Pies and Prejudice: In Search of the North | Paperback

Let it be quite clear, Stuart Maconie is not Bill Bryson nor is anywhere close. He is an inconsistent author, full of contradictions and the part of the title about prejudices hits it on the nail. How he can consider this book is about the North is almost beyond comprehension, missing out vast regions of the real North. The first chapter is about the South, where he lives and enjoys an apparently middle-class life, denying his self-proclaimed socialist ideals. At one point, he describes in great detail his five-star hotel with valet parking (even though he says he doesn't drive) and his gourmet dinner, far remote from a Northern "tea". This hypocritical and even patronising tone pervades the book.
Maconie makes a great fuss about defining the North. Rather than a simple statement like Watford, Watford Gap or a line from the Mersey to the Humber, he tells you, at length, what isn't the North, finally deciding that it starts at Crewe, of all places. So much so that he felt… more »

Let it be quite clear, Stuart Maconie is not Bill Bryson nor is anywhere close. He is an inconsistent author, full of contradictions and the part of the title about prejudices hits it on the nail. How he can consider this book is about the North is almost beyond comprehension, missing out vast regions of the real North. The first chapter is about the South, where he lives and enjoys an apparently middle-class life, denying his self-proclaimed socialist ideals. At one point, he describes in great detail his five-star hotel with valet parking (even though he says he doesn't drive) and his gourmet dinner, far remote from a Northern "tea". This hypocritical and even patronising tone pervades the book.
Maconie makes a great fuss about defining the North. Rather than a simple statement like Watford, Watford Gap or a line from the Mersey to the Humber, he tells you, at length, what isn't the North, finally deciding that it starts at Crewe, of all places. So much so that he felt constrained to write many pages about the town's virtues and vices, although it probably has little of either. This is his great failing as a writer; he belabours a point over long periods of witless prose, even flogging it to death. One example of this is his musical scene of Manchester. He starts by saying it is not a patch on Liverpool's, but that does not stop him from a dozen or so pages describing it from the 1960s onwards. However, there is not a single mention of Manchester's most famous musician, Sir Charles Hallé, his legacy of orchestras and choir, or the conductor of that time, Sir John Barbirolli, who did so much to follow in "Flash Harry's" (Sir Malcolm Sargent's) footsteps to popularise music for all to understand and enjoy.
Wigan, where he was brought up, and its pies occupy an inordinate part of the book. He acknowledges that others, notably George Orwell (his real name dropped, of course), have done a better job describing the pre-war abject misery than he could, as he wasn't even a bairn then. It may have improved since then, but I'm not inspired to visit it.
There seems little rhyme or reason in his virtual itinerary. He starts the Northern part of his trip in Cheshire, then Liverpool, Manchester, Wigan, Skelmersdale, and then hopping to West Yorkshire, waxing lyrical about middle-class Leeds, then back to Cheshire where his jealousy shows with footballers living it up on Alderley Edge and other affluent townships. Thence to Chester, which he liked, and back to Yorkshire, Harrogate to be exact, which he didn't like, no doubt because it was on the wrong side of the Pennines. He then started literally singing the praises of Ilkley Moor, no doubt in a Lancastrian accent, complete with a synopsis translated into English. From here, he rushed back to Lancashire to tell us about the wonders of Blackpool's Pleasure Gardens and what a dump Morecambe has become. He then briefly praises the Lake District over a couple of pages, while making sure that everyone knows that part of it is in his home county, including shipbuilding Barrow which merits half a chapter, along with several pages on the Cumbrian coast up to Silloth. Onto the Tees, Wear and Tyne, which seem vaguely lumped together as Geordieland, where Sunderland and Middlesborough have apparently become more important than the rest of the area. Amusingly, there are a couple of oblique mentions of the Jarrow March but Ellen Wilkinson has been eclipsed in the South Tyne by South Shields' Catherine Cookson, not to mention the absence of the Venerable Bede. ...