Full Moon over the Midlands

Join us at 8 pm on 27 February for this year’s National Midlands Week, a celebration in the spirit of the Lunar Society. There will be a very special guest appearance from the Moon

How are your plans looking for 2021 – a bit patchy and provisional? Already missing the June Glastonbury mud? Keeping your fingers crossed that a Covid variant doesn’t blight the Chelsea Flower Show in the autumn too? Never fear, there’s one celebration that is absolutely pandemic-proof and to which everyone is invited. You won’t even have to wear a mask.

As sure as the sun will rise and set on 27 February, so on that day at 8pm precisely will take place the sixth National Midlands Week – highly compressed, it will only last a few hours; Midlanders are busy people and don’t like to waste time. Millions will be welcome to participate, whether the virus is in abeyance or not.

Before we get on to the precise nature of this year’s celebrations, some might want to ask: why do we need a National Midlands Week in the first place? The inaugural celebration, in 2016, was held to accompany a week-long series on BBC Radio 4 which set out to tell the country’s story as seen from the middle. This doesn’t happen often: the truth is that the Midlands rarely gets to offer its perspective on national matters. English politics, like its historiography, is dominated by the idea of the North/South divide, in which the North is cast as the rebellious outrider to the establishmentarian South; Westminster v Peterloo; Southern toff and Leader of the House Jacob Rees-Mogg in pinstripe v ‘King of the North’ Manchester mayor Andy Burnham looking like a member of New Order. Where does that leave the millions of us trapped between the two great self-mythologising power blocs of the South and North? Stuck in the middle and largely overlooked in the Midlands, that’s where.

The linguistic associations of the word ‘Midlands’ are generally unalluring: fair-to-middling, middle management, middlebrow, midlife crisis… All of which makes the Midlands surprisingly voguish at the moment: whether you live in the North, South, East or West, the last year has been very Midlands-ish for everyone. We’ve all been stuck in the middle of the pandemic. Life has been middling at best. In that respect, we are all Midlanders now.

We’ve all been stuck in the middle of the pandemic. Life has been middling at best. In that respect, we are all Midlanders now.

So that makes this year’s National Midlands Week a perfect opportunity to extend an invitation to a wider range of people than ever before to share in the Midlands experience. Since we are all Midlanders now, we should all bask in the glow of National Midlands Week. And despite those unfortunate lexical ligatures, the Midlands has an exciting history to share. We could talk about the Great Reform Act of 1832’s roots in Birmingham’s ‘workshop democracy’, about the East Midlands outlaw mentality of Robin Hood and DH Lawrence, about the invention of Britart at Creswell Crags 15,000 years ago, about the glories of Bakewell tart… But this year we will be focusing instead on the eighteenth-century Lunar Society.

The story of the Lunar Society has a fairytale ring about it. Once a month, on the Sunday nearest the full moon, the members of the Society – assorted Midland entrepreneurs, enthusiasts and inventors – gathered at one of a series of locations in and around Birmingham. This particular point in the lunar cycle – which gave the group its name – was chosen to ensure that members had as much light as possible to travel home by afterwards; this all happened before the introduction of street lights. Matthew Boulton, the greatest of all Birmingham entrepreneurs, was the central figure, and one of the places where they met was Boulton’s Soho House, which was the scene for the development of so many of the innovations and inventions that drove the Industrial Revolution. It was at the Soho Foundry that James Watt’s revolutionary improved steam engines were manufactured. You can say, without a hint of overstatement, that Birmingham’s Soho changed the world.

The Lunar Society counted among its members many of the most innovative thinkers of a particularly innovative age: not just Boulton and Watt, but the great chemist and freethinker Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood. This collection of scientific and humanitarian progressives gathered once a month under the light of the Moon, to dream of a better world and laboured towards its material and spiritual improvement. To take the achievements of just one ‘Lunartick’, as the society’s members were dubbed: Erasmus Darwin – grandfather (with Wedgwood) to Charles, evolutionist and author of On the Origin of the Species – was a doctor who turned down an offer to be physician to King George III in order to have more time for his local patients, not to mention his inventions: for instance, a revolutionary steering mechanism designed to make carriage travel safer that would be adopted in car manufacture over a century later, a copying machine, a speaking machine and even plans for a rocket engine – a first sketch towards the kind of craft that would carry humans to the surface of the Moon in 1969.

Two years ago the principal National Midlands Week celebration took the form of a football match designed to evoke the sensation of what it feels like to be a Midlander. The game was played entirely in the middle of the pitch, with everyone – goalies, defenders, strikers – confined to the centre circle, and the ball declared out of play if it strayed anywhere near either of the goal mouths. The outcome: an entirely predictable nil-nil draw. It made for a very middling (a Midlands dialect word meaning ‘satisfying’) spectacle.

This year will be different. Participants will be given a single, simple instruction: go to a window and look up. Look up and take in the wonder of the full Moon – there will be a full Moon on 27 February – and, while you’re doing so, think about the Lunarticks, those progressive spirits who, two and a half centuries ago, met in the unheralded, out-of-the-way Midlands to plot the improvement of the lives of their fellow women and men, and to innovate in ways that would eventually carry us from the Midlands to the Moon. If they could do that, we can surely conquer Covid and start to gather innocently again in the mud at Glastonbury or amid the blooms at Chelsea. Always look up.

Always look up.

#NationalMidlandsWeek FAQs

What is #NationalMidlandsWeek?
It’s a week of national thanksgiving for the Midlands and Midlanders.

Why should the nation give thanks for the Midlands?
Because everything good and useful about England, the UK, the EU, the world, the universe, etc, started in the Midlands. As a nation, as a species, we owe the Midlands and Midlanders more or less everything, and it’s time we started to express that more clearly.

What form will this national thanksgiving take?
Since everyone is invited—and in truth ought to be obliged—to participate, it seemed foolishly limiting to hold an event in, say, Mansfield Town Square (max. capacity: 345). So instead the Thanksgiving Service will be held in the ether, or over the airwaves. Just tune in to BBC Radio 4 at 13.45 every day—between the one o’clock news and The Archers—from Monday, 23 May to Friday, 27 May: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07bthdr

What other events are planned?
None. But feel free to improvise your own.

What do you have planned for #NationalMidlandsWeek next year?
Nothing.

20 Reasons Why Nottingham Might Just Be the Best City in the UK

Who can resist the eccentric allure of the Queen of the Midlands?

1) Booze
Nottingham takes its drinking seriously. You can tell because a lot of the local hostelries – the Bell Inn, Ye Olde Salutation Inn – claim the distinction of great age. Nestling beneath the castle, Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem is said to date from 1189, the year Nottingham-loving monarch Richard the Lionheart ascended the throne. Legend has it that when old King Dickie announced his intention to lead a crusade against the Saracens, his followers had a swift one at the inn before setting off on their journey to Jerusalem: hence the name. No wonder Boots the Chemist set up shop here – there’s always been a high demand for aspirin and paracetamol to steady the raging hangovers.

2) Swearing
It was somewhere in the wilds of north Notts that Lady Chatterley’s gamekeeper Mellors first told Connie she had a nice tail and threaded her pubic hair with forget-me-nots, and it was on Waverley Mount above the Forest Recreation Park that the creator of that saucy pair went to school and practised the wide array of four-letter words that would later pepper his infamous Dirty Book. As living Nottingham legend James Walker recently explained on Radio 3: ‘Let’s not forget that we’re home to England’s favourite potty mouth, D.H. Lawrence. The acquittal of Penguin Books in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial of 1960 would pave the way for greater freedom of expression for us all. A Nottingham man made it possible for everyone to swear more freely.’ Hurrah!

3) Snot
Witty, fun-loving Vikings originally named the city ‘Snottingham’ in honour of local chieftain Snot. Happily, over time the initial ‘S’ was dropped, although blowing your nose is still regarded as an act of ancestor worship in Nottingham. In more recent times, the city has been no less unglamorously known to millions as ‘Dottingham’, the go-to railway destination for all cold-sufferers thanks to a (Snot-related) TV ad for Tunes cough sweets; it’s now also widely referred to as ‘Shottingham’ owing to the high level of gun crime. Still, we shouldn’t worry – Manchester derives its name from the Latin word Mamucium, which means ‘Tit Hill’.

4) Ducks
There are more ducks in Nottingham than in any other town or city in the UK – fact. That’s not because of the unusually large number of mallards that flock to the Market Square in spring (although that’s a factor, obviously) but because – anthropologists note – the human locals consider themselves to be ducks. As a consequence of this curious mass delusion, the phrase ‘Ey up, mi duck’ can be heard echoing around the city as young and old greet one another of a morning.

5) Geese
So there are a lot of ducks in Nottingham. There also used to be a lot of geese, which is how Goose Fair, the city’s annual fun fair, got its name: thousands of the birds, their feet coated with tar and sand to help them survive the journey, were brought over from Lincolnshire and Norfolk to be sold at the fair. First held in around 1284, Goose Fair used to be all about food; nowadays it’s all about terrifying high-tech rides that make your head spin and stomach churn.

6) A City of Rebels…
The award-winning Galleries of Justice Museum characterises Nottingham as a ‘rebel city’, and it’s a title the city well merits. From Robin Hood – ‘For he was a good outlaw, / And did poor men much good’ – and Lord Byron to Luddite leader Ned Ludd and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’s Arthur Seaton, the city has nurtured a long line of anti-establishment folk heroes.

7) … And (Cheese) Rioters
When the citizens of Nottingham rebel, they like to do it with a spot of humour: take the Cheese Riots in the 1760s, for instance, when discontented locals bowled the overpriced produce, conveniently supplied in wheel-like units, down the hills leading out of the market place. The mayor, protesting against the rioters, is said to have been knocked off his feet by one of the cheesy missiles and to have landed, with severe consequences for his dignity, in the mud of Wheeler Gate.

8) A City of Cave-dwellers
Nottingham folk are hyper-sophisticated but, historically, they’ve had a bit of a thing about living in caves. That’s largely because the city is built on a soft sandstone ridge which can easily be dug out to provide rudimentary subterranean dwellings for the financially challenged. ‘If a man is poor he has only to go to Nottingham with a matlock, a shovel, a crow, an iron, a chisel or a mallet, and with such instruments he may play mole and work himself a hole or burrow for his family,’ observed one nineteenth-century commentator. Asser, Bishop of Sherborne, even called Nottingham ‘Tigguo Cobauc’ (Place of Caves) in his ninth-century biography of Alfred the Great.

9) The Land of the Free
The idea of the USA was first cooked up in and around Nottingham by a group of religious Separatists who would eventually set sail for America on the Mayflower. The Pilgrim Fathers bequeathed several important legacies to the modern US, beginning with the ‘Mayflower Compact’. As President John Quincy Adams would later claim, the Compact was the foundation stone of the 1787 US Constitution, perhaps the most influential document ever enacted in the name of ‘the people’. So you could say Nottingham – the City of the Free – invented the Land of the Free.

10) A Land of Superheroes
That being the case, it’s only natural that the eccentric residents of Gotham, a village just to the south of Nottingham, should have given their name to the home city of Batman. The Notts village became immortalised as the setting for the adventures of the DC Comics superhero after Washington Irving (author of ‘Rip Van Winkle’) referred to New York as Gotham in 1807. It’s not clear that this was intended as a compliment: thanks to their efforts to dodge paying to have a highway built during the reign of King John, Nottinghamshire’s Gothamites had become legendary for their folly, even if they were only pretending to be stupid.

11) Ice Dancing
She was a humble insurance clerk, he was a common-or-garden copper, but together the Nottingham pair of Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean were destined to ice-dance their way into the record books when they received 12 perfect 6.0 scores for their ‘Bolero’ routine at the Sarajevo Winter Olympics in 1984. A gold medal and a place in the nation’s hearts followed. Today Nottingham is home to the National Ice Centre, which is housed – where else? – on Bolero Square.

12) Breakdancing
You may think that the original B-boys and B-girls learned to bust their moves on the mean streets on New York City – and if you did think that, you’d be right. But the specifically British break scene was centred on Nottingham, which played host to the celebrated Rock City Saturday afternoon jams in the early 1980s. Visiting B-boys included Goldie and Jason Orange – though Nottingham is in no way to blame for Take That. See the documentary film NG83 for further information.

13) Nonconformism (Religious)
Nottingham has been home to a long line of religious radicals. Chief among them in the nineteenth century was William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army. Booth was a notable equal-opportunities employer, an idea to which Booth gave memorable verbal form when he exclaimed: ‘My best men are women!’ Indeed, Booth’s heady strain of classic Nottingham eccentricity was his greatest spiritual weapon: one survey estimated that on a particular weeknight the Salvation Army attracted 17,000 worshippers while the Church of England got only 11,000 through its doors.

14) Nonconformism (Sporting)
In May 1930 the whole of the Notts cricket team took to the field in lounge suits on the final day of their match against Hampshire. The previous day’s play had ended with the Southern side requiring just a single run for victory. The Notts captain, Arthur Carr, didn’t think it was worth his men’s trouble to put on their whites the following morning. Opening bowler Bill Voce even wore an overcoat. His second ball yielded the necessary runs.

15) It’s Just Not Cricket
They say Australians are tough, but Nottingham folk are tougher still. It was the efforts of two Notts fast bowlers, Bill Voce and Harold Larwood, that caused the MCC to dismiss the Aussies as squealers in the wake of the infamous Bodyline tour Down Under in 1932–33. Voce and Larwood caused uproar when they employed so-called ‘fast-leg theory’, bowling at the batsmen’s leg stump and getting the ball to rise into their ribs. The strategy worked so well that it nearly caused a riot in the Third Test at Adelaide. And it wasn’t going to be a cheese riot either.

16) The Nation’s Best-Dressed
Nottingham was once the centre of the global lace industry and hence home to a huge female workforce, which perhaps explains the modern myth that there are four women to every man in the city (the city is consequently very popular for stag nights). It’s also where local boy Paul Smith began his illustrious fashion career. No wonder Nottingham folk are so much better dressed than everyone else.

17) Footballing Genius (1)
Which means Brian Clough, obviously. As manager of Nottingham Forest, Ol’ Big ’Ead won the league in 1978, then brought the European Cup to the City Ground the following year, and again in 1980. There’s also the matter of his celebrated bons mots. ‘We talk about it for 20 minutes and then we decide I was right’ was how he once explained his manner of dealing with team members who questioned his tactics. And then there’s that sign he had placed in front of the Trent End. It read: ‘Gentlemen, No Swearing Please – Brian.’ The famously foul-mouthed Trent Enders got the point – and the joke. Afterwards away supporters were routinely greeted with chants of ‘You’re gonna get your flipping head kicked in’. Still an unpleasant sentiment, clearly, but so much more family-friendly in this form.

18) Come On Down!
Nottingham gave the nation some of its best – or at least its most popular – lines in the 1980s. Who can fail to be moved by the memory of local boy Leslie Crowther inviting lucky audience members on to the stage with the words ‘Come on down!’ in the classic ITV gameshow The Price Is Right? The prizes were rotten, of course, but what lovely good clean fun it all was. Not at all like the smut they serve up nowadays. Note that Su Pollard – famous for uttering that other immortal 80s catchphrase, ‘Hi-de-hi!’ – likewise hails from Nottingham. Roy Skelton, who voiced both Zippy AND George in the children’s show Rainbow, grew up here too. There must be something in the water.

19) Footballing Genius (2)
Not far from the City Ground, a second football stadium, Meadow Lane, hosts the oldest professional team in the country, Notts County. Now, County may not be particularly good at the game but that’s not the point – they’ve been not very good at it for longer than anyone else. That’s distinction, if you like. Nottingham also has a third team: AC Milan, created by homesick Nottingham lacemaker Herbert Kilpin in Italy in 1899. Which, if you think about it, means that, between them, Nottingham clubs have won the European Cup/Champions League NINE times. Match that, bloated footballing ‘giants’ of the English North!

20) Bigger, Taller, Longer: Simply the Best
Nottingham’s vast Market Square is the largest (about 22,000 m²) in the country. Until recently, the city was also home to the tallest freestanding work of art in the UK, Ken Shuttleworth’s Aspire, a red and orange steel sculpture that rises 60 metres into the air above the Jubilee Campus of the University of Nottingham. A Nottingham writer – Philip James Bailey – also wrote what is sometimes rumoured to be the longest poem in the English language, Festus. The stats say it all: Nottingham bigger, taller, longer and simply BETTER than the rest.

Reading-as-a-Midlander 2: Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time

This week I have been reading – or, should I say, Reading-as-a-Midlander (see blog dated 18 May) – Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time.

There are twelve volumes so I haven’t had time to do much else over the last seven days; the cat is looking considerably thinner as a result. But on the plus side the new academic discipline of lecture midlandaise has taken enormous strides forward.

I don’t have the time to tell you the plot – it would fill around twelve volumes. But I can assure that it’s very good, so do read it if you’ve got nothing else to do until Christmas. You know the way people you thought you’d never see again keep turning up, surprisingly transformed? It’s very good on that.

Anyway, down to the serious bit: the explicit Midland content. Here I have the pleasure of reporting that A Dance to the Music of Time turns out to be a very interesting study case. Powell has often been dismissed as a snob, and if that’s true then I have to say his snobbery is wholly (or broadly) positive in regard to the Midlands. No, he doesn’t sing the praises of Nottingham, aka ‘the Queen of the East Midlands’, or locate long sequences in Lichfield (as milieux, London and Venice are more to Powell’s taste). But he’s not afraid to reference the Midlands all the same, and often in contexts where less sharp-eyed observers would specify the North. For instance, the young Oxford social misfit Quiggin is said to have claimed that ‘his father used to work on the railway line outside some Midland town’, while the painter Mr Deacon’s patrons are described as ‘mostly business people from the Midlands’ and the narrator is described as going to meet ‘some Hunger-Marchers arriving from the Midlands’. A great novel, and the Midlands consistently named ahead of the North – what more could you ask?

*                  *                  *

In truth, in the wider world as in literature, the word ‘Midlands’ doesn’t crop up much 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 argot 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 geographically there’s little social cachet in announcing yourself as hailing from the nation’s meat-and-two-veg.

Drive of Self-Discovery: Midlands piece in the Daily Express

Drive of Self-Discovery: Midlands piece in the Daily Express

‘Reading-as-a-Midlander’: Harry Mount’s How England Made the English

I am debuting here a new and potentially revolutionary practice: lecture midlandaise, or ‘Reading-as-a-Midlander’.

I got the notion from écriture feminine (‘women’s writing’), an idea that French feminist critics came up with back in the 1970s, when they argued that female consciousness had largely been expunged from the world of books. As Hélène Cixous said in her manifesto for this new kind of literature: ‘Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies. Écriture féminine places experience before language, and privileges the anti-linear, cyclical writing so often frowned upon by patriarchal society.’

Following on from this, I now propose écriture midlandaise, the programme for which can be summed up as follows: ‘Midlanders must write themselves: must write about Midlanders and bring Midlanders to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their sense of their own centrality to the history of England and the wider world. Écriture midlandaise places the Midlands before North and South, and privileges the wonders of the Midlands so often frowned upon by the English establishments of North and South.’ It sounds pretentious, but it’s a hoot really.

Anyway, an important component of this new practice is what Frenchies like Hélène Cixous would call lecture midlandaise, or ‘Reading-as-a-Midlander’.

That doesn’t mean I’m only going to read books about the Midlands from now on – that wouldn’t take very long; books about the North, by contrast, are legion and take a lot of reading (I have to keep waking myself up). But from now on whatever books I do read I’m going to read bodily and intellectually as a Midlander – that is, with an acute awareness of the ways in which the Midlands and Midlanders are portrayed or ignored in their pages.

Books about England and the English are obviously a good place to hone one’s skills Reading-as-a-Midlander, so I’ve picked Harry Mount’s How England Made the English as my starting point. This is a clever and enjoyable book, which is obviously the product of serious and wide-ranging research: Mount’s sentences often seem to contain more facts than they do words, which is no mean feat. But, more than the density of the data, what I like is the obliquity of the approach, as it allows the author to tilt and reframe (or just plain debunk) some of the most often repeated clichés about English life.

I do think the writer has missed a trick in chapter 10, however. This bears the title ‘North and South: The Great Divide’ and dates the beginnings of the tiresome North/South binarism at the heart of English culture to the Harrying of the North by William the Conqueror in 1069–70. Actually, Northern consciousness can be traced much earlier, to the writings of the churchy Northern supremacist the Venerable Bede, aka ‘the father of English history’. But what’s really provoking is the way that Mount can discuss ‘the north–south divide’ while consistently foregrounding the existence of that crucial third party – the Midlands. So we find the following formulation: ‘Whether for good or ill effect, the greater scale of the industries of the Midlands and the north altered the lie of the land that much more deeply than southern industries.’ He then gives three examples, all of them drawn from the Midlands (Shropshire, Nottinghamshire and Staffordshire). As such, we have a chapter that bluffly and credulously investigates the phenomenon of the supposed ‘north–south divide’ while often privileging the Midlands in the illustrations it gives of this division. This is a contradiction in terms, surely? Since Mount clearly knows that the Midlands are distinct from the North, how can he continue to talk about the ‘north–south divide’? It makes no sense.

(On the other hand, Mount gets a bonus mark for putting the Midlands ahead of the north – it’s always ‘the Midlands and the north of England’ – and a further mark for giving the Midlands a capital ‘M’ and the north a lowercase ‘n’.)

‘There’s Nothing Middling about the Midlands’ – article in Independent on Sunday

‘There’s Nothing Middling about the Midlands’ – article in Independent on Sunday

50 Great Things That Came Out Of The Midlands – 9. Robbie Williams

Why has Robbie Williams always been a bit of a square peg in a round hole in Take That? Because he’s from Stoke-on-Trent in the Midlands and the other four are all dyed-in-the-wool Northerners, of course. Mercurial, insecure, restless, a natural experimenter, Robbie is the interesting one, the one with charisma – the Take That Midlander. By comparison, the other band members (no offence, chaps) are a bit plodding, a bit meat-and-potatoes, a bit stereotypically Northern. Inevitably, it’s ‘Sir’ Gary Barlow – the really Northern one – who’s being groomed for the Establishment, but it’s Midlander Robbie who’s the national treasure.

50 Great Things That Came Out Of The Midlands – 26. Roundabouts

These marvellous circular traffic intersections didn’t originate in the Midlands but Telford in Shropshire is the centripetal heart of twenty-first-century England, boasting the highest density of roundabouts per capita of population. Motorists have been known to use up a whole tank’s worth of petrol driving from one end of Telford to the other: it’s only a few miles, but the roundabouts are addictive. Other Midland roundabout towns of note: too many to list.

50 Great Things That Came Out Of The Midlands – 34: Phil Lynott

The great hard-rock heroes all hail from the West Midlands. Robert Plant, Ozzy Osbourne and Lemmy all let out their first lusty baby cries in and around these parts. Even the great ‘Irish’ music icon and Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott was secretly a Midlander: his birth certificate shows that he was born in West Bromwich. That statue in Dublin really ought to be taken down and re-erected just off the M5. Little-known facts: 1) Off mic, Phil spoke with a broad Brummie accent. ‘Yow all right, bab?’ he would greet guitarist Scott Gorham of a morning. 2) The Boys Are Back in Town was originally titled The Boys Are Back in Brum – Dino’s Bar and Grill was a favourite eatery of Phil’s just off Chamberlain Square. It did a great egg and chips, apparently.