reposted from: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/martin_wainwright/2007/10/the_north-south_double_helix.html

The north-south double helix

The new line that splits England in half is a welcome trigger for debate, but a two-dimensional model does not suit this complicated subject.

Martin Wainwright

October 24, 2007 11:30 AM |

Today's new dividing line, as arrived at by a Sheffield University study, between the north and south of England, looks as dodgy as its many predecessors. However, it's a welcome trigger for debate.

A diagonal between the Bristol Channel and the Humber throws up endless flaky anomalies,

even when backed by the university's formidable expertise (which, thank goodness, remains firmly in the north).

Leicester is south, but Nottingham's north. Worcester is north, but Lincoln south.

The line's inventor, Professor Danny Dorling, a human geographer, talks excitingly of "a £100,000 cliff in house prices" along his division, but the truth is that there are no such dramatic pieces of social landscape. A two-dimensional model of such a complicated subject simply will not do.

Anyone who travels in either the putative south or north must become aware of the countless distinctions between areas at a micro-level, in every field from life expectancy to education.

The Sheffield report covers itself to an extent, by accepting that the country's worst concentration of poverty is in London, but it still falls victim to the crudities of lumped-together statistics.

Thus my own city, Leeds, will appear in this kind of data as a not terribly brilliant performer when it comes to education; an overall figure which disguises the many excellent schools (and not just in affluent neighbourhoods). Neighbouring Huddersfield has a comprehensive sixth form college, Greenhead, which regularly sends more students to Oxbridge than Eton, but that sort of fact, which means a great deal in terms of quality of life across the western mid-Pennines, is too small to register in this kind of survey.

Likewise house prices, for which a weekly dip in the property pages of Saturday's Yorkshire Post is instructive. I did an exercise recently which convinced me that houses within the Leeds commuter ring are now more expensive than those in the lush southern patch around Oxford. This is cherry-picking, I agree, but there are an awful lot of cherries. You will find similar swathes of success and prosperity all over the north - Wag-ish Cheshire, of couse, Cotswoldy North Yorkshire (at long last recognised this year as England's most beautiful county) and the valley of the South Tyne.

That may be a familiar litany but it is growing all the time. I am about to set off for Manchester this morning along a not-very-fashionable stretch of the Bradford ring road, which always gives me great joy. British Asians have been buying up rundown but essentially very sound Victorian villas there and lavishing money on them, down to elaborate gates and railings with the family's name entwined in wrought iron. There are very few parts of the north which have not had a share of this improvement during my 20 years reporting from the region.

It matters to make this point, because of the persistently misleading effect that simplistic north-south data has on an understanding of the realities, particularly in London where, alas, the decision-makers mostly live. I still have to cope with expressions of metropolitan amazement when, for example, Sheffield Hallam is named as one of the 10 most affluent constituencies in Britain, or Bradford as the nation's greenest city. Neither should surprise any northerner.

This subject needs a 3D model like the double helix, which would better show things as they really are.