Robert Shore
BANG in the MIDDLE

A JOURNEY THROUGH THE MIDLANDS – THE MOST UNDERRATED PLACE ON EARTH

Contents

Title Page

To Mansfield

To Nottingham

To Melton Mowbray

To Grantham

To Northampton

To Stratford-Upon-Avon

To Coventry

To Birmingham

To Lichfield

To Stoke-On-Trent

To Chatsworth

To The Crags

Acknowledgements

Fifty Great Things to Come Out of the Midlands

Copyright

About the Publisher

Queen Victoria’s blinds, John Gielgud’s private parts, and the great Robin Hood feud

So there we were, sprawled across the floor of our living room in South London, happily building a Lego Pharaoh’s Quest Flying Mummy Attack, when Hector dropped The Big Question.

‘Dad?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Where are you from?’

Hector had been asking a lot of questions lately – partly because, at five years of age, he was in the middle of the classic ‘why/where/when’ stage of child development, and partly because his school topic for the term was ‘About Ourselves’.

‘I’m from England,’ I said confidently. ‘Your mother is from France and I am from England.’

‘I think he needs a little more detail than that,’ my wife said, entering the room to deliver her line and then immediately exiting again, like an actor with a walk-on part in a French farce.

‘Okay, if it’s more detail you want,’ I steadied myself, ‘I’m from Mansfield.’

‘Oh,’ mused Hector. ‘Where’s that?’

‘You know, where Grandma and Grandad live. It’s in the Midlands.’

‘Oh,’ he mused again. ‘What’s the Miglands?’

‘Don’t you want to finish the biplane so we can start launching our flying attacks on the mummy?’ I said, trying to change the subject. A father likes to be able to answer his son’s questions with authority, and I wasn’t sure that I had anything very definite to tell him on the subject of my origins.

‘Miss Kate says she wants parents to come in and tell us about where they’re from,’ Hector persisted. ‘Do you want to come to school and tell us about the Miglands?’

I could just imagine the scene: a parade of parents from Bosnia, Bologna and Baghdad, all with amazing tales to tell to boggle the imaginations of a class of wide-eyed five-year-olds, and then me, bringing up the rear of this exotic, multi-lingual procession, turning bright red with embarrassment as I desperately tried to think of something interesting to say on the subject of Mansfield and the Midlands.

My wife is a Parisian, so on his mother’s side Hector’s heritage is rich: berets and haute couture, baguettes and haute cuisine, moody philosophers in black polo necks, and a general all-round je ne sais quoi. As cultural legacies go, you can’t ask for better. My contribution is thinner. Mansfield was named the sixth and ninth worst place to live in Britain, respectively, in the 2005 and 2007 editions of Channel 4’s popular The Best and Worst Places to Live in the UK show.

As for the Midlands – well, as a badge of identity, it’s not like coming from the North, is it? Few people would know where to draw the boundary lines that separate the coastline-free Midlands from the North and South of England, those two monolithic and self-mythologising geographical constructs that sit above and below it on the national map. Just as importantly, whereas most people could attempt at least rudimentary definitions of the North and South as cultural entities – flat caps versus posh accents, or, in the terms of Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, ‘Southern fairies’ versus ‘Northern monkeys’ – very few would find much to say about the Midlands’ ‘identity’. And that includes Midlanders.

I grew up in the Midlands, but I can’t remember anyone ever referring to themselves or me as a Midlander – there was a distinct lack of what you might call ‘Midland consciousness’. When I then went south to university, I was perceived as a Northerner, principally because I pronounced the word ‘class’ with a short ‘a’. ‘You’re quite well-spoken,’ I was assured by one of my Home Counties-scented, RP-channelling peers, ‘but you’ve got funny vowels. Might you be from the North, old boy?’ Since I didn’t much fancy spending the next three years propping up the bar with the college’s real Northerners, mithering on about dinner being the meal you eat in t’middle of t’day, lad, and how Southerners couldn’t take their drink, I grew self-conscious about my pronunciation and avoided making any unnecessary references to grass, glass or taking a bath in my conversation.

Even in this great Age of Identity Politics, coming from the Midlands is tantamount to coming from nowhere in particular. You can be a Professional Northerner (it’s a crowded field, but there always seems to be room for fresh recruits), but a Professional Midlander? The very word ‘Midlands’ is rarely employed outside specialised or technical contexts. It occurs most frequently in weather and travel reports (there are a lot of roads in the Midlands). Beyond that, it pops up in the camp idiom of a certain vintage: in his letters, the (London-born) classical actor John Gielgud refers to the zone between his legs and midriff as ‘the Midlands’. We all come from there at a biological level, of course, but in a geographical context there’s little social cachet in announcing yourself as hailing from the nation’s meat-and-two-veg.

* * *

I decided to do what I have done so many times before at moments of crisis in my life. I called my mother.

(Sound of a phone ringing out. The receiver is eventually lifted and a small intense woman, audibly gurning, speaks.)

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, Mum. It’s your second-born.’

‘Ey up mi duck.’ My mother is hardly a strong dialect-speaker, but she does enjoy slipping into the local argot from time to time. ‘Can I call you back later? I don’t really have time to talk at the moment.’

‘Then why did you pick up the phone?’

‘In case it was something important.’

I went into my hurt-silence routine, honed over decades.

‘Come on,’ she chivvied me. ‘What can I do you for? Spit it out.’

‘Mum, there’s a question I need to ask you.’

‘I love you and your brother both equally. I’ve told you before.’

‘Not that.’

‘Oh good, I was getting a bit tired of it.’

‘Mum, what does it mean to be a Midlander?’

Now it was her turn to go silent.

‘Mum?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, noisily chewing her lip. ‘I’ve never thought of it before.’

‘Well, would you think about it now, please?’

‘All right, keep your hair on … Well, I suppose it means we’re neither one thing nor the other – not Northern, not Southern. We’re just a bit middling.’

And that was all she could think of to say. In one respect – the stoical acceptance of one’s own inconsequentiality – it was a thoroughly Midland sort of response. On the other, it was baffling, since my mother is anything but middle-of-the-road. Quite the opposite, in fact: she’s one of the most extreme characters I’ve ever known. That’s a Midland paradox.

At that moment I realised that something important – life-changing, even – was happening to me: I was reconnecting with my Inner Midlander. This sort of thing happens to Northerners all the time, of course. It’s easy for them because there are so many clichés about Northern identity that they can tap into. But if you’re a Midlander? Instinctively, as well as in point of strict bio-geographical fact, I had always known I was one, of course, but I had no idea what that might signify in a wider sense. What is a Midlander?

‘Right,’ I said, putting the phone down and turning to my son with unwonted firmness of purpose. ‘You wanted to know where I am from, Hector. I say to you now that I don’t really know. Not geographically, obviously – show me a map and I will unerringly pin the tail of a donkey to the precise point on it where Mansfield lies. It’s just above Nottingham and a bit up and to the right from Derby. But in a broader sense – culturally, philosophically – I’ve no idea what it means to be a Midlander. So I must find out. We must find out. You have asked me the question and together we will discover the answer. Son, let us get into the car immediately and set off in search of my – I mean, our – identity.’

I thought my speech stirring, but Hector just looked a bit confused and upset. After all, he’d been planning to watch Megamind on DVD.

Putting her head round the door precisely on cue, his French mother came to his rescue again. ‘Hector’s got a birthday party this afternoon and we’re having lunch with the Downings tomorrow, so there’s no question of us going anywhere this weekend.’

‘Oh,’ I quivered, momentarily thwarted. ‘All right then, we’ll go next weekend instead.’

* * *

In truth, I was glad to have an opportunity to do a little research before setting off in search of my Midland heritage, and that is what I spent every spare moment of the following week doing. What I discovered by leafing through classic accounts of tours around England was very illuminating. Pretty depressing too, if truth be told.

If you want to know about attitudes to the Midlands, you could do worse than start with Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island (1995). Bryson is an American who settled in the UK – in North Yorkshire, to be precise, a choice that may be significant in itself – and made a reputation for himself as a travel writer. In Notes from a Small Island he set himself the task of explaining the British to themselves by undertaking a tour of this ‘small island’ – not so small, however, that he felt the need to engage in any detail with its sizeable middle swathe. No major Midland towns are marked on the map at the front of Bryson’s book. We find London, Oxford, Leeds, even Bournemouth and Halkirk (‘Where?’ I hear you cry), but no Nottingham or Birmingham – the latter being the largest city in the UK after London.

Flicking through its pages, there’s a sense that for the most part Midland locations are beneath Bryson’s notice. When he does write about them, he adopts a tone of gentle condescension. Retford, for instance, he declares ‘a delightful and charming place’; ‘the shops seemed prosperous and well ordered. I can’t say that I felt like spending my holidays here.’ Worksop is ‘agreeable enough in a low-key sort of way’. After he quits the South, the people he encounters only really come to life again and begin to talk with vivid local accents when he reaches the great city-states of the North, Manchester and Liverpool, where ‘bus’ suddenly vowel-shifts into ‘boose’. If you tried to arrive at a working definition of the Midlands from Notes from a Small Island, you might be tempted to characterise it as the lowland bit between the national peaks, however defined – geographically, socially or culturally.

Bryson’s book is part of a much wider tradition. The great surveys of the country tend to bypass the Midlands or emphasise its anonymity by other means. In his classic interwar study In Search of England, for instance, H.V. Morton names Rutland in the Midlands as ‘the smallest and happiest county in England’, but then adds: ‘I am the only person I have ever known who has been [there]. I admit that I have known men who have passed through Rutland in search of a fox, but I have never met a man who has deliberately set out to go to Rutland; and I do not suppose you have.’ Morton pays Rutland a great compliment, but in such a way as to stress its invisibility at a national level. As he says, ‘most people think [it] is in Wales’ – which, let’s face it, isn’t meant as a compliment.

Another mid-century guidebook pays tribute to the beauties of the Midland landscape, suggesting that the ‘Peak District in Derbyshire – with Buxton spa as a Convenient Centre – is worth a visit’. It turns out to be a qualified recommendation, however: ‘Whoever cannot go to Cumberland, Northumberland or Yorkshire will find compensation in the moorlands and hills of the Peak District, and in its deep valleys and rugged cuttings.’ In other words: for real English scenery, you’d be better off in the real North. The Midlands can be delightful, the author allows, but it’s never more than a ‘compensation’, a second-best option, a silver medallist at best in the race for national gold.

When an opinion is expressed about the region as a whole, it’s usually thoroughly damning. In 2003, the East Midlands found itself listed in a Spectator magazine travel special under the heading ‘Best Avoided: Places That Suck’. Recent research confirms how widespread this perception is. ‘Industrial, built-up, heavily populated, busy, no countryside; Uninteresting, nothing there, not touristy, unromantic; Dark, dirty and grey; Cold and windy’ were the words used to summarise the views of foreign respondents in a tourist-board survey of perceptions of the region. Booked your summer holiday yet? Well, now you know where you should be going.

The West Midlands fares little better in the popular imagination. Researchers at King’s College London recently announced that, for most people, Birmingham accents were inextricably linked with low intelligence. Most non-natives remain blind to the region’s charms, a tradition that stretches back at least as far as the Industrial Revolution. When Queen Victoria travelled through the Black Country – so named owing to the soot and grime that coated this highly industrialised area in the nineteenth century – she insisted on having the blinds pulled down in the royal train. Figuratively at least, it’s with the shutters firmly closed that most people still prefer to experience the Midlands. Americans call their Midwest – that big bit between the exciting, trendy coastal states – the ‘flyover states’. We’re a much smaller country and less given to taking domestic flights, but by analogy we could call the Midlands the ‘drive-through counties’ – the boring bit you drive through to get to where you really want to be.

In her spiky survey Class, Jilly Cooper – she of the saucy horsey romps – complains about ‘the terrible flat “a”s and dreary, characterless Midlands accent … which conjure up a picture of some folk-weave goon’, before declaring, in the chapter on ‘Geography’, that for the upper classes and, by extension, anyone from the smart set: ‘The Midlands are beyond the pale.’ Dispiritingly, many Midlanders wouldn’t disagree. There’s a thread on the Amazon website that’s very revealing of what might be called Midlander status anxiety. One contributor says: ‘Strictly speaking, coming from Derbyshire, I suppose I live in the Midlands but I feel like a Northerner. It has to do with accent, values and the time of day you eat your dinner.’ Another from Stoke-on-Trent agrees: ‘Though perhaps geographically we are in the North Midlands, we are very much a Northern city in spirit, outlook and feeling.’ Contributors regularly refer to the Midlands as a kind of ‘no-man’s-land’ or ‘minor melting pot’ that is ‘caught between stereotypes’ of North and South and that consequently lacks a distinct character of its own.

Soap operas have been prime conveyors of ideas about the major varieties of English identity for decades. Unsurprisingly the North and South dominate: London has EastEnders, Yorkshire Emmerdale, Manchester Coronation Street. It’s perhaps just as well that the Midlands no longer has a major evening TV soap to its name – let’s face it, the woolly-hat-wearing simpleton Benny in Crossroads wasn’t doing the region’s image any good. These days, of course, reality shows are as integral to our sense of identity as soaps and, in so far as they are geographically defined, the North and South again rule the roost: Desperate Scousewives, The Only Way Is Essex, Educating Essex, Educating Yorkshire, Made in Chelsea, Geordie Finishing School for Girls, Geordie Shore … Industry myth has it that a novice producer from the Black Country suggested The Only Way Is Wolverhampton but before the ITV2 commissioners could green-light the project their sides split and they literally died laughing. The Midlands, it would seem, just doesn’t have the necessary clout to carry a reality show.

When, against massive odds, one of the Midlands’ many beauty spots does make it onto TV, its actual location is often obscured. For instance, a recent episode of BBC2’s Town with Nicholas Crane was devoted to Ludlow, the Shropshire idyll celebrated by John Betjeman as ‘probably the loveliest town in England’. It was described in the opening moments as ‘landlocked’ – the key attribute of the Midlands, after all – but the term ‘Midlands’ was never actually deployed in the programme: the BBC probably thought that kind of dirty language inappropriate for the show’s genteel target audience. Instead Ludlow was described as being ‘on the Welsh border’, which is true, although if a similar programme about Sheffield failed to mention that it was in the North but stated instead that it was ‘on the border of the Midlands’ it would cause uproar among the locals. Viewers might have come away thinking Ludlow lovely but the association wouldn’t readily have been made with the broader idea of the Midlands. And that’s a real problem for the area.

A friend of mine with a deep knowledge of the broadcasting industry thinks the BBC’s neglect of the Midlands is structural. ‘The Beeb is set up in a way that is institutionally biased against the Midlands!’ he laughs. ‘It’s spent a lot of money in recent years to get more regional television in, so it now has all these designated regions: there’s London, the West and Wales (centred on Bristol), Manchester and the North, Scotland and Northern Ireland. And all of these blocs have pots of money earmarked for them, but the Midlands doesn’t fall into any of the remits. Hence it’s almost impossible to get anything commissioned there.’

Perhaps it would be a kindness simply to abolish the Midlands. That’s precisely what one academic map did recently. Tellingly, that map was created in Sheffield and displayed in Manchester, cities that are both – as if you didn’t already know it; and how could you not, given that region’s genius for self-promotion? – in the North of England.

Ah, the North, where they eat dinner at midday as God (and Geoffrey Boycott) intended, say ‘bath’ not ‘baarth’, speak their minds freely and plainly without recourse to any circumlocutory Southern waffle, where lager is a girls’ drink, blah-di-blah. You certainly know where you are with the characterful North. It’s not much of a place to live – ask all those BBC types who have been dragging their feet over their recent enforced relocation to Salford, the MediaCity development being one of the most flagrant bits of social engineering in recent English history – but you have to admit that, as a piece of branding, ‘The North’ has real genius, starting with the fearsome granite firmness of the name itself. The words ‘I’m a Northerner’ pack so much punch and communicate a ton of attitude. No wonder people from cities as radically different as Manchester and Newcastle are happy to share an overarching, aggregated ‘Northern’ identity. The Midlands, by contrast, has never really gone in for that sort of branding. Around Birmingham, the tourist-board people like to talk about the region as ‘The Heart of England’. But try saying ‘I’m a Heart of Englander’ and it just sounds naff. It might work as a piece of signposting for tourists but it’ll never catch on where it really counts, among Midlanders. As a clever acquaintance suggests: ‘The Midlands is less a discrete geographical category and more a state of mind. Roundabouts. Retail parks.’ If that’s the case, that’s hardly going to pull in the tourists, or provide the locals with a proud sense of belonging. The linguistic associations of the word ‘Midlands’ itself are no better: fair-to-middling, caught in the middle, middle management, midlife crisis. An alliteration-loving friend recently relocated to Northants. ‘I’m growing fond of the Midlands,’ he texted me. ‘Must be middle age setting in.’ See? Midlands/middle age. The connections made at the verbal level are nothing short of lethal.

* * *

The following Saturday we get in the car to head for Mansfield and the Northern propaganda begins even before we’re out of London. The motorway signpost at Archway roundabout immediately announces ‘THE NORTH’ in block capitals – if you take the M1, you must be going to the North, it tells you. Note that it doesn’t just say ‘North’ – a direction – but The North, a destination. The message is repeated, in the same bold typography, all the way up the motorway, next to each and every place name. Watford? ‘The NORTH.’ Luton? ‘The NORTH.’ Only when you get to the edge of Milton Keynes – where the region actually begins: there’s no advance warning – does ‘The MIDLANDS’ finally get a mention. And then, as suddenly as it appeared, the word vanishes again, so that the names of all the major towns and cities of the East Midlands – Northampton, Leicester, Nottingham – are unerringly accompanied by the words ‘The NORTH’. No wonder a lot of Southerners think the North begins as soon as you leave London: that’s what the road signs tell you.

I’m not put off, though. We’ve come to discover what it means to be a Midlander and we’re darn well going to find out, good or bad.

Neil Young’s ‘Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere’ is playing on the car stereo as we finally cross the border into Northamptonshire. I give a loud cheer.

‘Is Dad all right?’ Hector asks his mother, who raises a quizzical eyebrow in my direction.

‘I was cheering,’ I explain, ‘to indicate that we are home. Well, I am home. We are in the Midlands, my ancient homeland. We are now surrounded’ – I wave an arm airily to left and right, trying not to lose control of the car as I do so – ‘by my tribespeople.’

That quizzical Parisian eyebrow stays raised. ‘I didn’t realise you had such a sense of cultural belonging. We’ve been married thirteen years and you’ve never mentioned your tribespeople before,’ my wife says.

‘Let’s just say I’m rediscovering who I really am,’ I sniff.

* * *

‘What is civilisation?’ asked the great art historian Kenneth Clark (not to be confused with the great Midland politician Ken Clarke) in the opening moments of his famous 1960s BBC arts series Civilisation. ‘I don’t know … But I think I can recognise it when I see it; and I am looking at it now.’ Clark, standing with Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris peering over his left shoulder, wasn’t taking much of a chance when he made this statement. But would he have been able to say the same if he’d been plonked in the middle of Mansfield market square one Saturday afternoon in autumn?

Probably not. Mansfield has recently been subjected to a gruelling bout of ‘regeneration’, with results that are largely indistinguishable from ruination. Most of the big commercial operations have relocated to the retail parks dotted around the ring road, leaving much of the town centre boarded up. Pubs (‘Gerrem in!’ is an essential item of local dialect), pawnbrokers and betting shops dominate the historic market square, which is so run-down that even the Poundshop has closed down, or so it appears. (There’s a Pound World that’s still open around the corner, mind, not to mention Savers, another budget store.) The most characterful shop here is Eden Mobility: mobility scooters are enormously popular in Mansfield. If you don’t watch where you’re going, you’re likely to get mown down by one in the market square.

Not that Mansfield is without history: it actually received its royal charter as far back as 1227. As its moniker might lead you to expect, Mansfield is full of men, real men at that, but its name is actually derived from ‘Maun’, the name of the river on which it stands. It used to be a mining town and – perhaps the two go hand in hand – it also used to be home to the largest independent brewery in the UK, Mansfield Bitter, until the latter was sold off in 1999. The skyline-dominating brewery building has now been demolished and the local bitter’s glory days – encapsulated in the quaintly provincial Eighties ad campaign featuring a picture of Ronald Reagan and the tag line ‘He may be president of the most powerful nation on Earth but he’s never had a pint of Mansfield’ – are now little more than a folk memory.

Mansfield may mark the spot where the North meets the Midlands. In fact, some people question whether there’s any difference between the North Midlands and the ‘real’ North at all. As I mentioned before, some anxious Derbyshire- and Potteries-based posters on that Amazon thread don’t seem to think there is. Others see subtle differences. ‘Midlanders are a bit more sophisticated, like – we can string a few sentences together. Northerners swear more,’ one eccentric friend told me. ‘On the other hand, we’re both from Viking stock. We both like to plunder and pillage,’ he added wolfishly. There’s a takeaway called Viking’s in Mansfield, and it’s certainly the Nordic-invader legacy rather than what is normally considered the more socially cohesive Anglo-Saxon heritage that permeates the atmosphere around here. In the good old days, when pubs used to close in the afternoon, you could see gangs of men (and the occasional woman) marauding across the streets at three in the afternoon, stopping the traffic while they pissed all over the traffic bollards. Part of the recent ‘regeneration’ of the town centre included the installation of a showpiece fountain, prompting fears that local merrymakers would use it as an open-air urinal.

Football is very important in Mansfield, as is violence. The two have often combined to striking effect at Field Mill (or the One Call Stadium, as it’s currently known), the home of Mansfield Town Football Club. A noteworthy outburst of aggro came when the Stags (nicknamed in homage to the regal fauna of that nearby long-vanished Edenic idyll, Sherwood Forest, where Norman and Plantagenet monarchs disported themselves and Robin Hood and his Merry Men evaded the attentions of the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham) were relegated from Division 2 and consigned to non-league status in April 2008: fans showed their displeasure by physically attacking club owner Keith Haslam. The resulting head wounds were severe enough to necessitate a visit to the big local hospital, King’s Mill – it has to be big to accommodate Mansfield’s legions of unhealthy inhabitants: the town’s poor health record is one of the principal reasons for its appearance in that chart of the top ten worst places to live in the UK, and for the ubiquity of those mobility scooters.

Field Mill, King’s Mill … As you may be beginning to surmise, mills and millers play a major role in Mansfield folklore. The naming craze can probably be traced to a tale involving Henry II and the ‘Miller of Mansfield’ found in an eighteenth-century collection of ballads and songs known as Percy’s Reliques. The story goes that King Henry lost his way while hunting in Sherwood Forest and met a miller, who, failing to recognise his regal interlocutor, kindly offered him hospitality for the night. When the monarch’s retinue turned up at the miller’s humble cottage the following morning, the host was astonished to discover the true identity of his guest. The king, of course, thought it all very amusing and bestowed a knighthood on the miller, who henceforth gloried in the name of Sir John Cockle (there’s still a local pub of that designation). Percy’s Reliques wraps the story up:

Then Sir John Cockle the King call’d unto him,

And of merry Sherwood made him o’er-seer;

And gave him out of hand three hundred pound yearlye;

‘Now take heed you steale no more of my deer;

And once a quarter let’s here have your view;

And now, Sir John Cockle, I bid you adieu.’

The tale’s slightly patronising tone sums up the classic relationship between the Southern Establishment and Midlanders. The latter, usually presented in a slightly yokelish light – the men-in-tights vibe is inescapable – are tolerated or occasionally even encouraged in a mildly condescending manner, but are never treated as equals.

Olympic and Commonwealth swimming champ Rebecca Adlington aside, few famous people have come from Mansfield. There’s Richard Bacon, a Blue Peter presenter unceremoniously sacked after the News of the World suggested he took cocaine, who’s clawed his way back to respectability and a huge following on Radio 5 Live. Bernard William Jewry made his stage debut here at age four, but coo-coo-ca-choo’d his way out of town long before metamorphosing into Alvin Stardust, glam rock icon. The incestuous, club-footed Romantic poet Lord Byron inherited an ancestral pile just down the road, Newstead Abbey, which is now a highly atmospheric ruin – not unlike Mansfield town centre, come to think of it. And twenty minutes up the dual carriageway, ‘where the Peak District meets Robin Hood Country’, you can find the historic market town of Chesterfield, home to the Crooked Spire, the 228-foot-high thirteenth-century church steeple that twists some nine and a half feet from true centre and is to the Midlands what Pisa’s Leaning Tower is to Tuscany.

Unimpressed? Good. That’s the way Midlanders like it. Unlike Northerners, we don’t believe in blowing our own trumpets all the time. All the same – let’s call it the Midland Catch-22 – some of us would still like to know what it means to be a Midlander, especially when, for our son’s sake, we need a cultural identity to rival that of Parisians. That kind of thing usually involves locating a foundation myth for your tribe, discovering your rootedness in history.

So what are the deeds that tell Midlanders who they are? The South has King Alfred repelling the Vikings, the North has the Venerable Bede – and, perhaps more influentially these days, Oasis’s first album. But what about the Midlands?

Foundation myths are usually just that: more acts of creative imagination than actual heroic deeds – our idea of ‘The North’ is largely the result of a very successful branding exercise. To define and unite a culture, what you need above all else is the chutzpah to make up something grandiose-sounding. All that stuff about Alfred being the first king to unite England has been overstated and, let’s be honest, Definitely Maybe is mediocre at best. But, as cultural gathering points, they’ve proved extremely successful.

Hungry for possible leads on this unseasonably warm autumn afternoon, I scout feverishly through the magazine racks at Mansfield town library and the local WH Smith. Eventually I alight on an issue of Nottinghamshire Life and Countryside that looks promising: the cover announces a piece about ‘The Pyramids of Nottinghamshire’. I can’t remember any mention of a ‘Sutton Sphinx’ when I was a boy or of Mansfield’s role in the development of ancient Egyptian civilisation, but that doesn’t put me off. Anticipation growing, I turn rapidly to the article and discover that the ‘pyramids’ in question are actually dovecotes, and fairly recent ones at that, but I’m nonetheless full of admiration for the magazine’s feverish overstatement and it persuades me to think big. If the Midlands was the source of my family, why shouldn’t it have been the source of everything else too? Why shouldn’t civilisation itself have begun here?

Well, for one reason – which is that the Midlands is usually said to have no ‘deep’ history. (As a Midlander you sometimes get the impression that the principal aim of history in general is to let you know that you and your kind have played no part in it.) The immemorial mists of time are typically thought to have dispersed to reveal that nothing actually happened here until around 1842. To quote one twentieth-century source on the subject: ‘England’s prehistoric antiquities are mostly to be found south of a line drawn from Worcester to Ipswich; and north of a line drawn from Blackpool to Hull’ – lines that seem almost deliberately conceived to exclude the Midlands.

But history is a remarkable thing. Although by definition it’s all in the past, it keeps turning up again and transforming itself – and everything else with it – in the present. What if evidence suddenly emerged that Nottinghamshire genuinely did have pyramids, and a corresponding Pharaonic era? Unlikely, I know, since everyone seems to agree that the middle band of the country has no prehistory, but a development of the sort isn’t entirely out of the question. After all, think of the evolution of our own species. Even on a matter as fundamental as that, the question isn’t entirely settled. We know that Homo sapiens first appeared on the African continent about 200,000 years ago, before gradually migrating north, through the Middle East, to Europe and Asia. But, around the time of my writing this, fresh archaeological finds in Israel, Spain and China emerged to throw into question some of the finer details of the development of modern man. Even prehistory is in the process of rewriting itself. And if Israel, Spain and China can get in on the evolutionary act, why not the Midlands?

* * *

After Hector has gone to bed, I explain the challenge I’ve set myself to my parents.

‘Don’t you think you’re taking it all a bit seriously?’ says my mother, the queen of taking-things-too-seriously: most nights she can’t sleep for thinking about all the things that worry her but over which she has zero control. ‘Just tell Hector’s school mates it’s a good place for a punch-up and have done with it.’

‘Hey!’ interjects my father. ‘We’re worth a bit more than that. Tell them about Cloughie and Forest.’

‘Fighting and football’ I scribble down on my notepad.

‘There’s Robin Hood, of course,’ I say. ‘I thought we could go and look at the Major Oak tomorrow. Hector will like that.’

‘Well, there you go then,’ says my mother encouragingly. ‘Robin Hood’ll do, won’t he? What more do you need?’

‘I don’t know,’ I reply earnestly. ‘He might be a start. I want to know what makes us Midlanders: where we came from, who we are, where we’re going, to borrow a phrase from Gauguin.’

‘Go what?’ mugs my mother. ‘Well, I’ll tell you this for nothing: I don’t think people from Blidworth [where my mother was born] are much like people from Sutton [a couple of miles away, where my father was born]. For one thing, we used to make fun of people in Sutton because they said “bwaan bwead”.’

‘I’m not really interested in the microscopic differences between Blidworth and Sutton, Mum. I’m looking for the bigger picture.’

‘Well, if I’m not allowed to make fun of your father, I don’t want to play. Shift yersen, Denis, I need to walk around a bit. My leg’s killing me,’ she huffs as she pulls herself to her feet.

‘Shift yersen’ provides the cue for a brief discussion of local dialect terms. With the help of one of those mysterious photocopied documents that seem to circulate among old people keen to relive the linguistic glories of their youth, we laugh over ‘Ayer masht?’ (Have you made a cup of tea?), ‘Arkattit’ (Listen to the rain), ‘Ittle norrocha’ (You won’t feel any pain) and ‘Mekitt goo bakuds’ (Put the car into reverse gear): all classic Notts locutions. My personal favourite is ‘Ittim weeya poss’, or ‘Hit him with your purse’. It perfectly captures the delicacy of the local female population – by which I mean my mother really: no offence to anyone else.

I’m not sure these phrases are getting me any closer to my grail of a foundation myth, however.

‘This used to be the centre of the hosiery trade, didn’t it, Dad?’ I say airily to move the conversation along a little.

A bit of an obvious question, really, since that was my father’s line of work and, across a forty-odd-year career, it carried him from one end of the Midlands to the other.

‘Yes, I’ve got a couple of books about it upstairs,’ he responds. ‘They’ll tell you more about it than I can.’

‘But it’s your impressions I want. You worked in the industry for five decades. I want to tap into your experiences.’

He shifts uneasily in his seat. This kind of waffle doesn’t really appeal to him. He’s not the sort of man who likes the idea of being ‘tapped into’, thank you very much. To escape further questioning he gets up to put TalkSport on the radio, ostensibly because former England manager Steve McLaren, aka ‘the Wally with the Brolly’, has just quit as boss of Nottingham Forest – my dad’s team for the past seventy years – and he thinks they might be discussing it.

I turn my attention back to my mother.

‘All right, Mum. Answer me this: is Mansfield civilised?’

‘Not totally, no,’ she begins after reflection. ‘For instance, we’ve got two supermarkets: Sainsbury’s and Tesco. Now if you ask me about the people who go into Sainsbury’s, I’d say maybe. If you ask me about those who go into Tesco, I’d say maybe not. And then there’s the way they stack the shelves …’

(For the record, I should say that my mother happily shops in both Tesco and Sainsbury’s, which by her own reckoning makes her simultaneously both maybe civilised and maybe not civilised. Which sounds about right – maybe.)

‘All right,’ I stop her. ‘Let me ask you this: Do you think that people from Mansfield and Nottinghamshire and the Midlands generally have contributed much to world civilisation?’

‘Oh yes,’ she replies with surprising certainty.

‘In what way?’

‘We’ve turned a lot of good people out. This region invented the hosiery industry. That was worldwide. Then there was Raleigh bikes in Nottingham. And Metal Box in Mansfield: that was good for trays. It was worldwide too. Cars of course were Birmingham. Birmingham’s the Midlands too, of course, although Brummies are very different from us. And our coalmines were very profitable. So yes, we’ve contributed quite a bit really.’

‘Okay. Now I’d like to take it one step further, perhaps going further back in history.’ I’m beginning to sound like Melvyn Bragg on In Our Time on Radio 4. ‘If I said to you, human civilisation first developed in North Nottinghamshire, what would you say? Does that sound likely, Mum?’

‘Erm …’

‘If I told you that the wheel was invented in Mansfield, for instance.’

‘Yes, I could believe that. A lot of damn good engineers have come from Mansfield. There was a lot of talent in Blidworth – not much in Sutton, of course … Was the wheel invented in Mansfield, Robbie?’

‘It hasn’t been disproved.’

‘Well, we’ve got Robin Hood anyway,’ concludes my mother, growing weary. ‘I’m going to put the kettle on.’

* * *

Actually, how much longer Nottinghamshire and the Midlands will have Robin Hood is open to question. Ever since someone noticed that the early ballads mention a few locations across the border in Yorkshire – principally Barnsdale – there’s been a campaign to turn the original Nottinghamshire Man in Tights into a Salt-of-the-Earth NorthernerTM. Not so long ago, a Yorkshire MP could be heard demanding that roadside signs proclaiming Nottinghamshire ‘Robin Hood Country’ be taken down. ‘We believe very strongly that Robin Hood was a Yorkshireman and we are aggrieved to read that we are now entering Robin Hood country [when we drive south into Nottinghamshire],’ David Hinchliffe, the absurdist ex-Member for Wakefield, was quoted as saying in the New York Times in 2004. ‘It’s a very, very serious business. The way things are going, the signs are going to get torn down by angry Yorkshiremen.’ Perhaps it was the report in the NYT that gave Russell Crowe the idea of basing his accent on Michael Parkinson’s dour growl when he played the lead in the most recent Hollywood Robin Hood movie, or perhaps it was the fact that Doncaster in Yorkshire suddenly developed a ‘Robin Hood Airport’ in 2005. If Yorkshire nationalists get their way, one day in the not too distant future ’Oodie is likely to find himself transformed into a plain-talking Yorkshireman, with a whippet instead of a bow under one arm and a flat cap instead of a green feathered hat on his head. There’s a small conceptual problem that might need to be addressed before that can happen, though. It’s hard to see how Robin Hood’s reputation for stealing from the rich to give to the poor can be reconciled with the stereotype of Yorkshire folk as tight-fisted – an image that’s been actively embraced and promulgated by many of the natives of ‘God’s own county’ (such modesty!). As the ‘Yorkshireman’s Creed’ has it: ‘If ever tha does owt for nowt / Do it for tha sen.’ In that sense, Robin of Sherwood is the antithesis of the classic Northerner.

On Sunday morning we all pile into the car and drive out through Clipstone, past the overgrown pit heads and towards the little village of Edwinstowe and the Sherwood Forest National Nature Reserve, which contains the Major Oak, the mystical thousand-year-old tree that – legend has it – served as the Merry Men’s meeting place.

What does Robin Hood stand for exactly? What values does he represent? Social justice (stealing from the rich to give to the poor), obviously; but more resonantly he’s also a symbol of ‘Merrie England’. ‘Merrie England’ is the way that nostalgic Victorians, dismayed by the effects of the growing urbanism of their own age, liked to idealise their country’s pre-industrial past. Indeed, it was with a reference to Robin and his crew that the nineteenth-century essayist William Hazlitt popularised the concept of England’s idyllic, liberty-loving medieval past: ‘The beams of the morning sun shining on the lonely glades, or through the idle branches of the tangled forest, the leisure, the freedom … were sufficient to justify the appellation of “Merry Sherwood”, and in like manner, we may apply the phrase to Merry England.’ It’s interesting that the most romantic representative of this pastoral paradise of ancient freedoms should have hailed from the East Midlands, the area characterised as ‘Industrial, built-up, heavily populated, busy, no countryside’ in that recent tourist-board survey. That’s obviously not how an earlier age thought of the region. John Hamilton Reynolds elaborated on the idea of Robin as the symbol of this Edenic utopia in a sonnet to his friend John Keats:

Robin the outlaw! Is there not a mass

Of freedom in the name? …

It tells a tale of forest days – of times

That would have been most precious unto thee:

Days of undying pastoral liberty:

Sweeter than music old of abbey chimes –

Sweet as the virtue of Shakespearian rhymes –

Days, shadowy with the magic greenwood tree!

‘Now, Hector, what we’re about to go and look at,’ I explain enthusiastically as we set off along a winding path from the car park, ‘is Robin Hood’s special tree. It’s absolutely enormous. Robin and Alan-a-Dale and Friar Tuck and Little John and all the rest of the merry band used to climb up inside it to hide from the nasty Sheriff of Nottingham.’

I can see I’m losing his attention.

‘I’m a little bit bored, Dad,’ he says, pulling his beloved Ben 10 figurine from my bag.

‘Smile and I’ll get you an ice cream.’

He gives me a pained grin so I buy him a 99. A deal’s a deal.

My mother begins to recount a favourite family story as we near our destination. ‘Your Auntie Madge brought the Americans here when they came over for Jeff and Karrie’s wedding,’ she begins. ‘She told them she was going to show them the biggest tree they’d ever seen. So they drove over and Madge gave them the spiel as they were walking over from the car park – I think she even called it the biggest tree in the world – and then when they got into the clearing she said: “Well, isn’t it amazing?” And Karrie’s parents were really nice about it but Madge could see they were a bit underwhelmed. Anyway a few years later she went over to California to visit Jeff and Karrie, and while she was there they took her to Yosemite. That made her feel a bit embarrassed. “And you know, Kath, you couldn’t even see the tops of the trees there. That’s how tall they were,” Madge said to me. Well over 200 feet, Californian sequoias are. The Major Oak seemed a bit diddy by comparison. That put her in her place.’

At this point we emerge into a clearing and there it stands – history, mystery, majesty, all rolled together in the eye-filling spectacle of the glorious Major Oak …

‘Ooh, look at it!’ my mother exclaims mockingly. ‘It’s only just a bit taller than your dad.’

‘It stands 52 feet,’ I correct her. I don’t want Hector going back to school and telling his friends that the Major Oak is barely the size of a domestic Christmas tree.

‘Well, your dad’s a good size,’ my mother replies. ‘That’s one of the main reasons I married him, so that I’d produce decent-sized children.’

She scrutinises me briefly. She’s never quite forgiven me for not being as tall as my father.

It’s true that the Major Oak isn’t much to look at. Gnarled and bloated, as fat as it is high, these days it has to be held upright with an elaborate system of ropes and poles. Hector is decidedly underwhelmed. Crestfallen, I decide to abandon any further attempts at tour-guide propaganda with my little boy.

Afterwards we wander back for lunch at the visitor centre, where my mother declares herself astonished by the freshness of the rolls. (‘Who’d have thought you’d get such fresh rolls in Edwinstowe?’ she says with genuine wonderment, holding the admirable sandwich up for us all to coo over. She doesn’t then go so far as to actually eat it – she doesn’t really like food – but she’s still eulogising its memory a couple of days later.)

Like the Major Oak itself, the centre isn’t particularly spectacular – but that’s no surprise since Midlanders don’t go in much for ‘look at me’-style self-congratulatory display. They hold a festival here every August in ‘celebration of the life and times of the world’s most famous outlaw’, with jousting, falconry displays and court jesters by the dozen, so that’s probably the best time to come if you want the medieval scenery to be painted in for you. You hardly need it, though. There’s an ancient atmosphere here that you can still tap into if you give it a chance; you’ll soon find your imagination responding to its promptings. That friend of Keats wrote another sonnet, in 1818, on just this theme:

The trees in Sherwood Forest are old and good,

The grass beneath them now is dimly green;

Are they deserted all? Is no young mien,

With loose slung bugle met within the wood?

No arrow found – foil’d of its antler’d food –

Struck in the oak’s rude side? Is there nought seen,

To mark the revelries which there have been,

In the sweet days of merry Robin Hood?

Go there with summer, and with evening, go

In the soft shadows, like some wandering man,

And thou shalt far amid the Forest know

The archer-men in green, with belt and bow,

Feasting on pheasant, river-fowl, and swan,

With Robin at their head, and Marian.

As I begin reciting the lines to Hector, a little boy dances past in a Robin Hood outfit, armed with a bow and arrow, and the portly, balding man whose hand he’s holding metamorphoses into Friar Tuck; the woman behind them with the twelfth-century face and courtly air might be a royal lady-in-waiting come in disguise to pass vital secret information to Maid Marian. The trees begin to rustle in the rising wind and suddenly you can hear weary travellers clip-clopping their way through the fairytale wood, full of mystery and danger; as darkness begins to encroach, the eyes of the Sheriff of Nottingham’s men blink into life in the undergrowth. Hazlitt was right when he said, invoking Keats, that Robin Hood ‘still, in imagination, haunts Sherwood Forest’. There’s still magic in this salvaged tuft of the ancient Forest of Sherwood all right.

‘Dad?’

Hector, who has momentarily laid his Ben 10 figurine aside, can obviously feel it too.

‘Yes?’ I say expectantly. He is wearing his most angelic smile.

‘Dad … Can we please never come here again? It’s really boring.’

Oh well. No quest worth the trouble is ever that easy. The Midlands wasn’t built in a day, you know, and its reputation won’t be restored in a day either. Later that evening as I prepare to wave Hector and his mother off at the railway station – Hector has school the following day and his mother has better things to do than to go scouting for foundation myths in Mansfield – my wife asks when they can expect me home again.

‘Why, when I have staggering tales of Midland glory to tell, of course!’

‘Oh. I hadn’t realised this was adieu rather than au revoir,’ she laughs.

I do my best ‘hurt’ face. The train is about to leave.

‘Only kidding,’ she smiles. ‘I’m sure you’ll discover lots of interesting things.’

Hmm. I’ll show her – or, rather, the Midlands will show her! By the time I’ve finished, coach parties of French tourists will be jamming the approach roads to Warsop. You’ll see.

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