UKH

Which area produces/has produced the strongest climbers. To my untrained eye it seems like all the northerners are climbing way harder than us southern fairies? Is that because they have more hard routes to go at? Or is it in the Bovril they drink?

'Fairies'?!

Impressively retro/unconstructed there! 

surely fairies can fly ? Must help a little.

Should it be Faeries?

Really?

Off the top of my head climbers from the south;

Ben Moon, Airlie Anderson, Jasper Sharpe, Mick Fowler, Neil Gresham, Pete Oxley, Dave Pickford, Gav Symonds....

F***, the list goes on and on.

Crack a book lad, crack a book!!

And Moffat! 

Moffatt was Leicestershire, he was in the middle, you don't get to claim him if you think the North starts at Watford gap.

Born in London but brought-up is what we're looking for? And let's add the Midlands anyway

I think that, per population, Scotland seems always to have pulled above its weight.

And of course, Anne and yourself John. Oh the heady days of Mile End!

I hope you're not calling me a Southerner!

I'd rather be French! 🤣

Yes, but east or west is the real question.

It's amusing how everyone in England seems to think that the south starts just a bit south of them.

I don't think many people even in Scotland would seriously call Yorkshire the south!

Properly motivated climbers will move to be near the crags, once they've been in Sheffield for a year or 2 they can claim naturalised northerner status. 

I used to think Dumfries was in the Deep South!

It's certainly "down south".

Glasgow and Edinburgh are the south; Yorkshire's the Deep South.

Seems like if you are unfortunate enough to come from the south, then a move to Sheffield is critical to achieve your potential cf moon,moffatt, dawes, fowler et al. Even a move there from Dyserth can work wonders

They are even more southern

How I dislike these discussions that exaggerate divides. Many southern climbers moved north in order to be closer to more good climbing (self included a long time ago).

For one happy moment I thought this was going to be a thread on olden days cricket:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_v_South

Perhaps there could be a UKC discussion of Gentlemen vs Players climbers. One would imagine that Bonington and Dawes qualify as Gents, for instance, and Brown and Whillans as Players.

North South divide 

So what is the status of the bit of England north of The North. Honorary Scotland? Though I always thought that was just Northumberland.

That's also Scotland (super north)

That’s the first time I’ve heard Dawes called a gentleman.

Or "reyt north"

The middle bit of the map looks about right - I'm from the debatable Midland/North land that has a red line slap bang through it as shown. All sorts of people would shift that line south to the Trent of course, as per the classic definition (meaning, for example, that Notts County is a Northern football club while Nottingham Forest is a Midland one), but coming from Amber Valley the line as shown feels more accurate - with Derby being Midland, really. A key question has always seemed to be where the last hill of the Pennines is. I was brought up near Crich, which has a strong claim; others say The Chevin down Duffield way, but that's not much of a hill and Crich is a better candidate. Anything Pennine surely has to be North rather than Midland, anyway.

(One useful byproduct of the Brexit thing, whatever one makes of the politics, is that it got rid of the silly EU designation of all of Derbyshire being East Midland. The idea of suggesting that in a pub in Glossop or Chapel always seemed a bit risky.)

Anyone calling Derby Northern needs to recall their lone brain cell from wherever it has got to (I write this as a Geordie sat just north of Derby Ring Road).

Agreed, up to as point - I was recently discussing this with my Dunblane-based pal Mick, who was born and raised in Derby and still has strong links there, and I was slightly surprised to learn that he regards himself as Northern - and he has plenty of brain cells.

To me however it feels like the question is how far north of Derby does one have to go to stop being Midland, even accepting that there's no hard and fast line (and other factors such as language are in play, not just geography). On the basis that Sheffield is definitely Northern, are Matlock and Chesterfield as well? Personally I'd say yes, but they're in a sort of transient zone where they're a bit of both.

Does Derby have more branches of Greggs or Pret?

it’s Madge Hilll south of Kniveton. Stand on the trig and you’ll understand. Coming from the hill country south of Glasgow it feels like the last challenge to the flatlands of the south ftt try on an unbroken chain.

Sheffield ceased being part of The North proper (like) some time in the mid 90s. Confirmed by the Greggs divide: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/fe/0e/14/fe0e14f2f3b33186a70d6d284072345e.jp...

Britain's best male competition climber for decades comes from Guilford. That's the south even by London standards. 

Greggs probably, anyone with money in Derby is probably working on Pride Park, on Raynesway or at one of the hospitals so Pret would probably close down pretty fast.

Sheffield is definitely Northern, if you were to have a hard line I would say it skirts the northern edge of Chatsworth estate, Manchester and Liverpool are definitely North. Mansfield is northern I would say.

Connecticut...?

The north/south divide is really more about economics and industry rather than purely geography.

There is no Midlands. I like the idea that the economic north south divide is the mouth of the Humber to the mouth of the Severn.

Means that places like the West Midlands, which clearly 'feels' more like a northern industrial area, is rightly considered so, whereas the posher East Midlands is considered southern.

Have you been to Chesterfield or Derby before? Sure they have nice bits but there is no way they are posh towns/ cities. The only reasons that Derby has any wealth at all is that it had more of a focus on the rail industry than other towns in the north (facilitated by it being so very middle) and that RR set up shop there.

If Derby had lost rail in the way that Newcastle and Sunderland had lost shipbuilding it would look like Port Talbot and I doubt RR would have remained headquartered here.

Good point, and quite a poignant one for me as my late father - who worked on the railways in/around Derby all his days - would have turned 95 today. I sometimes wonder what he would have done had Derby not been a railway town - he would still have done something useful, for sure, but quite possibly elsewhere and the lives and me and my sisters would have been very different. Derby was and still is very much a railway place. My dad was stationmaster at Denby (the first five years of my life were spent on a platform!), then when that closed he was a line inspector for a while (I have a childhood memory of walking through Milford Tunnel - beneath the Chevin - with him to check on engineering work). Then for a long time until retirement he worked in the "power box" at Derby, in electronic signalling. Rolls-Royce in Derby was also a big thing, and had excellent sports facilities - we would go and play them in cup matches at cricket and get hammered, and that was their second XI.

I disagree with Paul Jepson's idea of there being no Midlands - as one brought up on the cusp of North/Midlands it was always clear what the Midlands were, just not clear quite where the northern boundary lay. Leicester, to take an example, is clearly a Midland city and not a southern one.

Anyway, to get back to the OP's point about whether the North or South of England has produced the stronger climbers, the status of Derbyshire feels a critical in this regard, as it's the most transitional of all counties, with the southern end (eg between Derby and the Trent) being non-Northern and the northern end definitely Northern. The mysterious boundary is somewhere in between but no one knows quite where.

They can be good fun if no-one takes it seriously. There was a Lancs vs Yorks thread years ago which was all about trading insults. From memory it remained good natured even if some of the banter was pretty savage.

Anyway, my contribution is that if we are talking about the UK as a whole, as in 'UKC,' then the Peak is definitely in the south and Northumberland is the middle-east.

Surely it's nothing more than rock within a sensible distance and a higher chance of growing up knowing folk into climbing?

And that anything north of Nottingham/West of Bristol is just better ;p

Nah.

As someone that grew up in North (this bit is very important)  Yorkshire and live in Scotland I effing love 'em ha ha

Anywhere south of York is almost France!

North starts above York.

On the Midlands  youtube.com/watch?v=BhJYRRnM6pc& As both a West Midlander and a middle child, I love this poem. 

I now live just a few hundred yards south of the border between the Midlands and the North (i.e. Derbyshire and Sheffield city [so Yorkshire in old money] boundary), but it's all a bit fuzzy. Dronfield was once in Yorkshire, Sheffield FC - the oldest football club in the world - has it's ground in Dronfield, hence Derbyshire, hence the Midlands. And Chesterfield and Worksop are on the BBC Look North weather map, not on Midlands Today's. 

In reply to dinodinosaur:

North vs Soiuth of where, considering its bad form to assume the UK is England, or not to include the whole of the UK on such a topic I think we have to face facts Leicestershire is well and truely south, by most measurements the centre of the UK is north of Manchester.

Somewhere near Haltwhistle iirc

It clearly meant England.

I think it’s well established that anything south of the Kessock Bridge is ‘the south’ and once you hit the Cheviot then you’ve little reason to go further to assess how south things really go.  

Usefully in Germany we have a clearer divide, the " Aldi Equator" as the Albrecht brothers divided their business into Aldi Sud and Aldi Nord and each brother ran their part.

Haven't their successors just agreed reunification?

The " North" used to start at Harworth . First colliery tip as you travelled up the A1. (It may well have been landscaped by now)

Chesterfield and Mansfield are the last vestiges of the Midlands, The North begins between them and Rotherham. Dino's dividing line is just a shade lower than it should be. Nottingham, Leicester and Derby- definitive Midlands cities. Sheffield and Manchester definitive Northern cities.

The North disowns Chesterfield and Mansfield and it's not like the Midlands wants them but it's got them!

IT's where brick architecture gives way to stone.  Belper-ish

There are unsubstantiated rumours they might rejoin but at the moment it all looks like a journo adding 2 and 2 together and getting 5. Basically some of the legal disputes between the two have been settled which would make it possible, other ideas are that the two patrs will come under a common operating system, it's anyones guess.

So the Cotswolds are part of  the north ?

Yes, it's absolutely geologically related. Just north of Derby (just north of Duffield and as you say, south of Belper), one goes back several 100 million years to the carboniferous system, which includes the whole of the Pennines. A completely different landscape with hard rock (grit and carb. lime) and thus a completely different, wilder, less rural feel. Although the whole of Derbyshire is in the so-called 'East Midlands' it's a misleading political-geography label, imho. In reality the county is divided in half, one in southern and one in northern England. At least, that's how I see it, but I may well be in a smallish minority.

That's West.  Obviously

Funnily enough I almost made that exact point upthread - it's always felt like a very valid distinction. In terms of my own upbringing, after the Denby station period mentioned above, I spent all my growing-up years in Swanwick, between Ripley and Alfreton. Swanwick was markedly smaller then than it is now - it's become quite commuter-village-ish due to proximity to the M1 and the A38 (the latter wasn't there when I was wee - I can remember it being built). There were still working pits in the area when I was young.

Before discovering the joys of hills I started my walking career with longish road and occasional path walks from the house. Right from the start it was striking how if I walked east out of the village, through Leabrooks and Somercotes etc, towards Mansfield/Nottingham, it was all joined-up places and brick architecture. That did - and still does - feel very Midland. But if I walked out the other way, to Pentrich and South Wingfield/Crich, it was immediately rural, with separate villages, increasingly undulating countryside (with Crich Stand perched on top of what was clearly a hill of sorts) and, crucially, stone-built houses and farms. That felt Northern to me - there was a real sense that I could just keep walking and get into increasingly hilly/rural country, into the southern Peak and beyond.

Of course North/Midlands isn't simply defined by rural/urban landscapes - there are the big Northern cities and industries and some very scenic Midland areas - but the distinction felt marked and has left me with a strong feeling of having been brought up on the actual divide between the two regions. This has stayed with me in terms of what I like in other places - for 20-odd years now I've lived on the very edge of Stirling, with increasing urban stuff one way from the house and fields/open country/hills the other - the latter starts just 100 yards or so from my door. I really like that bit-of-both boundary feeling, be it Midlands/North or Central Belt/Highlands.

Allenheads, apparently.

It is not. In charitable mode, Sheffield is North Midlands.

Manchester maybe, but I struggle with liverpool a bit.

Now you are just being silly.

"Before discovering the joys of hills I started my walking career with longish road and occasional path walks from the house. Right from the start it was striking how if I walked east out of the village, through Leabrooks and Somercotes etc, towards Mansfield/Nottingham, it was all joined-up places and brick architecture. That did - and still does - feel very Midland. But if I walked out the other way, to Pentrich and South Wingfield/Crich, it was immediately rural, with separate villages, increasingly undulating countryside (with Crich Stand perched on top of what was clearly a hill of sorts) and, crucially, stone-built houses and farms. That felt Northern to me - there was a real sense that I could just keep walking and get into increasingly hilly/rural country, into the southern Peak and beyond."

The reverse for me - it's the industrial bits that feel the most Northern.  The North/South thing is really about the people and not the landscape.  Richmond feels less northern than Mexborough.

I'm from Doncaster, just to the south, within view of Harworth pit tip (and several others).  I would have liked this definition when I was living there.  Now I'm just south of the Trent on the outskirts of Nottingham I'm not so sure!

Interesting - did the different shops look different? I was in an Aldi in France last week and it had a different sign and just looked a bit shit compared to UK Aldis, and I remembered that I had seen the same in Denmark a few years ago as well. Now I'm wondering if the UK branches are a different German origin branch to the French and Danish ones...?

Like I said, not on the Look North weather map, or at least not for Chezzy! I teach in the less salubrious end of Chesterfield and I've asked lots kids over the years whether they see themselves as Midlanders or Northerners and there is genuine confusion. This seems to suggest it really is the borderlands.

My brother-in-law is from Leeds and when I moved to Sheffield he denounced the good folk of the Steel City as Midlanders with pretensions.

I think we all struggle with Liverpool a bit.

More seriously, I think Liverpool being a true port city makes it special. I remember one of my dad's wise old mates saying Liverpool is just the East End of New York. There's something in that. And loads of Liverpudlians just look more ethnically mixed than most other parts of the country showing that multicultural heritage.

So it sort of is "the North" as an idea, but really its part of everywhere.

I don't.

I never think of Liverpool as being English. Just Liverpool, like you say it is special. And I mean that in a good way, despite my fondness for posting Scouse jokes on Tringa's joke threads.

There does seem to be a broad chunk of mid-Derbyshire (and possibly west Notts) where opinions differ markedly and there's a lot of uncertainty/confusion. There's clearly no definitive answer to this, particularly in the Chesterfield/Amber Valley stretch.

I wonder how aspirational it is, ie do more people (at least outdoorsy people) in that uncertain area like to regard themselves as Northern rather than Midland? I know I do - but if I'd headed south as a student, to the Definite Midlands or beyond, and not then spent most of my life climbing hills, I might now regard myself as a Midlander by upbringing.

Incidentally, my better half is from Coniston and seems to regard large parts of Yorkshire as not necessarily Northern. Mind you, she's also a professional linguist and would argue for isogloss aspects being significant in this debate - eg the one that makes the Barnsley accent so distinct/pleasant.

I think this is a bit pernicious! Richmond is definitely the north, it’s just Posh North which is definitely a thing. As is Poor South.

It’s interesting that many posters don’t consider Liverpool part of the north, but its own thing. Similarly London is not part of the south, but its own thing. 

I think you might have meant unreconstructed.

My parents are from Kentish South London, and my cousins grew up in that area so we used to go down regularly when I was kid. When friends started moving to central-ish London after uni and I'd go and visit, it felt very different from the South London suburbs I knew a bit from childhood/teenage years.

Those suburban areas were "the South" to me (I remember going to a party with my cousins in my mid teens I guess, trying to persuade my cousin's friend that if you are from outside the M25 you aren't necessarily a farmer), but more inner London was this multicultural world city where you were as likely to meet Americans or Indians or Swedes as you were native Londoners.

I recall some poetry from the wall of the Engineering department loos at Nottingham uni;

‘there are custurds, musturds and basturds’

to which someone had added ‘northern’ between the 2nd and 3rd classifications. This was followed by quite a lengthy debate as to where the North / South divide actually was. I can’t remember the conclusion though there was a strong argument for Nottingham being in the Midlands.

Yes - but there are plenty of "native" Londoners in more central parts, there is a lot of social housing within the north/south circulars and there are plenty of people who sound foreign but have been here since they were teenagers and who are as much Londoners as anyone else (unless you're some kind of blood and soil maniac). In addition parts of outer London are very very multicultural nowadays, eg the M4/M40 corridor of the city from Shepherd's Bush all the way out to Heathrow is a massive melting pot. To the point that the FT ran a travel article on how to use the new Elizabeth line to visit the "real London" of the suburbs, as opposed to the Succession-esque money-blitzed centre, coverint hipster joints in the east and the best Indian restaurants out west

I had a surprise a few years ago when I went to a small town in Sussex for a (rather genteel) stag do. Getting off the train I was clearly in a small town but the demographics didn't seem much different to the city I'd just left. "London" as a social phenomena has been spreading way out of the city in recent decades.

Yes, ALDI Nord have France, Benelux, Portugal, Denmark, Spain and Poland. ALDI Sud are Ireland, UK, Hungary, Switzerland, Austria, China, Italy and Slovenia.

In the USA ALDI Nord operates as Trader Joe's and ALDI Sud as ALDI.

Aye it's barely even Yorkshire ....;p

I put my faith in the old geographer Hadrian for the N/S dividing line. 

So the south is the better organised nice looking one! I don't know if German ideas of the north and the south track to British ones or Italian ones more?

I'm on the south coast of England, if you go much further south you get your feet wet! No-one here claims to be in the north!

Anyone with any sense disowns Mansfield (said as someone who worked there for 4years and went to school there previously!).

ALDI split it up on equal population grounds.

It's all so new there's just loads of different definitions, having had a Mitteldeutschland as a region it's a bit easier though. For us in Bavaria the dividing line is the "weisswurst equator" above which the heathens don't eat weisswurst, there are various ideas but roughly it runs along the river Main which was also one of the borders between Prussian controlled areas and Bavaria/ Baden Wuttemburg. Others use the Danube but allow some to the north, it's a religion thing. Like I said it's all kinda new, to southern Germany also belongs Austria and Tirol!

Clue is in the county name. South Yorkshire. Emphasis on south.......

east obviously.... Malcolm, Stuart, Wil, Max.

Four aces in any pack of Scottish climbers based on strength....

Intrigued by the idea that parts of Hertfordshire and Essex are in the Midlands, along with Suffolk and Cambs.

Northumberland, Lakes, Yorkshire Grit and Limestone,  = Northern
Peak = Midlands
Avon, Devon, Cornwall = South

Surely these are the relevant categorisations?

Technically correct but hard to think of Glossop and Hadfield of being in the Midlands. Dark Peak should've been divvied up between Lancs and Yorks but maybe they like being the Midlands stubby little appendage.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Midlands.png

I would have thought if you can get gravy on your chips you are in the north, if you can’t you aren’t!

When I was young this problem confused me no end; I couldn't understand why the weather forecast for 'the north' was (and is) not the correct forecast for Newcastle - which is clearly in the north! As an adult I still can't fully understand why it is the forecast for a city about 100 miles south of Newcastle.

Derby is barely north of East Midlands Airport, which by name is in the Midlands.

For me, being generous, the north starts at Manchester/Sheffield. Being less generous, Manchester is in the North Midlands.

When I was growing up in Northumberland, the Midlands started at Durham and stretched to York. Anything beyond there was The South.

The English National Cross Country Championships is organised each year by the Southern, Midlands or Northern Association. When Southern organise it is always Parliament Hill in London, for the last decade or so the Midlands have used Nottingham. The Northern venue has changed a lot, I’ve run at Sunderland, near Chester, near Harrogate and one year near Derby, in fact right next to East Midlands Airport.

The fact that climbers born in the south migrate to the north to be closer to the crags tells you all you need to know really.

As for where the divide lies, as this thread demonstrates, it’s a matter of perspective but at the end of the day you’ve got to ask the people who live there.

Living in Birmingham, I’d say north of the Stafford - Derby - Nottingham line is North, south of the Worcester - Warwick - Northampton line is south and the rest is the Midlands, except that Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk are East Anglia (having lived there as well, it’s certainly not North or Midlands but it’s not really South either, though the high tech industries and house prices around Cambridge suggest that it might as well be).

Surely no one living in Sheffield will claim to be in the South or the Midlands. Brummies will say Midlands. Chesterfield would be a mix by the sound of it. Norfolk would be East, Cornwall - West. Wales, Scotland, Ireland (which has its own North and I’m told South can be used for the Republic).

The whole N / S thing is a bit stilly really. As pointed out above, it was used as a proxy for the economic divide but S really meant SE - which has grown over time as wealth (or at least house prices and the London commuter belt) spread out from London.

You could also look at the weather - temperature, sunshine and rainfall. It’s grim up North 😉

EMA being south of Nottingham… kind of demonstrates the North / Midlands confusion round those parts. Though I suspect most people in Derby and Nottingham would say they’re in the Midlands.

I dunno, born in the County and been in Sheffield for uni for a few years, I still like to think if England is split into north/south/midlands in equal thirds the North/Midlands line gets drawn about level with York. At the end of the day if I have to drive just under 3 hours to get home and it's also 3 hours to get to London (the hub of the South) then Sheffield must be bang in the middle.

As a callous fresher one of my favourite activities was telling people from Manchester they were southern as it really rubbed them specifically up the wrong way...

That’s a matter of perception though. Did any Sheffield locals claim to live in the Midlands?

That said, our Tory PM is MP for a Yorks constituency so Yorks must be southern after all…

On a serious note, confining the North to Northumberland, Durham, Tyne and Wear and Cumbria would amount to a touch under 3 million people, about the same as the population of the West Midlands or Greater Manchester, i.e.individually insignificant. There are downsides to being too restrictive in what you include…

A long time ago I used to work with a Brighton football fan and he told me when they played Crawley Town (still south of London) in a cup match they chanted ‘you dirty Northern b@st@rds! you dirty Northern b@st@rds!’

Yawn! I suppose this thread is meant to be amusing, tickling primitive tribal prejudices or something. But I don't get it. Have UKCers really nothing better to do?

Oh come on!  Shirebrook is the place.

Yeah, it would seem the old kings of Northumbria and Mercia were less parochial than some present day people from the northern part of the North.

Yeah, Weymouth vs Dorchester matches used to result in similar chants from the Weymouth end.

I don't think this was the puerile argument that the OP ordered.

I'd say appreciating and joking about regional identity and differences.  It's part of culture and society would be pretty drab without that.

Stockport is in That Down South. Cafes there serve chips for breakfast, just like in That London. Shocking and most unhealthy. 

So, a line drawn from York to Stockport defines the south. Durham to Preston defines The North. The bit in between is the Midlands.

But these are based on magnetic north. “True North” is actually like a ring contour, it’s southern edge is Tyldesley, northern edge is my shed, western edge is Latics stadium, eastern edge is Hindley.  It does vary a bit, eg northern edge the other year was the end of my drive