Northern England

The half of England that industrialised first and has been arguing with London about it ever since. The north was Northumbria and then the Danelaw, and Norman rule imposed itself on it violently - the Harrying of the North in 1069 and 1070 devastated Yorkshire so thoroughly that the Domesday survey seventeen years later still recorded much of it as waste. Its monastic houses at Durham, Fountains and Rievaulx made it wealthy in wool. What defines it now began around 1780: coal, water power and cotton turned Lancashire, Yorkshire and the northeast into the first industrial region on earth, with Manchester as its type case, and the social consequences produced Peterloo, the Chartists, the cooperative movement founded at Rochdale in 1844, and the Labour Party. Engels wrote about Manchester because it was where the future was visible. Deindustrialisation from the 1970s removed most of that base within two decades and the region's politics have turned on the consequences since. Its accents remain the most distinct in England. The Angel of the North stands over a former colliery. The region holds around fifteen million people. Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield and Newcastle are its largest cities. Hadrian's Wall, Durham Cathedral, Saltaire and the Lake District are World Heritage sites. The Pennines run down its centre. Rugby league, association football's founding clubs and much of British popular music came out of these cities. The Football League was founded at Manchester in 1888, the first of its kind anywhere, and eleven of its twelve founding clubs were northern or Midlands.

• Existed: 900 CE – present
• Type: Entity