Perhaps we should have sold him the Isle of Man and got him working on the tunnel (selling him Northern Ireland would be a bit of a stretch).
As a tax haven, I would have thought that the IOM would have considerable appeal to the ginger one.
As a southerner, everything past Birmingham is ‘Up North’, however, looking on Google Maps, northbound roads out of Leeds are signed ‘The North’, whereas southbound roads are not signed ‘The South’.
I suppose it really does depend on who you ask.
Of course, Map Men have an episode about it
Incorrect. They are The NORTH. The shoutiness on the signs is important.
Most of the time, when people in England talk about “the north”, they mean the north of England. I’m fine with that if they are clear in their own minds about the difference between England and GB/UK and if relevant they make the distinction clear to their audience. However a lot of people in England seem to think that Scotland is about the size of Cornwall* and so they fail to realise that geographically, the north of the UK is very different from the north of England.
Also, some people from the south of England seem to think that “the north of the UK” exists in some cultural sense. It doesn’t - the north of England (which itself is not culturally homogeneous) is very different from even the south of Scotland. UK broadcasters pretty much never accurately acknowledge the several large cultural regions within Scotland.
In my opinion it is wrong for the BBC UK news to refer, as they do frequently, to the north east of England as just “the north east”, without specifying England - would they accept a Scottish journalist on the same programme talking about Dumfries being in “the south west” without mentioning the word “Scotland”?
It is totally unacceptable to me for the BBC, in the form of Alice Roberts and the Dig for Britain programme, to refer to Derbyshire as being in the “north of Britain”. I also heard anecdotally of a sign in Manchester airport that said “welcome to north west UK” - if that’s true, it’s absurd, and you’re going to have some foreign visitors who know a bit about UK history thinking “uh huh.”
I hadn’t watched many Map Men videos before but I’m afraid that one is badly thought out and it would lead me to question the accuracy of their other work. They totally fail to make the distinction between England and the UK - they draw a map of the island of Great Britain while saying “England”. They say, with apparent seriousness, that Scunthorpe is halfway up England, but I can’t work out how they arrive at that (it’s a bit to the north of any halfway line you choose for England).
*Seriously - it’s not unusual for people living the north of Scotland to be told by friends holidaying in the south of Scotland “you can pop over and say hello while we’re here”, when the distance is actually about 200 miles. As it happens, Scotland covers a longer area of the earth’s surface than England does - England is 447 miles from Scillies to just north of Berwick, Scotland is 454 miles from Mull of Galloway to Muckle Flugga. The Scottish mainland is 285 miles long as the crow flies, 391 miles by car.
That’s Dr. Roberts to you !
I’ll stick with Alice Roberts.
I really hope you’re not replicating that misogynist Twitter stuff about her.
No !?
what’s that all about ?