Twenty-four miles from Chester is Crewe, where the Railwaymen play. While Deva is unarguably northern, its noisy neighbour looks down to Stoke City and Port Vale rather than up to Macclesfield Town and Stockport County. North and south is important in England and there are few greater determinants of which is which and who is who than football. At first glance Crewe’s history sits tightly within a narrative of industrialism usually claimed and pocketed by the north. These were the railwaymen. They built trains and they built a town. Day trips for those of us that cars passed by would probably be impossible without them.
Until there were trains there was no Crewe. All of it was fields and scattered farms. ‘A mere hamlet of the most uninviting character’ said the one guidebook I could find. Then the iron roads spiralled around the ugly hamlet like ivy. They were not even supposed to be there; only when the lobbyists of Nantwich declared ‘not in my back field’ did the railway re-tune towards the ugly hamlet. From Birmingham to Liverpool ran the Grand Junction Railway, stopping off at Crewe, population: seventy. Further tracks arrived smartly, intersecting like wire wool. The new town of Crewe’s geography – accessible from the chimneyed settlements of Lancashire, the Midlands and Yorkshire, and the west coast – was simply too comely to ignore. On this side of England, most trains passed through, their passengers associating Crewe with tea and cakes. On the run following riots in the Potteries, Chartist Thomas Cooper, a friend of Sheffield no doubt, recorded how ‘We had time for breakfast at Crewe, before the Manchester train came up.’
Until that point, Crewe was a service station with frilly tablecloths. Then, its railwaymen decided it should be so much more. Their brave Crewe world would establish the first country of rail’s epic workshop and a model town to house those who stoked its flames. At first, they built superior tracks, but soon conjured the locomotives and carriages that slid across them. From the 1860s the people of Crewe made more and better tank engines than anywhere else. Each was created with delicate craft, but built robustly to last. They were doused in bucolic shades of plum and spilt milk, but named after classical heroes from another world. By 1900, Crewe had built 4,000 locomotives; 7,000 households depended on them doing so. Inside thirty years 40,000 people had moved to Crewe. Many of them came from Edgehill in Liverpool, newly usurped as a home of steam. Crewe could do things she never would. England’s newest town was an immigrant one, south Lancastrians, Yorkshire folk, Scots and Geordies joining the Scousers so that by 1851 only nineteen per cent of the adult population was from Cheshire.
They found work and they found a mostly pleasant place to live. Crewe was never resplendent, but its heart was fair. Railway company spoils often went straight into civilising their new town. They built libraries, mechanics’ institutes, meeting halls, parks and churches. Their housing was of a standard fit for railwaymen, creating a labour aristocracy that lived in clean and comfortable homes unheard of elsewhere. The companies provided baths and street cleaners, policemen and hospitals, water and gas. They dominated lives public and private, visually and mentally.
There were railwaywomen too, working in supporting industries. Some made soap, bricks or artificial limbs. Six-hundred-and-fifty tailoresses sewed the waistcoated uniforms that gave British trains atmosphere. No one could claim gender equality, but things were pushing in the right direction. A new town meant a generally classless one, according to a Daily Mail article of June 1917, and a happy one too:
There are no ultra-rich and no very poor in Crewe. There is little of what everywhere else passes for public entertainment, but there are clubs of all sorts, social and political, there are musical and debating societies ... all very active and energetic.
Democracy was harder to come by than dancing. With company munificence came company rule. When in 1877 Crewe became an elected Borough, its councils were chiefly populated by railway managers. It could be a stifling atmosphere. There was a puritanism to living in this company town, atmospherically and officially – Sundays of closed shops and no play remained in place until the 1930s. Pint-jar relief and release were difficult, the companies having banned pubs inside their town and shown much deference to Temperance. Railwaymen throats were wet inside boozers built on the edge of town. The recollections of Mike Langley, a Crewe expat and sports journalist supreme, were far from fond:
The Crewe of those days was a company town dancing to the tune of the works’ buzzer, where the sack was every apprentice’s 21st birthday present, where the children’s swings were chained on Sundays and where licensing justices were a gang of militant teetotallers who, even on VE-night when we won the war, shut the pubs at ten.
Work did not liberate, though there was an awful lot of it going on. During the First World War, the railworks of Crewe employed 10,000 people. Other industries spotted a willing workforce that could whip up a structure faster than most people could open a tin of bully beef. Rolls Royce and Bentley opened factories, the former’s supplying the aeroplane engines that bested the Nazis. When England needed fun to forget war, the industrial hangars of Crewe turned out ice cream vans, mobile fish and chip shops and hot dog vending vehicles. Still the locos shunted from Crewe to the world, from the 1960s in colour diesel rather than black-and-white steam.
And then, and then ... oh what a familiar tale. By the twenty-first century railwaymen’s hands were twiddling thumbs. Dr Beeching hammered the first rusty nail, dividing Crewe into a mere division of British Rail workshops. There were, as we now know, no special cases for such a social butcher and industrial psychopath. Making a department out of a breathing organism made strangulation easy. Closures spread across the Crewe works from east to west, an epidemic that left killing fields of wheel and axle corpses, not to mention pride. If the town existed because of the rails, then how could it go on without trains?
Today there is a retail park where many of Crewe’s workshops once were, which is like sinking a sewage works in a graveyard. To reach the Crewe Heritage Centre as I am now attempting to do, you have to walk beneath the stilts of one of those jumbo Tesco barns that will soon have its own Olympic team. On one side of the road signage offers ‘Welcome to Tesco Extra’, on the other ‘The Crewe Heritage Centre’. They are tussling for attention and attendance, one easily winning mine but not many others’. What Tesco can’t control as yet is the air, punctuated then saturated by the smell of fire and water on coal. It is a good job such a scent of heaven hangs as the Heritage Centre takes a covert approach to identifying itself, and the main hall is locked. I peer in through its glass door and a figure apparently wearing around her neck the spoils of a raid on a cash-for-gold shop stares back at me from inside.This turns out to be the mayor. I smile half-heartedly – symbolic authority only requires as much – and retreat to a bench. Behind me, Saturday volunteers tinker on a miniature railway. The yard ahead proffers sheeted ghosts – a cornucopia of steam trains and diesels, all awaiting their wake-up calls from beneath covers. Each wears the brass declaration ‘Crewe Built’. The Heritage Centre is jackknifed by working mainline railways, a blob at the bottom of a letter ‘V’. I enter a building at the far end that contains a cafe, shop, further exhibits and volunteers with intense giggles and gangly hair. I find the general untidiness endearing, an antidote to the new world of Westfield floors.
In a backroom an overhead projector plies the wall full of images. They are not of a smoothly produced documentary on the history of the Crewe works, nor are they BFI images of steam days. The images come from a shaky camcorder film of a diesel train ticking by the platform at Crewe station. The cameraman pans around to show us more of the train, inadvertently flashing up a merry band of enthusiasts as they hum, aaah and smile. It looks to have been shot in the 1990s and captures an England of then celebrating and nurturing another, earlier England. Change and continuity seep over the wobbly edges of the pictures. There is a fondness of times gone by, of what we were that would die without these people and without places like this. I wish we still built things, but at least we remember them. Reminiscence and heritage cannot be bulldozed or made into Carpetrights. All of this is decorated with humour and cheer. There are the three men by the screen fixing some signal parts to a wall. One is up a ladder, talking over his shoulder: ‘Off at three, I am. Off to get me toupee done. Then, Cup Final for me.’ ‘All right, Sean, you’ve said. You can go at three. I get it,’ says the man steadying his climbing frame, looking across at the third, driven to fond distraction. Then upstairs on a viewing platform, a teacher withstands and even heightens the rambunctious and endearing enthusiasms of his charges. One bolts up and down, tracing the progress of each train that passes and shouting its name, besotted. ‘Diesel. DIESEL. Virgin. VIRGIN. VIRGIN! OH. MY. GOD!’ Another asks ‘Can we go in the signal box?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ replies their beloved leader. ‘We can do what you want. We have all the time in the world.’
Surfing this tide of awe, I do not even notice Tesco or Wickes as I leave and am quickly in Crewe’s neat civic centre. White flagpoles thrice the height of goalposts frame the town hall and market. At the centre of them a statue of Britannia stands tall as if awaiting a penalty. At her feet in modern silver letters are the words of Laurence Binyon: We will remember them. Another England with wars gone by impossible to miss. The scent of meat sags in the air inside Crewe Market Hall, a butcher’s shop at each end competing. Its aroma reminds me of Watford, as does a leaflet on the noticeboard advertising Knutsford Civic Centre’s ‘Mind Body and Spirit Event’. The market building, a century-and-a-half old, has the clock-towered dignity of an Andalucian town’s railway station. Up close its details are many, like the unexpected number of veins in an autumn leaf. Its inner charms are more predictable and homely. The first stall I see sells knickers the size of cooling towers, fluorescent bibs and Premier League football scarves. Opposite, a woman trades in threads and wool underneath a sign reading Cakes, Biscuits & Pies. There are a number of redeployed or empty spaces like hers, including the Crewe Trouser Bar, here since 1948 but recently departed. An outdoor section of the market flogs dog beds, vegetables, pet gravestones and car boot delights in crates under a cattle market roof. This is the free market in its most inhibited state. Across the car park pensioners are dining al fresco outside the Market Cafe, or sucking cigarettes while they wait. It is brighter inside, owing to its sunny owner and the affectionate airs between old friends. Most people who enter say hello and pay without ordering. ‘I just hand over me money, love,’ says one woman to me, ‘Rachel knows what we want.’ Avoiding a daily special of faggots, peas and gravy I order a Full Breakfast priced ridiculously at £2 (videprinter: TWO). I accompany my first-rate feast with a can of Diet Sunkist, a regional speciality deserving of protected status. Rachel bobs and weaves around the room with her dishcloth, wiping and talking. ‘Tomorrow you go on holiday, in’t it Margaret?’ ‘Eh, love, I ’ad to take Lottie to the hospital for her needles the other day. She had no lift.’ She works hard, this one, surely the granddaughter of railwaymen.
Beneath the gables and bays of the Lyceum Theatre I continue to the shopping streets of Crewe. They are lined with a miscellany of adjoined two-storeyed buildings. All of our friends are here (Poundland, Orange Mobile, Shoe Zone ...), so we can never feel too abroad. People scurry busily between street stop-and-chats and shops. There are no pigeon-feeding glamour pusses or mercury-voiced crooners here, but there is a woman playing Cher numbers on a flute and a furious man telling us we are all going to die, which is factually correct if nothing else. He – a bald man in his early forties stood on a ladder stool, angry veins pawing at his neck like claws – is screaming, apparently, on behalf of God. The central theme is death, though there are interesting digressions into metaphors about cheques and parachutes.
It does not really tally with the contented way Crewe seems to be getting on with its Saturday morning business. The only other person I hear carping is a man whose airing cupboard door handle has snapped ‘clean off. Bloody thing.’ I had been keen not to use this analogy, but there are unavoidably Hornby Town aspects to Crewe. When the tiny models of men that train-set botherers (and I was one once, and probably will be again) place on platforms and pavements talk, I imagine it is about things like door handles. Further, the architecture on streets like Queensway is boxy and cardboard-coloured with small and perfectly rectangular bricks. At one end a clock tower sprouts for the sky and I should not be surprised if it is entirely hollow inside and if there are glue stains on its trickier parts. This town centre is unremarkable and yet charming, surely the very definition of a comforting, unchallenging Hornby world. Later I discover the comments of a lady described in a local history project as Mrs Hodgkinson:
At one time or another I have been informed of all of Crewe’s shortcomings by disgruntled residents. It was drab, it was completely utilitarian and without character. It has no beauty, either structurally or architecturally. It lacked class. It has no culture, and entertainment is non-existent. So what has it? Whatever it was and still is, many of us have come to have an unwilling affection for the lacklustre town that we find hard to explain. We just know it’s there.
These are not dissimilar views to those aired in Luton’s museum. People in all of these provinces are united by their familial love of their England. It is surprisingly resilient despite dead industry and chain streets, and that is because of one cliché that I am beginning to think of as true: people make places. That platitude works literally too. I realise this as I rest with beer in Hops, a bounteously stocked Belgian bar on a leafy road behind the selling streets of Crewe. It takes a person, not a corporation or government, to decide to establish a Belgian pub on the back streets of a forgotten railway town in Cheshire. In turn, that person creates something unique about a place. All of this comes together in a football club. People in a place build it and then continue to give it its personality by attending matches. This is essentially why matchday experiences at those clubs where sponsors, shareholders and in-comers dominate are charmless and impoverished of character. There is not much belonging and little to belong to. It is Deva Stadium versus Old Trafford, Bury Park versus Westfield centre.
The people that built Crewe Alexandra were railwaymen. They wanted to give their new town a symbol and show their railway children that life could be red, green and dreamy as well as plum, grey and steamy. Depending on whether you asked the yard owners or grafters, ‘Alexandra’ came from the Prince of Wales’ wife or a pub. In 1877 they found a rare spot of land without tracks or sheds and started up the town’s club. A decade on, an FA Cup semi-final was reached, and soon afterwards the railwaymen’s Railwaymen became members of the Football League’s Division Two. They finished one place below those other men of steel, Ironopolis. League football did not return until 1921, and the all-new Division Three North deigned Crewe within its purview. The club mostly bundled along, playtime release for railwaymen and costume makers. There were heroes along the way: before the Second World War, Herbert Swindells scored 137 goals; afterwards, Fredrick Inskip hit a penalty over the Railway End that rested in a coal wagon and travelled to Carlisle. Fast-forward to the cups of the 1960s. The diesel-builders saw Spurs held 2-2 at home (although Tottenham scored 13 in the home tie), and Greavesie’s Chelsea beaten at the Bridge. And on to the struggles of the 1970s. Urine oozing from open toilets to the street, goals ‘as hard to come by as second-hand coffins’ says the local paper. In 1981-82, Alexandra finished at the league’s foot, the eighth occasion on which they had done so since 1894 and a record. Around this time, the town that so many passed through had become a halt for footballers. Many stopped here before playing their way onwards. Stan Bowles found Crewe to be a salvage yard for his talents. Bruce Grobbelaar loaned in his steaming-mad ways and flew out a Liverpool player. Under Dario Gradi players such as David Platt, Geoff Thomas, Rob Jones, Neil Lennon, Robbie Savage and Danny Murphy changed trains for bigger times.
Lambton Worms of two-up two-downs once more take me to a home ground, this time Gresty Road. The last brick wall before I turn into the stadium car park sports a heavily political piece of graffiti: ‘Use The Bypass’. Ticket office girls, with whom I spend more time on Saturdays than I do my wife, ignore me at first. They have an important matter at hand: one has pinched a bacon Frazzle from the other. ‘That’s my dinner, ger off.’ I manage to buy a ticket for Crewe’s Main Stand. This is not just Main by name (actually, it’s now called the Air Products Stand), it is the main stand. The three others are tiny by comparison. The ground looks like a grand piano surrounded by Tomy xylophones.
Too much dwelling on concourse health and safety posters made by children (we painted castles and goals in my day; one of these, by a seven-year-old, contains the words ‘Do Not Play With Matches You Will Die’) makes me late to my seat. I file along to tuts and exaggerated glances at watches. I am not only an outsider; I am a late outsider, the worst kind of outsider. My seat is in the hindquarters of this lanky stand, giving gantry views of Crewe and Cheshire. Down to my left are ‘homes for heroes’ terraces built for returning First World War soldiers and a chippy, the golden light of which must have forced many an early exit on dark winter afternoons. Ahead is a tower block then the flatlands and pimpled interruptions of olive-green Cheshire, to the right spaces and shops where railwaymen once strived.
Crewe quickly make it 1-0. This goal matters. They need only a point to qualify for the play-offs, a towering accomplishment given that earlier in the season they occupied their habitual slot at the bottom of England’s fourth division. Where the Chester game meant little more than cakes and ale, its football slowing accordingly, the importance of today instils in the match a hypnotic rhythm. Morning rain has heightened the green of the pitch, and in front of us the reds and whites and blues and whites darting about like painted ants splash yet more paint. Aldershot’s manager once plundered goals on the tree’s top branches and for a while was a model. Today’s Kangol flat cap and waistcoat suggest he kept some of the free gear. The ball flies out of play and he controls it with a suited thigh, cradles it with his foot and lobs it to a thrower. Still got it.
In a matchbox stand behind the goal inevitable drums beat and when they die down the people of Crewe sing. ‘Should I be Vale?/Should I be Stoke?’ they ask, looking south. Then there is a solemn and blissful rendition of ‘Blue Moon’, sung to these skies long before it was to those of Manchester. Gresty Road’s proportions mean anthems spread from this terrace across to the Main Stand. Soundwaves then make their way across its blocks like a Mexican wave, so that timing is out and it resembles school assembly hymns sung in rounds. When the crowd noise fades it is occasionally replaced by the fleshy sound of shots being blocked by defensive legs. Aldershot are hitting back and hitting efforts from anywhere and everywhere. They hoick a free-kick into the air, a chill wind blows and bamboozles Crewe’s backmen. Somehow ball meets goal. Own goal, that comedic hell: 1-1.
Crewe pass and move their way back into the game. Everything they do is prompted by the golden boots of their teenage No. 25. In wristbands and ankle ties he nifts around like a genius alien. Today, comrade Glaswegians from Old Trafford and Goodison hawkeye him. When the summer comes, £6 million pounds will see him swap the Alexandra shuttle for Manchester’s express, another Crewe-built departure. ‘A Foster’s and a Bulmers, in’t it lads, I always forget’ says the man behind me, not as mesmerised as we the watchers. Aldershot’s No. 17 wants some attention too. We are all in the zoo looking at the tiger, so the leopard roars. He wins the ball somewhere around the halfway line, builds a one-two, tips the ball on and then spirals a dancer into the top corner: 1-2 to Aldershot. Look at me! Look at me!
At half-time there is attention-grabbing of a different nature. One, two, three then four people all sidle along to the gangway and slip on a battered haddock, discarded at the game’s start as its eater cheered Crewe’s goal. There is slapstick in railwayland. The match resumes and the reds and the blues continue in their slick ways. This is zippy, loveable stuff. I need something to concentrate on because I have a new rear-view neighbour. His voice is powerfully nasal. When he shouts he rasps like a foghorn on helium. When he moans, which he does a lot, it has the pace and pitch a newly set house alarm makes until the front door is closed. As the game marches on, both teams indulge in suicide passes, making compelling, kamikaze football. An Aldershot centre-half frequently leaves open wounds by charging forward and then allowing the ball to ham off his chugging tug-boat feet. His forward colleague spurts through, circumnavigates the goalkeeper and must score. He does not. There is no 1-3. ‘Pikey!’ snarls nasal man at an Aldershot player with long hair. Crewe nerves jangle. A full-back controls the ball and side-foots it to a Timpson shoe repairs advertising hoarding. In the corner, a wrong clock moves meaning it isn’t even right twice a day. Crewe need time, proper time to score.
And then, it matters no more. A scoreline somewhere else, in another small town in England, is beyond reproach. Crewe will be in the play-offs come what 12 May. ‘Que Sera’ spreads like wildfire through the terraces. Moneyed Cheshire types in front of me here to see the big-town team (he waxy jacket and checked flat cap, she gillet and cloche hat) talk of trains to London play-off weekends. Crewe fuel the hubbub by whacking the crossbar, and then cause ecstasy by equalising. It is a send-off goal. The bags are packed for the promotion tilt. ‘Que Sera’ sing 6,000 railway people, then they medley into an even more striking ‘Blue Moon’. They miss the whistle, but know by red arms aloft that they are there, three steps from climbing the ladder again. ‘Could each and every one of you remain seated. Do not encroach the pitch area’ pleads the Tannoy man. I have seen this film before. On trickle teenagers who spot gaps in the stewards’ formations. One breaks through the cordon with a deft drop of the shoulder. If Old Trafford and Goodison are still watching, they may be having words. Another has a profound limp but still outruns his fluorescent pursuant. This time the masses do not join in. Perhaps they are saving it for Wembley. I walk back into town and try to watch the FA Cup final. I can’t settle, though. It is being played at teatime and with the season not yet over. How these times at the top repel me.
The next morning I cross the Pennines on a train not made in Crewe. A mum tests her daughter ahead of an exam tomorrow, love and pride hovering in the air. As I stare out of the window I have my own version of the same. This terrain – of canals and old mills, of Stalybridge Celtic and Huddersfield Town – I consider my own. It is tangibly the north. Crewe, with its chimneyless skyline and songs of Vale, I am less sure of. It matters because the north-south divide apparently matters, to football and the rest.
I first became aware of the north-south divide at Ayresome Park. Whenever an opponent from a team based anywhere beyond Sheffield received physio treatment, the song was always ‘Soft southern bastard, you’re just a soft southern bastard’. In retaliation, sparse away ends would bellow about ‘Dirty northern bastards’. Thinking about it, I heard both on that recent winter’s day at the Riverside. There was always a suspicion of southern – and especially London – teams. Here were our paymasters and governors from the powerful south. They ran our lives, our granddads had made the steel that made them money, but we could show them a thing or two of this northern game. We were the louder, more loyal and educated fans too. Even gentleman Ernest Needham of Sheffield United thought so, writing ‘the spectators of the south are not so keen and sporting as they must be if their teams are to get anything like adequate support.’
However crudely and mythically it did so, football was saying something about society in England here, reflecting and shaping it as usual. Our great writers had long been convinced of the north-south divide’s existence and significance. Like many others, Henry Morton defined the divide by the change in scenery as one travelled up through England, and in doing so highlighted that there was a fixed version of ‘the north’ but less of one for ‘the south’:
Here was New England: an England of crowded towns, of tall chimneys, of great mill walls, of canals of slow, black water; an England of grey, hard-looking little houses in interminable rows; the England of coal and chemicals; of cotton, glass and iron.
Such themes are discussed at length in George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. Orwell also attempts to define ‘the south’:
When you go to the industrial North you are conscious, quite apart from the unfamiliar scenery, of entering a strange country... There is nevertheless a real difference between North and South, and there is at least a tinge of truth in that picture of Southern England as one enormous Brighton inhabited by lounge-lizards.
He acknowledged the differences between northerners and southerners, though questioned how useful the typical caricatures were, describing them thus: ‘the Northerner has “grit”, he is grim, “dour”, plucky, warm-hearted and democratic; the Southerner is snobbish, effeminate and lazy.’
From pre-Victorian days to those of granddads at Ayresome losing their steel profits to the south, there was a feeling that northern toil made southern wealth. When the north stopped using its hands there was no work to make that money but the south changed its ways, finding finance, science and service. Between 1979 and 1987, ninety-four per cent of jobs lost were above a line drawn from the Bristol Channel to the Humberside Wash. No wonder we resented them, unfair as that was.
In my thirty years this divide has grown at a pace greater than any time since the Depression. Now, it appears to be at its most profound. I have seen it on my travels, the ghosts and spaces of Teesside and the alive-and-kicking business parks of Bedfordshire. The government is mooting regional pay rates, lowering salaries in the north, and jobs in the north are being lost at four times the rate of anywhere else. Below it, the north has a government rooted in southern support and interests; above it is a Scotland that might well go its own way. It is consistently ‘top’ of the poverty charts. Always Middlesbrough, Manchester and Liverpool are there. There are, of course, archipelagos: prosperous places in the north (Chester), impoverished places in the south (Leyton). Yet an ostensible, majority divide does exist, though not everyone is sure exactly where it is, just as Crewe goes to show.
Stuart Maconie identified Crewe as ‘surely the gateway to the North’. I think it is more the driveway. It lingers between middle and top, delivering the Midlands of Stoke City and Port Vale to the north of Macclesfield Town and Stockport County. To whimsically claim this is to refute an extensive, outstanding piece of research compiled in 2007 by Danny Dorling of Sheffield University, in which Crewe was resolutely in the north. Dorling’s line begins at the Bristol Channel and arrows like a plane’s take-off to Grimsby. On its way it zigzags between towns and villages, and even fields and houses. It means that somewhere as far south as Worcester is in ‘the north’, somewhere as far north as Lincoln ‘the south’. He concluded that: ‘In terms of life chances the only line within another European country that is comparable to the North-South divide is that which used to separate East and West Germany.’ Dorling used employment, health, historical and other data to identify a line that:
Separates upland from lowland Britain, the hills from the most fertile farmland, areas invaded by Vikings from those first colonised by Saxons. Numerous facts of life divide the North from the South – there is a missing year of life expectancy north of this line. Children south of the line are much more likely to attend Russell group universities ... a house price cliff now runs along much of the line, and, on the voting map, the line still often separates red from blue.
Every bit his academic equal, I used the league tables of Football League Divisions Three North and South, 1921 to 1958. When all else fails, when you can be sure of nothing else: use football reasoning, use football definitions. By mapping the teams that played in those two divisions over their thirty-seven-year lifespans, I was able to draw a line. There are some irritating exceptions that relegated my theory from pseudo-geography to hit-and-hope, not least Crewe’s. Coventry City, Mansfield Town, Port Vale, Shrewsbury Town and Walsall played in both, so I defined them by the division in which they most often dwelled. Derby were northern (though that was only for a season), the Nottingham clubs to their north always southern. However, I have my line and I am sticking to it. Otherwise I have scrawled all over a perfectly good wall-chart map for nothing. At its west, my dividing line begins below Wrexham. It cuts right through the centre of Crewe whose stadium is in the south of the town, hence the driveway, borderline status, and safely above Port Vale and Stoke City. It then maroons Nottingham Forest and Notts County in the south, dividing them from Mansfield Town then Lincoln City, also in the north. The line ends below Grimsby Town.
Apart from being rooted in pub-based research (beer is another stain on the wall-chart) and bending Crewe to fit, my north-south divide’s weakness is the status of the West Midlands. So many towns there share industrial, cultural, social and political ‘northern’ characteristics, real or imagined. Moreover, Walsall spent more than ten years in Division Three North. It is in constructing my map that I realise a visit to those parts is needed; a few days in middle England and I might be able to see just who or what she is.
So what does this matter to our story? In one sense it depends whether we consider it a bad thing. I certainly do not mean to sound anti-south, another northerner bashing the Home Counties, but I realise there is bias in my language. In these chapters, too, I have generally preferred places in the north to the south, and found the stereotype of friendlier northerners true. This could, of course, be because I am more comfortable among those I share so much bitterness with. So, negatively the north-south divide matters as a battering ram with which to offend the other half, and positively as offering a place to belong to.
Yet the more I see of England, the less I am convinced the north-south divide matters. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, a man belongs far more to his town and football club than he does to a vague ‘north’ or ‘south’. Secondly, across that divide we are united by a number of things. We are united by our loyalties to our tiny realms on the one hand, but also to this big, cuddly rogue called England on the other. Above that, millions of us are bound by our devotion to football.