Is Europe’s future northern?

‘Where does the North of England really begin?’, I asked my colleagues this afternoon to make an instinctive response: Birmingham, Nottingham, Preston and Hull were offered, a couple slap bang in the middle of the country. Cue a surprisingly vicious argument about precisely why, and for what reasons, each of us had got it wrong.

Some of England’s geographical north is peppered with elegant Georgian-designed market towns, large, prosperous farms and country house hotels with Michelin-starred restaurants. Think the first series of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s The Trip. But ‘The North’ is also a value system – northerners are plain-speaking, gritty and don’t suffer fools gladly – and a byword for places irrevocably shaped by the culture of the Industrial Revolution. It is ‘the backbone’ of the country, as one of Andy Burnham’s slick marketing videos put it. Yet it’s hard to really maintain that England’s northern counties share a common culture. Grit and hard-working solidity are also values held by the peoples of Scotland’s north country and London’s despised but Stakhanovite City, which subsidises much of the rest of the country.

The condition of being southern, at least in European terms, is quite well-defined – it is a certain loucheness, a Latin flavour, even the way the heat and sun seem to clarify and brighten the landscape. But considering the escalating climate difficulties faced by the cultures that ring the Mediterranean Sea, why shouldn’t we take a new interest in what constitutes northern-ness as opposed to southern-ness?

Perhaps the key to Britain’s northern-ness is the condition it shares with its neighbours on the continent, with northern France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the countries that rim the Baltic Sea. Zoom out and it is far easier to make generalisations, which is precisely what the documentary-maker Jonathan Meades does in his 2008 documentary Magnetic North, in which he makes a sustained, positive case for ‘northern-ness’. This culture is rampantly materialistic. The merchants of the Hanseatic League, who maintained trading links across the Baltic seaway and the North Sea, built trading houses as opulent as cathedrals. It is Gothic that is the north’s supreme architecture – at once divine and earthy – an idiom so intrinsically creative and so various that Goethe could look on Strasbourg Cathedral and claim it, wrongly, for the ‘German genius’.

To be northern is to be anxious, always questing, Meades argues. The first episode culminates in a series of reflections on Caspar David Friedrich’s magnificent painting, ‘Chalk Cliffs on Rügen’. Here is the Baltic, a great tranquil pond just ready for newly enlightened man to go on his merry way, measuring, travelling and wondering. It is a painting full of giddiness at the promise and peril of progress – one of the figures peers over the cliff as if unsteady on his feet.

Economies in punishingly hot conditions are booming: the sunshine belt of the southern United States, the Gulf, and Western Australia. But southern Europe does not share the same core factors driving growth, cheap hydrocarbons and universal air-conditioning. The gorgeous South will continue its long decay and peacefully slide into irrelevance, a land where the lemon trees continue to flower, but nothing much happens; and even less in a future of catastrophic warming. If populations do migrate northwards, and climate change shifts the geography of power politics, opening the northern seaways, the countries of Europe’s north will once again be seen as interesting, as places that amount to much, much more than minimalist design, television box sets and sophisticated welfare systems. The Continent will rediscover its northern soul – pragmatic, adaptable, inquisitive – an inheritance more suited, perhaps, to the times we find ourselves in.