Introduction - Identifying Regions

Summary

In November 2004 a referendum was held to determine whether the people of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the historic counties of Durham and Northumberland, along with Middlesbrough, Redcar and Cleveland in North Yorkshire,wanted a regional assembly. Nearly 50% of the electorate voted decisively against the proposal by 3:1. The vote was somewhat enigmatic.To have nearly 50% concerned enough about the proposal to vote suggests some sort of regional engagement; the overwhelming majority against the proposal either suggests that there was no desire for regional devolution, or represents a reaction to the insultingly meagre degree of delegation offered – even less than London. Clearly, however, regional devolution in the North East had been on the agenda. The referendum was the climax of a decade-long campaign, during which the advocates for a regional assembly claimed,‘The north-east is different.The people of the region share a history and a culture which is unique.’

The idea that there is a unique history was the most frequently stated justification for regional government. Peter Hetherington opened a piece in The Guardian on 16 June 2003 entitled ‘Geordies look to saint for inspiration’ with the words,‘With a distinctive history, culture and musical heritage, it is a region set apart from the rest of England.’ Hetherington proceeded to quote amply from an unreferenced article by John Tomaney who invoked St Cuthbert as a symbol of the region's political and cultural identity and asserted a long record of self-determination going back to the middle ages. Peter Scott, vice-chancellor of Kingston University, singing from a slightly different hymn sheet for The Guardian on 2 April 2002, declared more cautiously that:

Regions are difficult to define… The north-east can claim coherence based on mish-mash memories of the age of Bede, its boundaries established by the ambitions of Northumbrian warrior kings, and when the industrial revolution was engineered on the banks of the Tyne.

The supposed coherence of contemporary north-east regional identity is claimed on the basis of ‘mish-mash memories’. And those memories apparently run back for fourteen centuries.