Feature Northernism March 29, 2011 Depictions of the ‘grim’ North are a struggle between the beautiful and the real, depending on the distance you view it from.

Grim; authentic; gritty; real, be it through cinema, photography, literature or painting, cultural representations of the North have long been defined and understood in these terms. The need to project a ‘reality’ of Northern life and landscape can be traced back to a perception of the South – in its many artistic manifestations – as an unrepresentative space, in which fantasy; heroism; and happy endings abound. The realism of the North says that life is not like that: it doesn’t look like that and it doesn’t feel like that. It seeks to show us an alternative, an image of the nation that does not come from the pen of Richard Curtis. And so, the cultural commentators and columnists that smugly occupy the pages of our broadsheets have their thirst for the pigeonhole quenched, and the North becomes the darkened flipside of the South’s coin.

Google ‘Gritty’ and ‘This is England 86’ and you’ll see scores of bloggers and journalists alike, praising Shane Meadows’ ‘realistic’ depiction of disaffected youth in Thatcher’s Britain, and highlighting the series’ controversial scenes of rape and graphic violence – tacitly perpetuating the bleak imaginary of the North in the process. Some may call the series ‘visually stylish’, of course, which it is, but there will be little or no attempt to interrogate the complexities of Meadows’ aesthetic. The truth is that the North of This is England 86 may be ‘real’ but it’s also beautiful – the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

The series, shot in Sheffield, sees it many moments of character-driven humour and tragedy accompanied by lingering portraits of space and place: flats; parks; streets of low-rise social housing – the familiar visual currency of the North. These iconographic fragments are not there simply to serve the story and they do not function merely to establish the spaces in which the characters will interact. They are included to be looked at and to be considered; like photographs or paintings in a gallery, they exist not for background, but for interpretation.

This aestheticisation of Northern space permeates popular images of the region: the rows of identical terraced houses and the factory or colliery (when there were factories and collieries) are as familiar as the stately homes, or country landscapes of the South. We face an uncomfortable realisation then, when we experience fascination and even pleasure at these images of ‘grim reality’; the spaces that connote a working life down the pit or a hopeless existence on an impoverished council estate are delivered as spectacle, as images to be ‘looked at’.

In the cinema, the New Wave films of the late ‘50s and ‘60s did much to consolidate this visual interpretation of the North. Contemporary reviewers often praised films like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and This Sporting Life for their revelatory depiction of the region, and – by extension – their challenge to the dominant conservatism of the London-centric mainstream. Yet, the New Wave is now seen as an exercise in cultural tourism; a fetishisation of the North at the expense of its inhabitants. Critics cite as evidence the middle-class backgrounds of the films’ directors, and their repeated images of bitter and disaffected working-class protagonists isolated amidst stark, prison-like urban environments. It is easy, then, to see the North of the New Wave as the product of a patronising outsiders’ view made for a patronising audience of outsiders. But when Karel Reisz’s camera rests on the Nottingham skyline for a sumptuous ten seconds of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, we can sense author Alan Silitoe’s own imagining of the North in his original text: ‘July, August, and summer skies lay over the city, above rows of houses in the western suburbs, backyards burned by the sun with running tar-sores whose antiseptic smell blended with that of dustbins overdue for emptying, drying paint even drier on front doors, rusting knockers and letterboxes, and withering smoke from factory chimneys coiled blackly’. Silitoe grew up in harsh poverty; he brings his experience of Nottingham to the pages of his novel and to the words of his screenplay. Yet, the Northern townscape he describes is as beautiful as it is bleak – it is a space that begs to be symbolised and made poetic because it is viewed from a distance, no longer from within.

Despite his humble origins, Silitoe penned his debut in Majorca during a 7-year stay in Europe with his American poet wife, Ruth Fainlight. Silitoe’s interpretation of the North captures a sense of this distance and of exile, as well as authenticity – it is a poetic realism born of the tension and guilt found between experience and escape. So too, David Storey (another 1960s working-class writer whose work was adapted for the New Wave), communicates a psychogeographical North, of aggressively figurative hills and valleys looming over towns; of factories; and terraced houses, seen through the eyes of protagonists whose unarticulated emotional distance from their environment is tragically palpable. Storey himself exists within this conflict: the grammar school boy from Wakefield who played Rugby League while studying fine art – trapped irreconcilably between two classes; two cultural spaces.

Our iconography of the North is therefore the product of this ‘looking back’: the artist who seeks to render her or his view of their environment is forced to exist outside of that space, and their product is the paradoxically spectacular image of the region. The art of the North is one of bitterness and hopeless romance, it characterises this irreversible movement between social and cultural spheres. Where beauty exists, it is a tragic beauty – born of a vision that is always external, always showing the outside looking in.

Northernism was written by David Forrest and published in Article Issue 2, Volume 2, the Cities Issue.