Dividing England along the Severn-Wash line
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In the past I’ve been writing about ways to split up England for the purpose of making federalism work in the UK (see this and this and this).
For some bizarre reason one split I never suggested in these blog posts was in many ways the most obvious one.
As a linguist, I’ve been aware for years that English dialects split into two main groups: Southern English south of a line roughly from the Severn to the Wash, and Northern English north of this line. (Scottish dialects are a completely different story.) Three of the most important isoglosses are shown on the map on the right.
However, this line turns up in lots of other contexts, e.g.:
- Economics: “The current government’s attempts to bridge the north-south divide look doomed to failure. All but one of the 20 worst districts for hidden unemployment lie north of a line from the Severn to the Wash […]”
- Politics: “South of a line drawn from the Wash to the Severn estuary, Labour has just 10 seats outside of London.”
- Geology: “The line links the mouth of the River Tees between Redcar and Hartlepool in the north east of England with the mouth of the River Exe in Devon, the south west. The lowlands (sedimentary rocks) are predominant to the east of the line and higher land (igneous and metamorphic rocks) dominates to the west. As well as geology, those areas to the north and west of the line are generally wetter in climate than those to the east and south. Similar lines are commonly drawn, for similar purposes, between the Severn Estuary and the Wash, and between the Severn and the mouth of the River Trent.”
- Ornithology: “[The nightingale is] a secretive bird which likes nothing better than hiding in the middle of an impenetrable bush or thicket. In the UK they breed mostly south of the Severn-Wash line […]”
- Medicine: “Although the 1916 and 1917 waves of meningitis in the civil population were less intense than the primary wave of 1915 […], the underlying pattern of heightened disease activity in counties to the south of the Severn-Wash line persisted.”
I’m sure there are many more examples, but these should suffice to show that the Severn-Wash line is the most obvious border. North England and South England would be different in so many ways that they would quickly develop separate identities.
Obviously I don’t think England will ever be divided, but the consequence is that an undivided England will always dominate the UK to such a great extent that Scottish independence becomes a necessity.
Rob, I was thinking of you when I wrote this… ๐
I know ๐ I would say the green isogloss would demarcate the ‘tribal’ split between northern and southern England.
Birmingam would have to be partitioned — even cantonised …
You could try to stoke up Catalonia-style nationalism in southern England …
What do you mean by the “‘tribal’ split”? Is this where people start calling themselves Northerners/Southerners? If England was ever partitioned, I guess the proper thing to do would be to have local referendums in the area between the red and the green line to ask whether they wanted to belong to North or South (just like what happened in Schleswig after WWI).
Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.
By the way, have you got any good ideas for names for the two new nations? Northumbermercia and Anglissex, perhaps? ๐
The Kingdom of England and the Democratic People’s Republic of England (DPRE) of course.
:-0
The DPRE would have Scotland as its only ally, which would view it as a useful buffer zone between it and free England.
Have you ever lived in the future DPRE, btw, or only in the KoE, Wales and Scotland?
Nearly bought a house in York once so that I could be equidistant between clients in London and Edinburgh. But things changed and we moved to Glasgow instead.
York should be the capital of the DPRE. Scotland could confiscate the UK’s nukes on the pretense of disarmament and secretly sell them to the DPRE.
The two countries would be very different, wouldn’t they? In the South, the LibDems might gobble up Labour, leading to a system of Tories against LibLabs; in the North, the Libdems would probably merge with the Tories, resulting in Labour against LibCons.
I’m not sure I’d want the DPRE to have weapons of mass destruction!!!
It would need them as a big stick to wave whenever it wanted foreign aid or to quell some domestic situation …
The more I think about it, the more I like it! The North gets the socialist paradise it’s always dreamed of and the South gets to forge ahead and dominate the world in the electronics market, blowing Apple out of the water in the process …
and and and there’d be a Youtube sensation named Sussex Style …
You sound like you’d be a very proud citizen of the Kingdom of South England…! ๐
Kingdom of England ๐
Oops, sorry! Anyway, aren’t most musicians from the British Isles from Scotland, Ireland and the DPRE? Can’t think of many from the KoE — the Wurzels, perhaps?
Am I seeing things or is Rob finally agreeing to one of Thomas’s UK carve-up plans, rather than shaking indignantly like usual?
Well, the lines are more realistic this time round …
I think the last one involved border crossings somewhere between Portsmouth and Southampton …
I’m just imagining an accelerating political divergence between North England and South England …