Barely a year since Labour’s so-called “red wall” of ex-industrial seats crumbled in the December 2019 general election, the North of England is again center stage. With a by-election in the northeastern port town of Hartlepool — and the strange emergence of a Northern Independence Party (NIP) looking set to take votes from Labour — we have been treated to any number of intrepid political safarists taking the several-hour train ride out of London to brave the wild and untamed “regions.” The North of England, often seen as one of Britain’s rust belts, and the former home of many of the industries that turned Britain into the workshop of the world, is today widely used as blank slate on which people of all political positions can draw whatever conclusions they wish.

But what, exactly, is “the North”? For a term used so freely, it’s a slippery concept. We could look at geography: the North is that land that lies to the north of Crewe in the West and the Humber in the East; W. H. Auden’s “Never-Never Land” beyond Crewe Junction, that “wildly exciting frontier where the alien South ends and the North, my world, begins.” But what connects prosperous and bucolic Harrogate and the deprived former mill town of Oldham, other than a motorway and the vagaries of the English landscape?

Perhaps, then, the North is defined by its culture: but unlike the regional nationalisms of the Basques, Catalans, Quebecois, or even Britain’s Celtic fringes, there is no separate linguistic unity, and nor is there an independent public sphere of the kind enjoyed by Scotland, which has its own newspapers and cultural production. Beyond the stereotypes of flat caps and whippets, or the more modern Oasis and gravy-soaked chips, no one is really sure what Northern culture is. If, as Benedict Anderson said, a nation is an imagined community, then the North’s requires a rather giant mythical leap to summon it forth.