The Northern Question

Praise

“Compelling, rigorous and ambitious.”
—Jacobin

“Hazeldine painstakingly recounts how successive twentieth-century governments sacrificed the North on the altar of sterling and the South East.”
—Times Literary Supplement

“A lively, provocative and richly researched book. Tom Hazeldine shows that far from being marginal to British politics and culture, northern England has played a pivotal role in British history—and must be given serious consideration by the politicians of the future. Well-written and absorbing.”
—Selina Todd, author of Tastes of Honey and The People

“The definitive account of the historical importance of the North–South Divide. A masterly history of the shifting social forces shaped by this enduring fault-line.”
—Geoffrey Ingham, author of The Nature of Money and Capitalism Divided?

“The disparity between the North of England and the South East is a rich and tangled history. Hazeldine’s account is persuasive, and his long view is valuable. With real acuity, he highlights key differences in people’s ideas of political possibility.”
—John Harris, Guardian

“The first serious study of the social and historical fissure to appear in more than 30 years.”
—Big Issue

“An expansive account of the north-south divide.”
—Lynsey Hanley , Financial Times

“Shunning simplifications and panegyrics, Hazeldine’s book is particularly strong on the postwar period, during which both Labour and Tory governments wrestled with the northern question and failed to provide an answer.”
—Prospect

“Deserve[s] a place on the bookshelves of any historian concerned with England.”
—New Welsh Review

“Brilliant … [a] gripping, important, infuriating history.”
—Review31

“A confident, synoptic book, taking on a thousand years of England’s North/South divide.”
—Owen Hatherley, Tribune

“A historical travelogue not for the politically faint-hearted.”
—Mark Perryman, Philosophy Football

“Hazeldine convincingly asserts a northern reality. His point is that Brexit, and the collapse of Labour’s Red Wall, are just the latest consequences of a divide written into England’s political and economic geography.”
—Rory Scothorne, London Review of Books