ABSTRACT
Like the Canadian North, the ‘North’ of England is not a precisely defined and mapped out jurisdiction with clear borders. It is said by many to extend as far south as the Cheshire border, including Manchester, and by a few to include even the Midlands – everything ‘North of Watford’ (see Figure 5.1). 1 This ‘North’, which is seen as an undifferentiated unity no more diverse than the motorway signs to ‘The North’, 2 provides a second example of a representation of a region as a pastoral foil to other, collectively romanticised images of London and the South of England. Unlike the Canadian ‘True North’, however, the images of the British North, if produced in the cultural hub of London, are also re-worked, accepted, or rejected by Northerners for their own, internal, reasons. A spatial mythology surrounding the British North is dialogically interwoven with other spatial mythologies and their attendant practices which collectively comprise the formation of attitudes, institutionalised arrangements, and practices we have been calling social spatialisation. Map of the extent of the British ‘North' https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315003269/77da7924-b390-4571-8796-b40fc2bfb867/content/ch5fig1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
