The Midlands has long been the source of almost everything that is good about English – and, indeed, world – culture and history
From Shakespeare to Walkers crisps to oxygen, there’s more to the Midlands than Spaghetti Junction. In fact, it’s where anything of any value – ever – started life
The Midlands – that great swath of England squeezed between the self-mythologising power blocs of north and south on the national map – has an image problem. And that problem, essentially, is that it doesn’t have an image.
1. Gravity
Photograph: The Gallery Collection/Corbis
Midlanders are very grounded people, so it should come as little surprise that it was a Midlander – Sir Isaac Newton – who discovered gravity. The Royal Society named the former Grantham schoolboy as the most influential scientist of all time. Beat that, smarty-pants London!
2. Creswell Crags
Photograph: Don McPhee for the Guardian
Did you know that the Midlands is home to what archaeologists have dubbed “the Sistine Chapel of the ice age”? That’s right: at Creswell Crags, a limestone gorge on the Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire border, ice age Midlanders invented Britart.
3. Mercians
Photograph: David Jones/PA
The recent recovery of the Staffordshire Hoard from a field in Hammerwich has provided a useful reminder that Anglo-Saxon Mercia (the Midlands) was politically, culturally and militarily far superior to Northumbria (the north) and Wessex (the south).
4. The US
Photograph: John Foxx/Getty Images/Stockbyte Silver
The idea of the US was first cooked up in North Notts by a group of religious separatists who would eventually set sail for America on the Mayflower. Those first persecution-fleeing Midlanders invented the concept of the Land of the Free.
5. The Great Reform Act
Photograph: Print Collector/Getty Images
The 1832 Great Reform Act laid the foundations of our modern electoral system. And it was basically all Brum’s doing. As Lord Durham declared: “The country owed Reform to Birmingham, and its salvation from revolution.”
6. Gary Lineker
Photograph: Andy Paradise/Rex Features
All Midlanders are nice people – that’s a scientifically proven fact – but that doesn’t stop them being high achievers. The sporting world’s Mr Nice, Gary Lineker, is a Leicester lad. The Match of the Day host isn’t above poking fun at himself: since 1995 he’s played an arch-villain in advertising campaigns for Walkers crisps, also from Leicester.
7. Rebecca Adlington
Photograph: Paul Childs/Action Images
Midlanders are also modest, almost to a fault. Can you think of a more self-deprecating sporting over-achiever than Mansfield-born swimmer Rebecca Adlington? She’s England’s most decorated female Olympian ever.
8. The Salvation Army
Photograph: Alamy
The East Midlands has been home to a long line of spiritual radicals, including William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army and a notable equal-opportunities employer. “My best men are women!” he declared with winning Midland eccentricity.
9. Stilton
Photograph: Foodstock/Alamy
The distinctive blue-veined cheese may take its name from a village in Cambridgeshire, but it’s a strictly Midland phenomenon – by law it can only be produced in Leicestershire, Derbyshire or Nottinghamshire using local cow’s milk.
10. Mass tourism
Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Leicester cabinetmaker Thomas Cook effectively invented mass tourism in the 1840s. Note that there is very little tourism, never mind mass tourism, to the Midlands.
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