just discovered, in the early modern period the Midlands taught America to be the Land of the Free. Today, the region can lay claim to the hardly less exalted title of the Land of the Free-Flowing Traffic Interchange. Opened to great public fanfare in 1972, Spaghetti Junction in Birmingham links three different motorways and features not a single set of traffic lights. Clever stuff, and the very quintessence of motoring freedom. Of course, some people say that Spag Junc is really just a big car park trying to pass itself off as a motorway junction, but we won’t give such dissident voices publicity here.

40) Roundabouts

While we’re on the subject of free-flowing traffic, let’s consider Midlanders’ supremacy when it comes to roundabouts. These marvellous circular traffic intersections didn’t originate in the Midlands but Telford in Shropshire is the centripetal heart of twenty-first-century England, boasting the highest density of roundabouts per capita of population. Motorists have been known to use up a whole tank’s worth of petrol driving from one end of Telford to the other: it’s only a few miles, but the roundabouts are addictive. Other Midland roundabout towns of note: too many to list.

39) The Great Reform Act

Shortly after the current Coalition Government assumed power, Nick Clegg promised the ‘biggest shake-up of our democracy since 1832’. Little Nicky has delivered nothing of the sort, of course, but it was good of him to remind us all of a genuinely defining event in British politics: the 1832 Great Reform Act, which laid the foundations of our modern electoral system. The foremost public campaigner was the visionary Brum-based economist Thomas Attwood, who founded the Birmingham Political Union (BPU) and played a crucial role in securing the reform of the franchise in the 1830s. As Lord Durham declared: ‘the country owed Reform to Birmingham, and its salvation from revolution.’

38) Arthur Seaton

Nottingham novelist Alan Sillitoe created the ultimate modern Midland folk hero when he penned his classic Angry Young Man novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958). Anti-hero Arthur Seaton is a fount of thrillingly rebellious quotations. Sheffield musical darlings Arctic Monkeys adopted one of Seaton’s most resonant phrases for the title of their album Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, while Manc miserabilist Morrissey drew on the novel for his finest lyric, ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’. Which neatly illustrates a general truth: whenever (if ever) you think of something good about the North, it’s usually the Midlands you’re really thinking about.

37) Gary Lineker

All Midlanders are nice people – that’s a scientifically proven fact – but that doesn’t stop them being high achievers. The sporting world’s Mr Nice, Gary Lineker, is a Leicester lad and was noted throughout his footballing career for his commitment to fair play: he was never even booked, never mind sent off. That didn’t stop him from becoming England’s second-highest all-time goalscorer on the international stage, of course. The Match of the Day host isn’t above poking fun at himself either: since 1995 he’s played an arch-villain in advertising campaigns for Walkers Crisps – who are also from Leicester.

36) Rebecca Adlington

Midlanders are also modest, almost to a fault – it’s one of the main reasons the splendours and accomplishments of the region are such a well-kept secret. Can you think of a more self-deprecating sporting over-achiever than Mansfield-born swimmer Rebecca Adlington, who, on I’m A Celebrity, was (I’m quoting) ‘so starstruck by Westlife singer and eventual victor, Kian Egan, she blushed heavily and couldn’t look him in the eye’? And she wept about her self-image too. She’s England’s most decorated female Olympian ever, for heaven’s sake! And a national treasure.

35) Proper Dialect

Some people think only Northerners do proper dialect. Not true. In fact, in terms of local lingo, Yorkshire is positively impoverished compared to the regional riches of Nottinghamshire. ‘Shift yersen’ (Get out of my way), ‘Ayer masht?’ (Have you made a cup of tea?), ‘Ittle norrocha’ (You won’t feel any pain) and ‘Ittim weeya poss’ (Hit him with your purse) are a few of the phrases you need to master before weekending in Mansfield. As for the West Midlands, visitors would be well advised to get their tongues around the following bit of Yamyam-Yowyow dialogue before setting off: ‘Yow all right, bab?’ ‘Yam. Bostin’!’

34) The Major Oak

You haven’t lived until you’ve stood beneath the thousand-year-old, 52-foot-high Major Oak in Sherwood Forest – history, mystery and majesty all rolled together in one great eye-filling spectacle. (Sort of.) This is where Robin Hood, Alan-a-Dale, Friar Tuck and the other Merry Men would conceal themselves to evade the attentions of the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham. ’Oodie and Maid Marian tied the knot a few minutes down the road in St Mary’s Church, Edwinstowe. They hold a festival here every August in celebration of the great Man in Tights: ‘For he was a good outlaw,/ And did poor men much good.’ How very Midland.

33) The Olympics