“In January of this year the Department for Transport
(DfT) launched a small (by government standards) pilot competition for local
authorities to find ‘total transport’ solutions in rural and isolated
communities.
To some this may have seemed fairly innocuous; a
scrambled attempt to cover ground in local services left barren by revenue
cuts. Yet the guidance for bidders
contained a line that appeared to herald something more than spin, smoke and
mirrors; something that looked like an honest appeal.
‘Service integration has not been attempted on any
scale up to now, so the essential first step is for local authorities to work
out how to go about it.’
Events this month, where we have seen the wheel of
public reform turn once more, recalled this line.
When the coalition government first came into power,
the word regional was banned. Localism
was the new watchword. This month saw
the concept of regionalism bloom again.
Across the North and the Midlands two
major bodies built of local authorities are ready to take on statutory powers
for regional transport planning. While
in the West Country, Surveyor has been told there is an ‘aspiration for
more formalised regional control of transport’.
Further south, we see major sub-regional groups
developing. In the East Midlands we have
the two great communities of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire planning a joint
combined authority and in ‘England’s Economic Heartland’ of Northamptonshire,
Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, we have an integrated total transport plan
blossoming that, in its conception, actually pre-dates the DfT’s competition.
Some of this goes back to traditional English
regionalism. The North, and to a lesser
extent the Midlands, have always been comfortable seeing themselves as
individual cultural entities, while some even still see Cornwall, another
beneficiary of recent devolution, as a country in itself. In the south, where demarcation is more of an
economic issue, sub-regional transport planning may be more practical. The capital of course, effectively a region
in itself, already has the might of Transport for London working for it…”
Poor old South. The devil’s in the demarcation, isn’t
it? Boundaries may be fuzzy but we know
where the North and the Midlands are. We might even be able to point out East Anglia, another traditional entity but now
one sadly subsumed into the ‘East of England’
Prescott zone, where it rubs shoulders with
north London. But the South? And the West?
Here it gets confused.
In 1919 Professor C.B.
Fawcett published a famous, not to say infamous, work entitled Provinces of England: A Study of Some
Geographical Aspects of Devolution.
It included a map of 12 provinces, defined by physical features and
ignoring county boundaries. The only nod
to history was the re-use of certain names as labels of convenience. Cornwall and
Devon were combined as the ‘Devon
Province’. The ‘Wessex
Province’ comprised no more than the Solent basin. In
between was an area stretching from the Wye valley to the English Channel, grouped
as the ‘Bristol Province’. Fawcett explained its name as follows:
“Round Bristol the
popular regional name has been ‘West of England’ or ‘West Country’. But our Bristol Province has no better claim
to the name ‘West of England’ than the West Midland Province has, and a less
claim than could be made on behalf of Devon; while the term ‘West Country’ has
different local meanings from north to south of England – in Durham and
Northumberland it refers to Cumberland and Westmorland.”
Generations of the more materialist
regionalists have praised the prof for his objectivity and lack of sentiment. Most fail to comment on the fact that in 1942
Fawcett revised his map, now with 11 provinces, several minor and some major
boundary changes, plus a couple of name changes while he was about it. Surely unassailable objective reality ought
not to be that malleable?
Cultural geography is about
people and the place they call home. It
picks up where physical geography leaves off and it’s what’s rightly central to
any discussion about English regionalism from below. It’s because that voice from below is so often
suppressed that we have this difficulty with demarcation down south. It’s why we’re assured that it’s absolutely
all about economics, and the functional parameters of accommodating and
responding to growth, and not at all about culture.
Is Cornwall part of the ‘West Country’? For a Cornishman, the west starts at Truro and carries on to
the Isles of Scilly. Cornwall has the Cornish Riviera. Devon has
the English Riviera. You might think the
penny of national separation would have dropped by now. So if England’s West Country extends no
further west than the Tamar, how far east does it go? According to a recent study of regional
accents by YouGov, no further than Somerset. Not even as far as Brisawl, me lover.
The ‘West Country’ is a
slippery term because it’s defined by those living to the east of it. It’s what’s down west from London
and as London’s
sphere of influence grows so the West Country shrinks. Between the wars it was still possible to describe
Berkshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire and Dorset as the ‘Middle
West’ (the reference is from Lovely
Britain, edited by Mais and Stephenson), somewhere too far west to be the
Home Counties and not west enough to be the real West Country.
Wessex today is split west-east – between the ‘South West’
and ‘South East’ Prescott zones – but another line would be north-west /
south-east. Even in the days of our
independence we had Wessex
west of Selwood and Wessex
east of Selwood, the diocese of Sherborne and the diocese of Winchester.
As with the Highland / Lowland line in Scotland, our
geography has shaped our history, creating divisions for others to exploit if
they will. Whereas a self-governing region
could work to strengthen the lines of communication that bind us together, the
priorities of the London regime for centuries
have been to follow the lines of least resistance, the tentacles that reach
into deepest Wessex. There’s the Bath Road, the Kennet & Avon Canal,
the Great Western Railway and the M4 going to the west; the Portsmouth Road, the London & South Western
Railway and the M3 going to the south.
Or so it’s presented. The reality
is that of travel in the opposite direction, for these are not primarily the
bonds of a resilient and self-confident region.
They’re the great veins along which our region’s tribute flows up to London, never to be seen
again.
The demarcation problem in
‘the South’ is insoluble so long as London
is allowed to dominate. The North and
the Midlands aspire to break free of London
and they have the distance and the spirit to make it so whenever they
choose. As Surveyor’s editorial notes, the South may be tending to see its
future solely in terms of sub-regions, satellites submissive to the will of the
Great Wen, not defined, as others are, in resistance to it. So long as that’s the case then it deserves
the environmental and social catastrophe that’s heading towards it as London overspill eyes its
fields.
It doesn’t have to be that
way though. Wessex
has a flag, Wessex has a patron
saint, Wessex
has its own, much abused dialect. We
have as much right as any Mercian or Northumbrian to govern ourselves. In so far as we’re on London’s doorstep, our culture in the front
line facing the steamroller, we have a stronger and more urgent case than they
do.
Our first priority,
naturally, is to jettison the idea of the ‘West Country’, a concept far too
flexible for its own good. Wessex is an alternative name that retains the
idea of being placed geographically to the west of London.
It does so without the notions of ineradicable inferiority, mental
dumbness and infinite recession into peninsular twilight that have
characterised a view of the ‘West Country’ handed down from above. One busy lopping off our eastern shires one
by one.
Time to stand, men of the
west. And then push back.
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