Calling all Southerners: What's your impressions of the North

[Bletchleyite]

As a southerner who has Yorkshire heritage and I'd lived in Shotton for a few years I can quite rightly say that I'll never live further north than the Thames ever again.

Mostly down to the lack of jobs but it's also down to the fact that when I lived in Shotton, I did get very homesick and missed the south of England dearly.

And in the South I miss the North terribly at times. I think it's the pull of your birthplace. Most people probably have the same.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Agreed. It isn't bad, but there's nothing that makes it stand out as a place to want to be either.

Places near me I'd put in that category are the likes of Bedford, Northampton and Aylesbury, FWIW - they're OK but don't stand out. (Though Bedford is nice down by the river, and Aylesbury has an excellent theatre for a small town).

 

[MidnightFlyer]

For the most part the people I used to deal with were great to get on with, but the town itself is dreary. I always describe it as having lost its reason to exist (the mills) in the 1950s but it hasn't realised it yet.

I think it has probably handled its loss of purpose (if you like) a lot better than some of the other towns who had the same fate befall them. Some explanation may be offered by it being (post-1974) the second largest settlement in Lancashire, the reasonable sporting success (and thus extended profile) of its football team, two high profile MPs for extended periods of time and the fact that it has become the commercial centre of the wider area, having had vast swathes of its town centre rebuilt in the last decade; as well as considerable improvements to its transport infrastructure, both public and private.

The towns further out towards Pendle, and into enemy country, and down the valleys towards Manchester by and large have not experienced such good fortune and for example somewhere like Nelson still well and truly does look lost for its lack of industry.