North-East England, 1850-1914

Serious local history in England has long centred on towns and shires; whereas ‘regions’—which generally transcend established administrative boundaries and entrenched parochial mindsets—have been largely neglected. The main difficulty with the region as a concept lies in the problem of defining distinctive local characteristics and fixing spatial limits. Most people would probably agree that England—both in the past and in the present—could usefully be divided into ‘regions’; but attempts to draw them on the map have led to endless disputes. Graeme Milne is surely correct in claiming that the North-East is currently ‘the most clearly-defined and self-aware of the English regions, thanks largely to its isolation ... and a cultural exceptionalism rooted in the rise and decline of heavy industry’ (p. 1). He is also right to focus on the economic changes which transformed the district between the Tyne and the Tees during the six decades before the First World War in his brave attempt to pin this elusive concept down. For the popular image of the Victorian North-East as a cohesive region derives largely from the concentration of a complex of interlocking industries and enterprises (coal, iron and steel, engineering, and shipbuilding) along the banks of its three great rivers. Equally important, however, as Milne is at pains to point out, was the area's pronounced maritime orientation, because each of the three riparian urban/industrial ‘clusters’ had strong water-based connections with the wider world. Shipbuilding and ship-owning provided the links between domestic hinterlands and overseas-oriented forelands, and much of Milne's study deals with these two sectors of the economy

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