InfoBritain

North West England

The traditional gateway to the north lies at Doncaster in north east England on the river Don. The north began at the point of no return for someone on horseback travelling away from London. With hard riding you could cover the hundred and seventy miles from London to Doncaster in one day. Sir Robert Carey did just this on the 24th of March 1603 when he rode to take news of Queen Elizabeth's death to James of Scotland. Once a traveller went beyond Doncaster there was no returning that day, and the north had begun.

North east England has a different character to the north west. This is in large part due to the main route to the north running through Doncaster and then on through Yorkshire. The historic road to Scotland ran from Stamford to Doncaster, to Scotch Corner, Stainmore and then to Carlisle. Lancashire in the west was bypassed, which resulted in this area becoming isolated. Lancashire was generally quieter and more peaceful, avoiding most of the insurrections that caught up the rest of the north. This fed into the nature of the area. The people were popularly known to be more easy going; the word "softer" has been used. This difference even led some historians to create rather shaky theories about different sets of Vikings influencing the east and the west.

The traditional eclipse of the north west by its more powerful northern neighbour was to change in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Industrial Revolution took place largely in the north west of England. Manchester was to become the centre of this change, and in the 1840s this city became an international symbol for the new industrial age. At its height Manchester would generate wealth to rival London itself. The complicated social changes that came with industrialisation have roots in this area. Manchester was the scene of the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, when soldiers opened fire on a huge meeting calling for parliamentary reform. Four hundred people were killed. The Labour party came into being In Bradford, north east of Manchester, in 1893. A Bradford labour union sponsored Alderman Ben Tillet in the parliamentary election of 1892. Tillet lost, but the following year Keir Hardy chaired a meeting of labour organisations in Bradford, and set up the Independent Labour Party. The north west also has the beautiful Lake District area which inspired a cultural revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A group of poets and writers centred on Coleridge and Wordsworth created what is known as the Romantic movement. They often wrote about man's relationship with nature, a relationship that the Industrial Revolution forced people to explore.

In the 1960s a further cultural revolution centred itself in Liverpool. Young people, and their music became important. The Beatles were the most influential of the bands that came out of Liverpool at that time. The Empire was gone, and the Beatles seemed to look back at their country and find something bigger in the ordinary places of Britain. Penny Lane in Liverpool is not an obviously important place, until you take a walk along it with Penny Lane in mind.