By Saskia Papadakis, Royal Holloway, University of London
In 1999, Prime Minister Tony Blair dismissed the English North-South divide as a ‘myth’. Calling the North-South divide ‘simplistic’, he pointed out that there were rich people in Cheshire and poor people in Manchester, and that the rich and the poor were ‘living cheek by jowl’ in London. Why talk about North-South divides when New Labour were going to bring prosperity to all of Britain?
Since the heady days of New Labour, the English North-South divide has come back in a big way. From the moment the city of Sunderland was the first to declare its ‘Leave’ referendum result early on 24 June 2016, the Northern voter, imagined as white, working-class and male, has been seen as responsible for Brexit. The shock of the referendum result was explained as the result of an out-of-touch, London-based ‘metropolitan elite’ – middle-class, pro-migration and pro-globalisation – being ignorant of the plight of the ‘left behind’ white working-classes living in deindustrialised Northern towns. The remedy proposed by politicians and media commentators has been that those metropolitan elites should pay more attention to the ‘authentic’ voices of supposedly ordinary working-class Northern people – so long as those voices are calling for tighter controls on immigration.
This idea that England can be split between a South imagined as cosmopolitan, effeminate, wealthy and progressive, and a North that is supposedly white, masculine, working-class and backwards-looking, has deep roots. The English working classes have traditionally been associated with the figure of the white male worker, and, since the rise of industrialism in the early nineteenth century, the English North has been depicted as a uniformly working-class space. It follows that in cultural and political representations of the North, it continues to be ‘a place where white, working-class masculinity is constructed and performed’.
This way of imagining the North flattens out the complexity and diversity of the region, and of the people who live there. Alongside the social and economic changes that have resulted from state-led deindustrialisation from 1979 onwards, the North, like the South, is deeply connected with histories of empire, global circuits of migration, and practices of antiracism and solidarity. These realities are conveniently ignored when the British government and media use the figure of the white, working-class and implicitly racist and bigoted Northerner as a justification for punitive policies around migration and a ramping up of transphobia.
The flipside of all the handwringing about the ‘left behind’ and the plight of ‘white working-class boys’ is a deep disdain for Northern people, places and cultures. The imagined white, working-class Northern man – such as the concept of ‘Workington Man’ developed by the Conservatives in the 2019 UK general election – comes in handy for British media and political elites when justifying their own reactionary racism. However, given that he is imagined as violent, fascist, and ignorant, the white working-class Northern man is also an object of disgust. Even the idea of the ‘left behind’ has a eugenicist ring, implying that Northerners are backwards in time, less evolved and less sophisticated than their Southern counterparts.
This disgust towards Northerners and the North of England has implications for everything from health inequalities, infrastructure investment and the links we make between place and opportunity – according to Paul Longley and his co-writers, ‘just 31% of people in England’s north-east perceived good opportunities for social progression, compared with 74% of those in the south-east and 78% of Londoners’. Government schemes like ‘levelling up’ and the ‘Northern powerhouse’ never seem to involve new funding for the North; iconic Northern buildings like the Dorman Long Tower are demolished whilst Battersea Power Station in London receives a £9 billion make-over, including new public transport links and the restoration of its redundant chimneys.
The English North-South divide may indeed be a ‘myth’, but it is a powerful one, shaping the spatial distribution of resources within the nation. More than this, it shapes how people feel about themselves and the places in which they live. In my research, I recorded oral history and walking interviews with people from the North of England who were living in London. The stigmatisation of the North as uniformly white, working-class and racist, and the imaginary of London and the South-East as middle-class, cosmopolitan and progressive, were stories that were woven into the identities and narratives of my participants, whether they rejected and challenged these stereotypes, or whether they repeated and reproduced them. This geographical imaginary is entangled with ideas about race, gender and class in England, about who is ‘deserving’ of basic resources like healthcare and transport, and about which people and places have a future within the nation.
As politicians respond to far-right electoral successes in the North by doubling down on Powellite rhetoric on migration, we need to pay attention to how North-South mythologies become part of a political reality, in which migrants are punished for the failures of Keir Starmer’s increasingly desperate leadership. By breaking apart these myths, we can resist the racialised, classed and gendered logics of North-South imaginaries, and work towards more democratic and hopeful futures across the North-South divide.
About the author: Dr Saskia Papadakis is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, where she is part of the team recording An Oral History of the UK Environmental Movement, 1970-2020. Her first monograph, Resisting the North-South divide: Migration and identity in postcolonial England, will be published by Manchester University Press.
Suggested further reading
Emery, J. (2018). Geographies of deindustrialization and the working-class: Industrial ruination, legacies, and affect. Geography Compass. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12417
Martin, R. (1988). The political economy of Britain’s North-South divide. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Available from: https://doi.org/10.2307/622738
Nayak, A. (2017). Purging the nation: Race, conviviality and embodied encounters in the lives of British Bangladeshi Muslim young women. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12168
Papadakis, S. (2025). Postimperial melancholia and the English North-South divide: reading the life stories of Northern women of colour in London. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.70016
How to cite
Papadakis, S. (2025, June) The myth of the white working-class Northern man. Geography Directions. Available from: https://doi.org/10.55203/JCND9168
Geography Directions 