Devolution is a chance to forge North East’s 'promised land'

These days when you see the North East on television or online, the chances are you’ll be presented with certain stock themes. It might be rugged, coastal countryside, with a castle or two seen from afar.

Or perhaps the modern stuff – the Millennium Bridge, the Angel of the North, and a photograph of the Glasshouse framed by the Tyne Bridge under-structure.

Or, more likely, it’ll be the distinctly not-modern stuff: terraces of back-to-back working-class communities, derelict sites of long-lost industry, and a TV presenter, probably from London, talking about warm, proud people before scooting off to catch the teatime train back down south.

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There’s nothing wrong with any of these images, but it’s annoying that the images in the third category often feel like they’re being seen through southern eyes. These pictures say, ‘ooh it’s very wild and tribal and gritty isn’t it? I bet the people are so down to earth there - such history and soul!’

Which is all very well, but it doesn’t say much about what the North East is now, nor what it might have to offer beyond nice weekend breaks and soulful accents on a TV programme. In 2024 these North Eastern images and myths have become newly important, because our area has just been given the chance to tell its own story for a change.

That’s because in what should be an era-defining act of decentralization, the UK government is devolving power from Westminster to local regions, through the medium of new mayoral authorities. The new powers span transportation, housing, planning, economic development and more, and will bring new powers to local communities.

The North East Combined Authority is made up of representatives from the old County Durham, Gateshead, Newcastle, North Tyneside, Northumberland, South Tyneside, and Sunderland authorities. It is led by Kim McGuinness, the Labour candidate who was elected in May this year.

Ms McGuinness says she intends to tell a story about the North East that is creative, fresh and meaningful for real people. She believes stories interest and inspire us because they show how values are lived out in real life, and how they overcome challenges.

Done right, a good story will unite the different areas of our region. It will help us agree and express what our values are. It will help to restore some of our faith in each other and in political institutions.

The question is, what is it that we in the North East do and believe now? We know that in the past we pioneered mining, shipbuilding and other industries, and we built new kinds of communities and ways of living together, like the welfare institutions, the Aged Mineworkers Homes, the non-conformist churches, and countless informal networks that sustained people during strikes and other periods of deprivation. How can we draw on the spirit that drove that sort of activity to build a future? Among the themes mooted in the last decades, five have been particularly prominent.

Firstly, there is the industrial revolution, that world-changing period that the North East started. Although many of those original industries are long-gone, the expertise lives on in the engineering of things like wind turbines and other marine technology. Should we be celebrating this, rather than lamenting the past?

That brings us to the second idea, which is specifically the use of that expertise to build a new, decarbonised future: after all, the biggest offshore wind farm in the world just off the coast, Europe’s most productive car factory exports electric vehicles out of Sunderland, and the Port of Tyne’s work on carbon capture and storage all this means that the North East can convincingly claim to be the originator of the net zero economy.

The third theme is of the North East as an outlier – a vision advanced in Dan Jackson’s popular book, The Northumbrians. The North East’s distance from London, he argues, gives it a people’s-republic-of-Northumbria feeling of independence; should we use that to inspire us, and think of ourselves less as an English province, and more as small but dynamic global player? This “global North East” idea – the fourth in our list – is not as outlandish as it may seem. After all, the region has always been very good at exports of goods and services.

The final theme is about the thinking and creativity whose roots can be traced back to the inventiveness of the industrial era. Sunderland’s landing of new film studios as big as Pinewood shows how the creative industries will be a big driver for the region’s future economy, and should remind us that the North East already produces a conspicuously large amount of writing, music, film and games that sell very well beyond the region’s borders.

The real point, though, is that many of the old boundaries between “creative” and “not creative” are likely to change. The growth of Artificial Intelligence means we’ll need to think about what humans can do that machines cannot; it seems likely that we’ll still things like communication and presentation, collaboration and teamwork, and analysis and evaluation, done by real people. Those skills – fusion skills, as they’re called – will be as essential to the artist as they are to the engineer and the shopkeeper and the teacher and the therapist. So take note: if you think the North East becoming a creative centre is somehow about asking ex-miners to become ballet dancers, you’re thinking about creativity in the wrong way.

Whatever themes we draw on, the most important thing will be to recognise what is truly distinctive about the North East’s way of thinking. That’s notoriously hard to pin down, but you could do worse than to begin with these four qualities:

1. It likes actual evidence

Perhaps because of the influence of science and engineering, the North East tends to put an emphasis on actual experience. It trusts things that have actually been seen to happen as a guide to what might happen in the future. That means it’s suspicious of authority, theory, and it retains a distinctive down-to-earthness that is very useful in separating out hype from reality.

2. It tries things out and goes again

In keeping with the above, the North East gets things right by making them, trying them out, making adjustments and then going is comfortable trying out, and going again. Look at how County Durham native Ada Lovelace invented the computer algorithm, or how George Stephenson worked on the miner’s safety lamp, or how Bobby Robson shaped his tactics. Hard experience has taught us that it’s rarely a good idea to start with an idea and try to make reality fit it.

3. It likes an antagonist

Maybe it’s an element of romanticism in the region’s character, but nothing seems to energise its people quite like having something to struggle against. Time and time again people have taken on vested interests and questioned their assumptions; you can see that in figures as diverse as Dominic Cummings, David Olusoga and Sam Fender.

4. It’s emotional

The North East may love the self-image of practicality, common sense and hardness, but outsiders are often struck by the sheer emotion of the place. At its best, this corner of the North can pull off a beautiful alloy: feeling, the authenticity and controlling reason. What other region could be represented by an iron angel with its feet on the ground, wings outstretched and ready to take flight?

Perhaps rather than re-making and remodelling the North East, we just need to make sure we’re using our best ingredients. There can be no doubt that we have the necessary materials; let’s use them to forge a true and believable story for our past, present and future selves.

And not a single story, but a collective epic. Not a place, but a promised land that can be delivered. Not a leader, nor even “a people”, but two and half million heroes.

North East Now is a series of essays commissioned by New Writing North with Redhills and UCL. Further pieces will feature in The Journal and on ChronicleLive in the coming weeks