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Fifty Great Things to Come Out of the Midlands
BY ROBERT SHORE
Contents
Fifty Great Things to Come Out of The Midlands
About the Publisher
Fifty Great Things to Come Out of The Midlands
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