Where Do I Live?
The industrial wasteland of the north-west coast
I grew up in the 1970s and 80s, in the north-west of England.
Not the north-west of train timetables, newsreels, weather forecasts and the like, that would probably have you land in Manchester, Liverpool, Preston or perhaps Lancaster at a push. There’s nothing at all wrong with those areas — I studied and worked in Liverpool for four years and loved it, lived and worked in Lancaster for another two, but my own origins are even further up.
This is where I tend run into problems with people’s geographical knowledge. Go north of Lancaster and surely you come to Scotland!? Many people certainly think that’s the case anyway. So am I Scottish? Well no. I wouldn’t mind that at all to be honest, but surprisingly there’s actually more of England up here, between the border of Lancashire and the border of Scotland. So many British people don’t even know that, I certainly wouldn’t expect anyone else to.
Yet my homeland, the far north-western ‘corner’ of England — Cumbria — is the third largest county in geographical area, out of forty-eight in England.
Conversely, we’re ranked forty-first out of that forty-eight in terms of population. A vast amount of the county is taken up by lakes, fells and fields. Those who do realise Cumbria exists tend…
