Northern England
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Northern England

Northern England
North of England; the north
The three current Northern England government regions shown within England, without regional boundaries. Other cultural definitions of the North vary and have changed over time.
Sovereign state United Kingdom
Historic countiesCheshire Cheshire
Cumberland Cumberland
County Palatine of Durham County Durham
Lancashire Lancashire
Lincolnshire Lincolnshire (part)
Northumberland Northumberland
Westmorland Westmorland
Yorkshire Yorkshire
 o Total37,331 km2 (14,414 sq mi)
(2011 census)[1]
 o Total14,933,000
 o Density400/km2 (1,000/sq mi)
 o Urban
 o Rural
Time zoneGMT (UTC)

Northern England, also known as the North of England or simply the North, is the most northern area of England. There are three statistical regions defined as northern England: the North East; the North West; and Yorkshire and the Humber. These regions have a combined population of approximately 14.9 million as of the 2011 Census, over an area of 37,331 km2 (14,414 square miles) with 17 of the 69 cities in the United Kingdom. Northern England is considered culturally and economically distinct from the south of England, as well as from the midlands of England. This distinction is sometimes referred to as the north-south divide.

The northern boundary is the Anglo-Scottish border, the county of Cheshire is at the England-Wales border to the west, but there are varying interpretations of where the region's southern border with the Midlands lies, some considering it to lie along the River Trent and the most northernly occupation of the Saxons. Classification of the north by UK regions currently excludes all of Derbyshire (which is now classified within the East Midlands) but most northern Derbyshire residents, particularly in High Peak, Peak District and Chesterfield would categorise themselves as northerners and the economic and cultural heritage of these areas is closely aligned to adjacent northern areas.

Many of the innovations of the Industrial Revolution began in Northern England, and its cities were the crucibles of many of the political changes that accompanied this social upheaval, from Trade Unionism to Manchester Capitalism. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the economy of the North was dominated by heavy industry such as weaving, shipbuilding, steel-making and mining. Industrial decline in the second half of the 20th century damaged Northern England, with greater deprivation than Southern England.

Urban renewal projects and the transition to a service economy have resulted in strong economic growth in parts of Northern England, a definite North-South divide remains both in the economy and the culture of England. Centuries of migration, invasion and labour have shaped Northern culture. The region retains distinctive dialects, music and cuisine.


Northern England is located in England
Watford Gap
Watford Gap
Various "gateways" to the North


A map of the historic counties of England, with those counties normally taken as "northern" highlighted.
Northern England as defined along historic county boundaries

Other definitions use historic county boundaries, in which case the North is generally taken to comprise Cumberland, Northumberland, Westmorland, County Durham, Lancashire and Yorkshire, often supplemented by Cheshire.[3] The boundary is sometimes drawn without reference to human borders, using geographic features such as the River Mersey and River Trent.[4] The Isle of Man is occasionally included in definitions of "the North" (for example, by the Survey of English Dialects, VisitBritain and BBC North West), although it is politically and culturally distinct from England.[3]




A relief map of the Pennines


Lush hills beyond a long, narrow lake.

Much of the mountainous upland remains undeveloped, and of the ten national parks in England, five - the Peak District, the Lake District, the North York Moors, the Yorkshire Dales, and Northumberland National Park - are located partly or entirely in the North.[c] [20][21] The Lake District includes England's highest peak, Scafell Pike, which rises to 978 m (3,209 ft), its largest lake, Windermere, and its deepest lake, Wastwater.[22] Northern England is one of the most treeless areas in Europe, and to combat this the government plans to plant over 50 million trees in a new Northern Forest across the region.[23]

A satellite photo of the British Isles at night


Natural resources




Women rushing to get out of the rain.



Climate data for the England N climate region, 1981-2010
Average high °C (°F) 6.4
Average low °C (°F) 0.7
Average precipitation mm (inches) 94.1
Average precipitation days 14.2 11.1 12.5 10.9 10.5 10.7 10.7 11.5 10.9 13.6 14.3 13.7 144.5
Source: Met Office[38]

Language and dialect



The vowel sound in sun across England. All of Northern England, as well as part of the Midlands, is included inside the /?/ isogloss.[39]


Northern English accents have not undergone the TRAP-BATH split, and a common shibboleth to distinguish them from Southern ones is the Northern use of the short a (the near-open front unrounded vowel) in words such as bath and castle.[43] On the opposite border, most Northern English accents can be distinguished from Scottish accents because they are non-rhotic, although a few rhotic Lancashire accents remain.[44] Other features common to many Northern English accents are the absence of the FOOT-STRUT split (so put and putt are homophones), the reduction of the definite article the to a glottal stop (usually represented in writing as t or occasionally th, although it is often not pronounced as a /t/ sound) or its total elision, and the T-to-R rule that leads to the pronunciation of t as a rhotic consonant in phrases like get up ([ ?p]).[45]




Wild daffodils on the banks of a lake



Other languages

There are no recognised minority languages in Northern England, although the Northumbrian Language Society campaigns to have the Northumbrian dialect recognised as a separate language.[54] It is possible that traces of now-extinct Brythonic Celtic languages from the region survive in some rural areas in the Yan Tan Tethera counting systems traditionally used by shepherds.[55]



The prehistoric North


During the ice ages, Northern England was buried under ice sheets, and little evidence remains of habitation - either because the climate made the area uninhabitable, or because glaciation destroyed most evidence of human activity.[59] The northernmost cave art in Europe is found at Creswell Crags in northern Derbyshire, near modern-day Sheffield, which shows signs of Neanderthal inhabitation 50 to 60 thousand years ago, and of a more modern occupation known as the Creswellian culture around 12,000 years ago.[60] Kirkwell Cave in Lower Allithwaite, Cumbria shows signs of the Federmesser culture of the Paleolithic, and was inhabited some time between 13,400 and 12,800 years ago.[61]

Significant settlement appears to have begun in the Mesolithic era, with Star Carr in North Yorkshire generally considered the most significant monument of this era.[62][63] The Star Carr site includes Britain's oldest known house, from around 9000 BC, and the earliest evidence of carpentry in the form of a carved tree trunk from 11000 BC.[62][64]

The Lincolnshire and Yorkshire Wolds around the Humber Estuary were settled and farmed in the Bronze Age, and the Ferriby Boats - one of the best-preserved finds of the era - were discovered near Hull in 1937.[65] In the more mountainous regions of the Peak District, hillforts were the main Bronze Age settlement and the locals were most likely pastoralists raising livestock.[66]

Iron Age and the Romans

A stone wall winding over a hilly landscape


The Brigantes allied with the Roman Empire during the Roman conquest of Britain: Tacitus records that they handed the resistance leader Caratacus over to the Empire in 51.[69] Power struggles within the Brigantes made the Romans wary, and they were conquered in a war beginning in the 70s under the governorship of Quintus Petillius Cerialis.[70] The Romans created the province of "Britannia Inferior" (Lower Britain) in the North, and it was ruled from the city of Eboracum (modern York).[71] Eboracum and Deva Victrix (modern Chester) were the main legionary bases in the region, with other smaller forts including Mamucium (Manchester) and Cataractonium (Catterick).[72][73] Britannia Inferior extended as far north as Hadrian's Wall, which was the northernmost border of the Roman Empire.[f] Although the Romans invaded modern-day Northumberland and part of Scotland beyond it, they never succeeded in conquering the reaches of Britain beyond the River Tyne.[74]

Anglo-Saxons and Vikings

Great Britain in 878:
  Other Anglo-Saxons

After the end of Roman rule in Britain and the arrival of the Angles, Yr Hen Ogledd (the "Old North") was divided into rival kingdoms, Bernicia, Deira, Rheged and Elmet.[75] Bernicia covered lands north of the Tees, Deira corresponded roughly to the eastern half of modern-day Yorkshire, Rheged to Cumbria, and Elmet to the western-half of Yorkshire. Bernicia and Deira were first united as Northumbria by Aethelfrith, a king of Bernicia who conquered Deira around the year 604.[76] Northumbria then saw a Golden Age in cultural, scholarly and monastic activity, centred on Lindisfarne and aided by Irish monks.[77] The north-west of England retains vestiges of a Celtic culture, and had its own Celtic language, Cumbric, spoken predominately in Cumbria until around the 12th century.[78]


Norman Conquest and the Middle Ages

A round castle keep atop a hill

The 1066 defeat of the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada by the Anglo-Saxon Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Stamford Bridge near York marked the beginning of the end of Viking rule in England, and the almost immediate defeat of Godwinson at the hands of the Norman William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings was in turn the overthrow of the Anglo-Saxon order.[82] The Northumbrian and Danish aristocracy resisted the Norman Conquest, and to put an end to the rebellion, William ordered the Harrying of the North. In the winter of 1069-1070, towns, villages and farms were systematically destroyed across much of Yorkshire as well as northern Lancashire and County Durham.[83][84] The region was gripped by famine and much of Northern England was deserted. Chroniclers at the time reported a hundred thousand deaths - modern estimates place the total somewhere in the tens of thousands, out of a population of two million.[83] When the Domesday Book was compiled in 1086, much of Northern England was still recorded as wasteland,[84] although this may have been in part because the chroniclers, more interested in manorial farmland, paid little attention to pastoral areas.[85]

The ruined walls of a large abbey with a tower
The ruins of Fountains Abbey, now another World Heritage Site

Following Norman subjugation, monasteries returned to the North as missionaries sought to "settle the desert".[86] Monastic orders such as the Cistercians became significant players in the economy of Northern England - the Cistercian Fountains Abbey in North Yorkshire became the largest and richest of the Northern abbeys, and would remain so until the Dissolution of the Monasteries.[87] Other Cistercian abbeys are at Rievaulx, Kirkstall and Byland. The 7th-century Whitby Abbey was Benedictine and Bolton Abbey, Augustinian. A significant Flemish immigration followed the conquest, which likely populated much of the desolated regions of Cumbria, and which was persistent enough that the town of Beverley in the East Riding of Yorkshire still had an ethnic enclave called Flemingate in the thirteenth century.[88]

During the Anarchy, Scotland invaded Northern England and took much of the land north of the Tees. In the 1139 peace treaty that followed, Prince Henry of Scotland was made Earl of Northumberland and kept the counties of Cumberland, Westmorland and Northumbria, as well as part of Lancashire. These reverted to English control in 1157, establishing for the most part the modern England-Scotland border.[89] The region also saw violence during The Great Raid of 1322 when Robert the Bruce invaded and raided the whole of Northern England. There was also the Wars of the Roses, including the decisive Battle of Wakefield, although the modern-day conception of the war as a conflict between Lancashire and Yorkshire is anachronistic - Lancastrians recruited from across Northern England, including Yorkshire, while the Yorkists drew most of their power from Southern England, Wales and Ireland.[90] The Anglo-Scottish Wars also touched the region, and in just 400 years, Berwick-upon-Tweed - now the northernmost town in England - changed hands more than a dozen times.[91] The wars also saw thousands of Scots settle south of the border, chiefly in the border counties and Yorkshire.[92]

Early modern era

After the English Reformation, the North saw several Catholic uprisings, including the Lincolnshire Rising, Bigod's Rebellion in Cumberland and Westmorland, and largest of all, the Yorkshire-based Pilgrimage of Grace, all against Henry VIII.[93] His daughter Elizabeth I faced another Catholic rebellion, the Rising of the North.[94] The region would become the centre of recusancy as prominent Catholic families in Cumbria, Lancashire and Yorkshire refused to convert to Protestantism.[95] Royal power over the region was exercised through the Council of the North at King's Manor, York, which was founded in 1484 by Richard III. The Council existed intermittently for the next two centuries - its final incarnation was created in the aftermath of the Pilgrimage of Grace and was chiefly an institution for providing order and dispensing justice.[96]


Industrial Revolution

A large mill above a weir on a wide river


Pier Head, now part of the Liverpool Maritime Mercantile City former World Heritage Site, greeted migrants from around the world.

The Great Famine in Ireland of the 1840s drove migrants across the Irish Sea, and many settled in the industrial cities of the North, especially Manchester and Liverpool - at the 1851 census, 13% of the population of Manchester and Salford were Irish-born, and in Liverpool the figure was 22%.[101] In response there was a wave of anti-Catholic riots and Protestant Orange Orders proliferated across Northern England, chiefly in Lancashire, but also elsewhere in the North. By 1881 there were 374 Orange organisations in Lancashire, 71 in the North East, and 42 in Yorkshire.[102][103] From further afield, Northern England saw immigration from European countries such as Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia and Scandinavia. Some immigrants were well-to-do industrialists seeking to do business in the booming industrial cities, some were escaping poverty, some were servants or slaves, some were sailors who chose to settle in the port towns, some were Jews fleeing pogroms on the continent, and some were migrants originally stranded at Liverpool after attempting to catch an onwards ship to the United States or to colonies of the British Empire.[104][105][106] At the same time, hundreds of thousands from depressed rural areas of the North emigrated, chiefly to the US, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.[106][107][108]

Deindustrialisation and modern history


The First World War was the turning point for the economy of Northern England. In the interwar years, the Northern economy began to be eclipsed by the South - in 1913-1914, unemployment in "outer Britain" (the North, plus Scotland and Wales) was 2.6% while the rate in Southern England was more than double that at 5.5%, but in 1937 during the Great Depression the outer British unemployment rate was 16.1% and the Southern rate was less than half that at 7.1%.[109] The weakening economy and interwar unemployment caused several episodes of social unrest in the region, including the 1926 general strike and the Jarrow March. The Great Depression highlighted the weakness of Northern England's specialised economy: as world trade declined, demand for ships, steel, coal and textiles all fell.[110] For the most part, Northern factories were still using nineteenth-century technology, and were not able to keep up with advances in industries such as motors, chemicals and electricals, while the expansion of the electric grid removed the North's advantages in terms of power generation and meant it was now more economic to build new factories in the Midlands or South.[111]

The industrial concentration in Northern England made it a major target for Luftwaffe attacks during the Second World War. The Blitz of 1940-1941 saw major raids on Barrow-in-Furness, Hull, Leeds, Manchester, Merseyside, Newcastle and Sheffield with thousands killed and significant damage to the cities. Liverpool, a vital port for supplies from North America, was especially hard hit - the city was the most bombed in the UK outside London, with around 4,000 deaths across Merseyside and most of the city centre destroyed.[112] The rebuilding that followed, and the simultaneous slum clearance that saw whole neighbourhoods demolished and rebuilt, transformed the faces of Northern cities.[113] Immigration from the "New Commonwealth", especially Pakistan and Bangladesh, starting in the 1950s reshaped Northern England once more, and there are now significant populations from the Indian subcontinent in towns and cities such as Bradford, Leeds, Preston and Sheffield.[114]

Deindustrialisation continued and unemployment gradually increased during the 1970s, but accelerated during the government of Margaret Thatcher, who chose not to encourage growth in the North if it risked growth in the South.[115][116] The era saw the 1984-85 miners' strike, which brought hardship for many Northern mining towns. Northern metropolitan county councils, which were Labour strongholds often with very left-wing leadership (such as Militant-dominated Liverpool and the so-called "People's Republic of South Yorkshire"), had high-profile conflicts with the national government. The increasing awareness of the North-South divide strengthened the distinct Northern English identity, which, despite regeneration in some of the major cities, remains to this day.[115]



Pie chart showing the population of each region of the UK.
  Northern England
  Other English regions
  Other Home Nations



A sign reading Nelson Street, with text in Chinese underneath.
Bilingual English/Chinese signage in Liverpool Chinatown

95% of the Northern population speak English as a first language - compared to an England and Wales average of 92%[i] - and another 4% speak English as a second language well or very well.[57][125] The 5% of the population who have another native language are chiefly speakers of European or South Asian languages. As of the 2011 census, the largest languages apart from English were Polish (spoken by 0.7% of the population), Urdu (0.6%) and Punjabi (0.5%), and 0.4% of the population speak a variety of Chinese: a similar distribution to that in the whole of England.[125] Redcar and Cleveland has the largest proportion of the population speaking English as a first language in England, with 99.3%.[57]


At the 2011 census, the North East and North West had the largest proportion of Christians in England and Wales; 67.5% and 67.3% respectively (the proportion in Yorkshire and the Humber was lower at 59.5%). Yorkshire and the Humber and the North West both had significant populations of Muslims - 6.2% and 5.1% respectively - while Muslims in the North East made up only 1.8% of the population. All other faiths combined comprised less than 2% of the population in all regions.[126]



Map of districts in England and Wales shaded by life expectancy.

One major manifestation of the North-South divide is in health and life expectancy statistics.[129] All three Northern England statistical regions have lower than average life expectancies and higher than average rates of cancer, circulatory disease, respiratory disease and obesity.[130][131] Blackpool has the lowest life expectancy at birth in England - male life expectancy at birth between 2012 and 2014 was 74.7, against an England-wide average of 79.5 - and the majority of English districts in the bottom 50 were in the North East or the North West. However, regional differences do seem to be slowly narrowing: between 1991 and 1993 and 2012-2014, life expectancy in the North East increased by 6.0 years and in the North West by 5.8 years, the fastest increases in any region outside London, and the gap between life expectancy in the North East and South East is now 2.5 years, down from 2.9 in 1993.[131]

These health inequalities manifested during the COVID-19 pandemic in high infection rates, death rates and excess mortality in Northern England, and in severe job losses in the following Great Lockdown recession.[132] By June 2020, the infection rate in Northern England was nearly double that in London,[133] and a study by the Northern Health Science Alliance found that of the six worst affected areas in England during the pandemic in their study, five were located in the North.[132]



There is a significant attainment gap between Northern and Southern schools, and pupils in the three Northern regions are less likely than the national average to achieve five higher-tier GCSEs,[136] although this may be down to economic disadvantages faced by Northern pupils rather than an actual difference in school quality.[137] Northern students are under-represented at Oxbridge, where three times as many places go to Southerners as to Northerners, and other Southern universities while Southerners are under-represented at leading Northern universities such as Sheffield, Manchester and Leeds.[138] Due to the educational attainment and university admission disparities between north and south, there are calls for the government to invest in education in disadvantaged parts of Northern England to redress this.[139]


Like the UK as a whole, the Northern English economy is now dominated by the service sector - as of September 2016, 82.2% of workers in the Northern statistical regions were employed in services, compared to 83.7% for the UK as a whole. Manufacturing now employs 9.5%, compared to the national average of 7.6%.[140] The unemployment rate in Northern England is 5.3% compared to an England-wide and UK-wide average of 4.8%, and the North East has the highest unemployment rate in the UK, at 7.0% as of December 2016, more than one percentage point higher than any other region.[141][142] As of 2015, the gross value added (GVA) of the Northern English economy was £316 billion,[143] and if it were an independent nation, it would be the tenth largest economy in Europe.[144] The region does have poor growth and productivity rates compared to Southern England and to other EU countries.[145]

Growth, employment and household income have lagged behind the South, and the five most deprived districts in England[j] are all in Northern England,[146][147] as are ten of the twelve most declining major towns in the UK.[k][148] The picture is not clear-cut, as the North has areas which are as wealthy as, if not wealthier than, fashionable Southern areas such as Surrey. Yorkshire's Golden Triangle which extends from north Leeds to Harrogate and across to York is an example, as is Cheshire's Golden Triangle, centred on Alderley Edge.[149][150] There are major disparities even across individual cities: Sheffield Hallam is one of the wealthiest constituencies in the country, and is the richest outside London and the South East, while Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough, just on the other side of the city, is one of the most deprived.[149][151] Housing in Northern England is more affordable than the UK average: the median house price in most Northern cities was below £200,000 in 2015 with typical increases of below 10% over the previous five years. However, some areas have seen house prices fall considerably, putting inhabitants at risk of negative equity.[152][153]

The decline of coal mining and manufacturing in Northern England has led to comparisons with the Rust Belt in the United States.[154] To stimulate the Northern economy, the government has organised a series of programmes to invest in and develop the region, of which the latest as of 2017 is the Northern Powerhouse. The North has also been a significant recipient of European Union Structural Funds. Between 2007 and 2013, EU funds created around 70,000 jobs in the region, and the majority of Northern Powerhouse funding comes from the European Regional Development Fund and the European Investment Bank.[155] The loss of these funds following Brexit, combined with potential reductions in exports to the EU, has been identified as a threat to Northern growth.[156][157]

Public sector

The public sector is a major employer in Northern England. Between 2000 and 2008, the majority of new jobs created in Northern England were for the government and its suppliers and contractors.[158] All three Northern regions have public sector employment above the national average, and North East has the highest level in England with 20.2% of the workforce in the public sector as of 2016 - down from 23.4% a decade earlier.[159][160] The austerity programme under the government of David Cameron saw significant cuts to public services, and the reduction in public sector employment resulted in job losses for around 3% of the Northern England workforce with significant impact on the regional economy.[158]

Agriculture and fisheries

Sheep with thick, stringy wool in a field.

There are 2,580,000 hectares (6,400,000 acres; 25,800 km2; 10,000 sq mi) of farmland in Northern England.[161] The rough Pennine terrain means that most of Northern England is unsuited for growing crops; like Scotland, Northern farming was traditionally dominated by oats, which grow better than wheat in poor soil.[162][163] Today, the mix of cereals and vegetables grown is similar to that of the UK as a whole, but only a minority of land is arable. Only 32% of Northern farmland is primarily used for growing crops, compared to 49% for England as a whole. Conversely, 57% of the land is given over to rearing livestock, and 33% of England's cattle, 43% of its pigs and 46% of its sheep and lambs are reared in the North.[161]



Manufacturing and energy

Northern England has a strong export-based economy, with trade more balanced than the UK average, and the North East is the only region of England to regularly export more than it imports.[167][168] Chemicals, vehicles, machinery and other manufactured goods make up the majority of Northern exports, just over half of which go to EU countries.[168] Major manufacturing plants include car plants at Vauxhall Ellesmere Port, Jaguar Land Rover Halewood and Nissan Sunderland, the Leyland Trucks factory, the Hitachi Newton Aycliffe train plant, the Humber, Lindsey and Stanlow oil refineries, the NEPIC cluster of chemical works based around Teesside, and the nuclear processing facilities at Springfields and Sellafield.[169]

Offshore oil and gas from North Sea and Irish Sea, and more recently offshore wind power, are significant components in Northern England's energy mix.[170] Although deep-pit coal mining in the UK ended in 2015 with the closure of Kellingley Colliery, North Yorkshire, there are still several open-pit mines in the area.[171] Shale gas is especially prevalent across Northern England, although plans to extract it through hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") have proven to be controversial.[172]

Retail and services

A cluster of modernist office buildings in at night.
Regeneration has seen Leeds become the second largest financial and legal hub in the UK.[173]

Around 10% of the Northern England workforce is employed in retail.[174] Of the Big Four supermarkets in the UK, two - Asda and Morrisons - are based in the North. Northern England was the birthplace of the modern cooperative movement, and the Manchester-based Co-operative Group has the highest revenue of any firm in the North West.[175][176] The area is also home to many online retailers, with startups emerging around tech hubs in Northern cities.[177]

With urban regeneration, high-value service sector industries such as corporate services and financial services have taken root in Northern England, with major hubs around Leeds and Manchester.[174] Call centres - attracted by low labour costs and a preference for Northern English accents among the public - have replaced heavy industry as major employers of unskilled workers, with more than 5% of workers in all Northern England regions working in one.[178][179]

High-tech and research


Recent decades have seen the growth of high-tech companies based around Northern England's major cities. There are eleven high-tech firms worth over $1 billion based in the region, and digital industries support around 300,000 jobs.[177][180] Game development, online retail, health technology and analytics are among the major high-tech sectors in the North.[177][181]

Leisure and tourism

A postcard of Blackpool promenade.
Crowded beaches at Blackpool in the 1890s

The expansion of the railway network in the second half of the nineteenth century meant most in the North lived within reach of the coast, and seaside towns saw a major tourism boom. By around 1870 Blackpool on the Lancashire coast had become overwhelmingly the most popular destination - not just for Northern families, but many from the Midlands and Scotland as well.[182] Other resorts popular with Northerners included Morecambe in northern Lancashire, Whitley Bay near Newcastle, Whitby in North Yorkshire, and New Brighton on the Wirral Peninsula, as well as Rhyl over the border in North Wales.[183][184]

The same social forces that had built these resorts in the nineteenth century proved to be their undoing in the twentieth. Transport links continued to improve and it became possible to travel overseas quickly and affordably. The Belgian coast at Ostend became popular with Northern working-class tourists in the first half of the twentieth century, and the introduction of package holidays in the 1970s was the death of most Northern seaside resorts.[185] Blackpool has maintained a focus on tourism, and remains one of the most visited towns in England, but visitor numbers are far below their peak and the town's economy has suffered - both employment rates and average earnings remain below the regional average.[186]

The wild landscapes of the North are a major draw for tourists,[187] and many urban areas are looking for regeneration through industrial, heritage and cultural tourism: of the 24 national museums and galleries in England outside London, 14 are located in the North.[188] As of 2015, Northern England receives around a quarter of all domestic tourism within the UK, with 28.7 million visitors in 2015, but only 8% of international tourists to the United Kingdom visit the region.[189][190]



As part of a drive to reduce media centralisation in London, the BBC and ITV have moved much of their programme production to MediaCityUK in Salford and Channel 4 has moved its headquarters to Leeds. Of the four national evening soap operas, three are set and filmed in Northern England (Coronation Street in Manchester, Emmerdale in the Yorkshire Dales and Hollyoaks in Chester) and these are important to the local TV industry - the commitment to Emmerdale saved ITV Yorkshire's Leeds Studios from closure.[191][192] The region also has a reputation for drama serials and has produced some the most successful and acclaimed series of recent decades, including Boys from the Blackstuff, Our Friends in the North, Clocking Off, Shameless and Last Tango in Halifax.[193][194]


Since The Guardian (formerly The Manchester Guardian) moved to London in 1964, no major national paper is based in the North, and Northern news stories tend to be poorly covered in the national press.[195][196] The Yorkshire Post promotes itself as "Yorkshire's national paper" and covers some national and international stories, but is primarily focused on news from Yorkshire and the North East.[197] An attempt in 2016 to create a dedicated North-focused national newspaper, 24, failed after six weeks.[198] Across Northern England as a whole, The Sun is the best selling newspaper, but the ongoing boycott around Merseyside following the newspaper's coverage of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster has seen the paper fall behind both the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror in the North West.[199][200][201] In general national readership in the North drags behind that of the South; the Mirror and the Daily Star are the only national papers with more readers in Northern England than in the South East and London.[195] Local newspapers are the top-selling titles in both the North East and Yorkshire and the Humber, although Northern regional newspapers have seen steep declines in readership in recent years.[201][202] Only seven daily Northern papers have circulation figures above 25,000 as of June 2016: Manchester Evening News, Liverpool Echo, Hull Daily Mail, Newcastle Chronicle, The Yorkshire Post and The Northern Echo.[202]


Workers install cables in a trench in a field.

Manchester Network Access Point is the only internet exchange point in the UK outside London, and forms the main hub for the region.[203] Household internet access in Northern England is at or above the UK average, but speeds and broadband penetration vary greatly.[204][205] In 2013 the average speed in central Manchester was 60 Mbit/s, while in nearby Warrington the average speed was only 6.2 Mbit/s.[206] Hull, which is unique in the UK in that its telephone network was never nationalised, has simultaneously some of the fastest and slowest internet speeds in the country: many households have "ultrafast" fibre optic broadband as standard, but it is also one of only two places in the UK where over 30% of businesses receive less than 10 Mbit/s.[207] Speeds are especially poor in the rural parts of the North, with many small towns and villages completely without high speed access. Some areas have therefore formed their own community enterprises, such as Broadband 4 Rural North in Lancashire and Cybermoor in Cumbria, to install high-speed internet connections. Mobile broadband coverage is similarly patchy, with 3G and 4G almost universal in cities but unavailable in large parts of Yorkshire, the North East and Cumbria.[208]

Culture and identity

The individual regions of the North have had their own identities and cultures for centuries, but with industrialisation, mass media and the opening of the North-South divide, a common Northern identity began to develop. This identity was initially a reactionary response to Southern prejudices--the North of the nineteenth century was largely depicted as a dirty, wild and uncultured place, even in sympathetic depictions such as Elizabeth Gaskell's 1855 novel North and South[209]--but became an affirmation of what Northerners saw as their own personal strengths.[210][211][212] Traits stereotypically associated with Northern England are straight-talking, grit and warmheartedness, as compared to the supposedly effete Southerners.[210][213] Northern England--especially Lancashire, but also Yorkshire and the North East--has a tradition of matriarchal families, where the woman of the house runs the home and controls the family's finances. This too has its roots in industrialisation, when mills offered well-paid work for women: during depressions when demand for coal and steel were low, women were often the main breadwinners. Northern women are still stereotyped as strong-willed and independent, or affectionately as battle-axes.[214][215][216]

"It's Grim Up North"

The phrase "It's Grim Up North" was first coined by J. B. Priestley in 1933 and was associated with coal mining, industrial mills, weather and the way of life in the north of England during the Victorian and post World War I eras, when mills and coal mining, as well railways, child labour and slums were common. The phrase is often used by those who are not from the north of England, who paint the north as being different to the south of England. The current mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham has also quoted the north as being grim, but not a bad thing.[217][218][219][220][221] The phrase was quoted in 1991 when the band The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu a.k.a. The KLF used it in relation to a lot of places in the north of England including Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Merseyside, Cheshire and Yorkshire. As well as parts of the East Midlands Region and Cumbria and they use the phrase repeatedly in their song of the same name.


A grey wool flat cap on a man's head.
The flat cap stereotypically associated with Northern England

The North of England is often stereotypically represented through the clothing worn by working-class men and women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[222] Working men would wear a heavy jacket and trousers held up by braces, an overcoat, and a hat, typically a flat cap, while women would wear a dress, or a skirt and blouse, with an apron on top as protection from dirt; in colder months they would often wear a shawl or headscarf.[222][223][224] The maud, a woollen plaid woven in a pattern of small black and white checks, was also popular in Northern England until the early twentieth century.[225]

If not wearing leather lace-up shoes, some men and women would have worn English clogs, which were hardwearing and had replaceable soles and tips.[224] Factory workers tapping their feet in time with the click of machinery developed a type of folk clog dance referred to as clogging, which was intricately developed in the North.[226]

In the second half of the twentieth century, these traditional clothes fell out of fashion. Other styles such as "casual clobber" (mainland European designer clothing brought back by touring football fans) and sportswear became more popular, and the influence of Northern bands and football teams helped spread them across the country.[227][228] In the twenty-first century, some traditional Northern items of clothing have begun to make a comeback - in particular, the flat cap.[222][229]



The North is known for its often crumbly cheeses, of which Cheshire cheese is the earliest example. Unlike Southern cheeses like Cheddar, Northern cheeses typically use uncooked milk and a pre-salted curd pressed under enormous weights, resulting in a moist, sharp-tasting cheese.[233] Wensleydale, another crumbly cheese, is unusual in that it is often served as a side to sweet cakes,[234] which are themselves well represented in Northern England. Parkin, an oatmeal cake with black treacle and ginger, is a traditional treat across the North on Bonfire Night,[235] and the fruity scone-like singing hinny and fat rascal are popular in the North East and Yorkshire respectively.[236]

While a variety of beers are popular across Northern England, the region is especially associated with brown ales such as Newcastle Brown Ale, Double Maxim and Samuel Smith's Nut Brown Ale.[237] Beer in the North is usually served with a thick head which accentuates the nutty, malty flavours preferred in Northern beers.[238] On the non-alcoholic side, the North - in particular, Lancashire - was the hub of the temperance bar movement which popularised soft drinks such as dandelion and burdock, Tizer and Vimto.[239][240]

According to The Tab, the bakery chain Greggs is an integral part of Northern identity, using the number of people per Greggs as an indicator as to whether a town should be considered Northern.[241]

Immigration to Northern England has shaped its cuisine. The Teesside parmo is one example, derived from escalope Parmesan brought to the area by an Italian-American immigrant and adapted to the region's taste.[242] There are large Chinatowns in Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, and communities from the Indian subcontinent in all major towns.[230] Bradford has won the Federation of Specialist Restaurant's "Curry Capital" title six years in a row as of 2016,[243] while the Curry Mile in Manchester formerly had the largest concentration of curry restaurants in the UK and now offers a wide range of South Asian and Middle Eastern cuisine.[244]


"Scarborough Fair", a traditional Northern folk song
A marching band with a variety of horns and drums.
The Harrogate Band playing in Leeds

Traditional folk music in Northern England is a combination of styles of England and Scotland - what is now called the Anglo-Scottish border ballad was once prevalent as far south as Lancashire.[245] In the Middle Ages, much of Northern folk was accompanied by bagpipes, with styles including the Lancashire bagpipe, Yorkshire bagpipe and Northumbrian smallpipes. These disappeared in the early nineteenth century from the industrialising south of the region, but remain in the music of Northumbria.[246] The British brass band tradition began in Northern England at around the same time: the dismissal of the Cheshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire military bands after the Napoleonic Wars, combined with the desire of industrial communities to better themselves, led to the founding of civilian bands. These bands provided entertainment at community events and led protest marches during the era of radical agitation.[247] Although the style has since spread across much of Great Britain, brass bands remain a stereotype of the North, and the Whit Friday brass band contests draw hundreds of bands from across the UK and further afield.[247][248]

Northern England also has a thriving popular music scene. Influential movements include Merseybeat from the Liverpool area, which produced The Beatles, Northern soul, which brought Motown to England, and Madchester, the precursor to the rave scene.[249][250] Across the Pennines, Sheffield is the birthplace of influential electronic pop bands from Cabaret Voltaire to Pulp, the New Yorkshire indie rock movement of the 2000s gave the country the Kaiser Chiefs and the Arctic Monkeys, and Teesside has a rock scene stretching from Chris Rea to Maxïmo Park.[251][252][253] The press frequently frames music stories and reviews in terms of cultural and class differences between North and South, notably in the 1960s rivalry between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the 1990s Battle of Britpop between Oasis and Blur.[254][253]


Two large stadia surrounded by terraced houses.

Sport has been both one of the most unifying cultural forces in Northern England and, thanks to local rivalries such as the Lancashire-Yorkshire Roses rivalry, one of the most divisive. As huge numbers of people moved into recently built cities with little cultural heritage, local sports teams offered the population a sense of place and identity that was otherwise absent.[255]


Manchester hosted the 2002 Commonwealth Games, which left it a legacy of sporting facilities including the City of Manchester Stadium, Manchester Aquatics Centre and the National Cycling Centre, headquarters of British Cycling.[258] The Grand Départ for the 2014 Tour de France was in Leeds, and every year since Yorkshire has hosted the Tour de Yorkshire cycling event, part of the UCI Europe Tour.[259] Tyneside meanwhile hosts the Great North Run, the UK's biggest mass-participation sporting event and the most popular half marathon in the world.[260]

Association football

The Liverpool-Everton Merseyside derby is the longest running top-flight rivalry in English football.


In 1883 Blackburn Olympic, a team composed mainly of factory workers, became the first Northern team to win the FA Cup, and the next year Preston North End won an FA Cup match against London-based Upton Park.[262][263] Upton Park protested that Preston had broken FA rules by paying their players. In response, Preston withdrew from the competition and fellow Lancashire clubs Burnley and Great Lever followed suit. The protest gathered momentum to the point where more than 30 clubs, predominantly from the North, announced that they would set up a rival British Football Association if the FA did not permit professionalism.[262] A schism was avoided in July 1885 when professionalism was formally legalised in English football.[263][264] The Football League was founded in 1888, and marked its independence from the London-based Football Association (FA) by establishing headquarters in Preston - the League retained a Northern identity even after it accepted several Southern teams into its ranks.[265] Organised women's football followed as the workforces of majority-female factories of Northern England in the First World War entered the 1917-18 Tyne, Wear & Tees Munition Girls Cup - the world's first women's football tournament. However, the FA did not support women's football and banned it altogether in 1921.[266] Intense local derbies between neighbouring teams mean that there is less of a North-South rivalry than in some other sports.[255]


Many of the powerhouses of English football came from the North - as of the 2020-21 season, of the 123 top-flight league titles since 1888, 83 (67%) have been won by teams based north of Crewe.[267] Everton, Liverpool, Manchester United and Manchester City are among the mainstays of the Premier League, while teams like Blackburn Rovers, Middlesbrough, Newcastle United and Sunderland have had more inconsistent runs in recent years, regularly being promoted and relegated from the top flight.[267] Northern England is also the birthplace of the largest proportion the country's top players - as of Euro 2016, 537 Northerners had played for the England team, compared to 266 Midlanders and 367 Southerners,[268] and 15 of the 23 man squad for the 2018 World Cup, as well as 14 of the 2019 Women's World Cup squad, were born in the region.[269]

Rugby football

Two rugby league teams playing in front of full stands.

The Rugby Football Union, which enforced amateurism, suspended teams who compensated their players for missed work and injury, leading teams from Lancashire, Yorkshire and surrounding areas to split away in 1895 and form the Rugby Football League. Over time, the RFU and RFL adopted different rules and the two forms of the game - rugby union and rugby league - diverged. Rugby league's stronghold remains Northern England along the "M62 corridor" between Liverpool and Hull.[270] As of the 2021 season, 11 of the 12 teams in the Super League (the highest level of rugby league in the Northern Hemisphere) are from Northern England, with one team from France, and the 14-team Championship below it has 12 Northern teams, one London team and 1 French team.[271]

Rugby union was not entirely driven from Northern England, and in the 1970s the region was home to several strong teams.[272] The high-water mark of rugby union in Northern England was the 1979 New Zealand tour during which the English Northern Division was the only team to defeat the All Blacks.[273] In the 21st century the region's club sides have become less popular, with association football, cricket and rugby league attracting more spectators and talent.[272] In the 2020-21 season, Sale Sharks and Newcastle Falcons play in the English Premiership, and Doncaster R.F.C. play in the RFU Championship.[274]



Cricket has a strong following in Northern England, and three counties are represented by first-class county cricket teams: Durham, Lancashire and Yorkshire. The Roses Match (named for the Red Rose of Lancaster and the White Rose of York) between Lancashire and Yorkshire is one of the hardest fought rivalries in the sport - the pride of both sides, and their determination not to lose, resulted in the teams developing a slow, stubborn and defensive style that proved unpopular elsewhere in the country.[275] The London-based Marylebone Cricket Club, which controlled the game at the time, selected few Northern players for Test matches, and this was perceived as a snub to their playing style - the anger united Lancashire and Yorkshire against the South and helped cast a shared Northern identity that transcended the Roses rivalry.[275][276] This divide was illustrated in the 1924 County Championship, when Yorkshire beat London-based Middlesex to claim the title. Surrey accused Yorkshire of scuffing the pitch and intimidating the bowlers, while the match with Middlesex was so vicious that the team threatened to never play in Yorkshire again.[275][276] The Lancashire captain Jack Sharp on the other hand was quoted as saying "I'm real glad a rose won it. Red or white, it doesn't matter."[276] Durham are a recent addition to top-flight cricket, having only achieved first-class status in 1992, but have won the County Championship three times.[277]

Although Yorkshire and Lancashire were traditionally more relaxed about professionalism than other counties, cricket did not see the same regional schisms on the topic that rugby and football did - there were debates over amateur status in first-class cricket, but these tensions were given release in the Gentlemen v Players fixture.[278] Nevertheless, the annual North v South games were among the most popular and competitive in the sport, running annually from 1849 until 1900 and intermittently thereafter.[279]


  Liberal Democrat

Northern England, as the first area in the world to industrialise, was the birthplace of much modern political thought. Marxism and, more generally, socialism were shaped by reports into the lives of the Northern working class, from Friedrich Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England to George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier.[280] Meanwhile, enterprise and trade at the North's ports influenced the birth of Manchester Liberalism, a laissez-faire free trade philosophy. Expounded by C. P. Scott and the Manchester Guardian, the movement's greatest success was the repeal of the Corn Laws, protests against which had led to the 1819 Peterloo Massacre in Manchester.[281]

A parade with large traditional trade union banners.
The Durham Miners' Gala is one of the largest trade union events in Europe.[282]

The first Trades Union Congress was held in Manchester in 1868,[283] and as of 2015 trade union membership in Northern England remained higher than in Southern England, although it is lower than in the other Home Nations.[284] Since the Thatcher era, the Conservative Party struggled to gain support in the area.[17][115][285] Today, Northern England is generally described as a stronghold of the Labour Party - although the Conservatives hold some rural seats, they traditionally held almost no urban seats and as of the 2016 local elections there are no Conservative councillors on Liverpool City Council, Manchester City Council, Newcastle City Council or Sheffield City Council.[17] During the 2019 general election, many traditionally Labour constituencies in Northern England swung heavily towards the Conservatives, and the collapse of the "red wall" of Northern Labour seats was a major factor in the Conservative victory.[286] Historically the region was also a heartland for the Liberals, and between the 1980s and the 2010s their successors in the Liberal Democrats benefited from Conservative unpopularity by positioning themselves as the centrist alternative to Labour in the North.[287][288]

At the 2016 EU membership referendum, all three Northern England regions voted to leave, as did all English regions outside London. The largest Northern Remain vote was 60.4% in Manchester; the largest Leave vote was 69.9% in North East Lincolnshire.[289] In total, the Leave vote in the Northern England regions was 55.9% - higher than in the Southern England regions and the other Home Nations, but lower than in the Midlands or the East of England.[289] The Eurosceptic UK Independence Party (UKIP) positioned themselves as the main challenger to Labour in Northern constituencies, and came second in many at the 2015 general election.[290][291] UKIP originally struggled in the region due to vote splitting with the far-right British National Party (BNP), who exploited racial tensions in the wake of the 2001 Bradford riots and other riots in Northern towns. In 2006, 40% of BNP voters lived in Northern England and both BNP MEPs elected at the 2009 European elections came from Northern constituencies.[292][293] After 2013, BNP support in the region collapsed as most voters swung to UKIP.[294] The Northern UKIP vote in turn collapsed following the EU referendum, with most UKIP voters returning to their former allegiances.[295]

Campaigns for Northern England devolution have seen little electoral support. Plans by Labour under Tony Blair to create devolved regional assemblies for the three Northern regions were abandoned after the government lost the 2004 North East England devolution referendum against a No vote of 78%.[296] The regionalist Yorkshire Party and North East Party only hold seats at the local council level,[297] and the Northern Party, which campaigned for a devolved Northern government with the power to make laws and full control of taxation and spending, was wound up in 2016.[298][299]



A gothic cathedral with two towers.
A modernist cathedral shaped like a funnel.

Christianity has been the largest religion in the region since the Early Middle Ages; its existence in Britain dates back to the late Roman era and the arrival of Celtic Christianity. The Holy Island of Lindisfarne played an essential role in the Christianisation of Northumbria, after Aidan from Connacht founded a monastery there as the first Bishop of Lindisfarne at the request of King Oswald.[300] It is known for the creation of the Lindisfarne Gospels and remains a place of pilgrimage.[301][302] Saint Cuthbert, a monk of Lindisfarne, was venerated from Nottinghamshire to Cumberland, and is today sometimes named the patron saint of Northern England.[303][304] The Synod of Whitby saw Northumbria break from Celtic Christianity and return to the Roman Catholic church, as calculations of Easter and tonsure rules were brought into line with those of Rome.[305]

Percentage of registered Catholics in the population in 1715-1720.[306]
  Less than 3%
  More than 20%

After the English Reformation Northern England became a centre of Catholicism, and Irish immigration increased its numbers further, especially in North West cities like Liverpool and Manchester.[108] In the 18th and 19th centuries, the area underwent a religious revival that ultimately produced Primitive Methodism,[307] and at its peak in the 19th century Methodism was the dominant faith in much of Northern England.[308]


In the ecclesiastical administration of the Church of England the entire North is covered by the Province of York, which is represented by the Archbishop of York - the second-highest figure in the Church after the Archbishop of Canterbury. The unusual situation of having two archbishops at the top of Church hierarchy suggests that Northern England was seen as a sui generis.[311] Likewise, with the exception of parts of the Diocese of Shrewsbury and Diocese of Nottingham, the North is covered in Roman Catholic Church administration by the Province of Liverpool, represented by the Archbishop of Liverpool.[312]

Other faiths


Small Jewish communities arose in Beverley, Doncaster, Grimsby, Lancaster, Newcastle, and York in the wake of the Norman Conquest but suffered massacres and pogroms, of which the largest was the York Massacre in 1190.[313] Jews were forcibly banished from England by the 1290 Edict of Expulsion until the Resettlement of the Jews in England in the seventeenth century, and the first synagogue in the North appeared in Liverpool in 1753.[314] Manchester also has a long-standing Jewish community: the now-demolished 1857 Manchester Reform Synagogue was the second Reform synagogue in the country,[315][316] and Greater Manchester has the only eruv in the United Kingdom outside London.[317] Traditionally, there is also a large Jewish presence in Gateshead. In total, there are 84 synagogues in Northern England registered for marriages.[310]

Spiritualism flourished in Northern England in the nineteenth century, in part as a backlash to the fundamentalist Primitive Methodist movement and in part driven by the influence of Owenist socialism.[318] There remain 220 Spiritualist churches registered in the North, of which 40 identify as Christian Spiritualist.[310]

The first mosque in the United Kingdom was founded by the convert Abdullah Quilliam in the Liverpool Muslim Institute in 1889.[319] Today, there are around 500 mosques in Northern England.[310][320] Indian religions are also represented: there are at least 45 gurdwaras, of which the largest is the Sikh Temple in Leeds, and 30 mandirs, of which the largest is Bradford Lakshmi Narayan Hindu Temple.[310][321][322]


Transport in the North has been shaped by the Pennines, creating strong north-south axes along each coast and an east-west axis across the moorland passes of the southern Pennines.[323] Northern England is a centre of freight transport and handles around one third of all British cargo.[324] Both passenger and freight links between Northern cities remain poor, which is a major weakness of the Northern economy.[325]



A long queue of buses
Wilmslow Road bus corridor in Manchester is one of the busiest in Europe.[327]


Buses are an important part of the Northern transport mix, with bus ridership above the England and Wales average in all three Northern regions.[331] Many of the municipal bus companies were located in Northern England, and the region saw intense competition and bus wars following deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s.[332] Increasing car ownership in the same era caused bus use to decline, although it remains higher than in most areas of the South.[333]


Two trains - one modern, and one from the eighties - in a Victorian railway station.
Trains from Northern and TransPennine Express at Preston


The first tram line in the United Kingdom was built in Birkenhead and opened on 30 August 1860 (partially open intermittently as a heritage tramway).[338] Trams turned out to be especially well suited for Northern cities, with their growing working-class suburbs, and by the turn of the century, most Northern towns had an extensive interconnected electric tram network.[339] At the network's height, it was possible to travel entirely by tram from Liverpool Pier Head to the village of Summit, outside Rochdale, a distance of 52 miles (84 km), and a gap of only 7 miles (11 km) separated the North-Western network from the West Yorkshire network.[340] Starting in the 1930s, these were largely replaced by motor buses and trolley buses.[339] With the closure of Sheffield Tramway in 1960 and Glasgow Tramway in 1962, Blackpool Tramway - popular as a tourist attraction as much as a means of transport - was left as the only public tram system in the UK until the Manchester Metrolink opened in 1992.[341] Today there are four light rail systems in the North - Blackpool Tramway, Manchester Metrolink, Sheffield Supertram and Tyne & Wear Metro.[342]


International airports of Northern England

Manchester Airport serves as the main international hub for Northern England and is the busiest airport anywhere in the UK outside London, handling 27.8 million people in 2017.[343][344] In total, there are eight international airports in the North; these are (in descending order of passenger traffic) Manchester, Newcastle, Liverpool John Lennon, Leeds Bradford, Doncaster Sheffield, Humberside, Teesside and Carlisle Lake District.[343][345] Many of these airports were developed during the boom in low-cost air travel during the early 2000s, but have suffered since the Great Recession[346] - Teesside is running at just 3% of its maximum capacity, and Blackpool Airport closed as an international airport in 2014.[347][348] The devolution of Air Passenger Duty to Scotland represents a further possible threat to Northern English airports, allowing Scottish airports to offer cheaper flights than their English rivals.[349] Few spoke flights operate between Northern airports and the national hubs at Heathrow and Gatwick, putting further strain on the smaller Northern airports and forcing connecting passengers to travel via continental European airports. The planned High Speed 2 station at Manchester Airport will offer direct high-speed services to London, allowing spare capacity at Manchester Airport to take some of the flights which currently serve busy London airports.[347]



The first modern canal in England was Sankey Brook, opened in 1757 to connect Liverpool's ports to the St Helens coalfields.[350] By 1777, the Grand Trunk Canal had opened, linking the rivers Mersey and Trent and making it possible for boats to travel directly from Liverpool on the west coast to Hull on the east coast.[350] Manchester, 40 miles (64 km) inland, was connected to the Irish Sea by the Manchester Ship Canal in 1894, although the canal never saw the success that was hoped for.[351] The North retains many navigable canals, including the Cheshire, North Pennine and South Pennine canal rings, although they are now used mostly for pleasure rather than transport - the Aire and Calder Navigation, which carries over 2 million tons of oil, sand and gravel per year, is a rare exception.[352]

Many Northern coastal towns were built on trade, and retain large sea ports. The Humber ports of Grimsby and Immingham (counted as a single port for statistical purposes) are the busiest in the UK in terms of tonnage, serving 59.1 million tons as of 2015, and Teesport and the Port of Liverpool are also among the country's largest - in total, 35% of British freight was shipped through Northern ports.[353][335] Roll-on/roll-off ferries offer passenger and freight connections to the Isle of Man and Ireland along the west coast,[354] while east coast ports connect to Belgium and the Netherlands,[355] although Northern ports handle only a small percentage of the UK's vehicle traffic.[356] Liverpool Cruise Terminal opened in 2007, cruises also operate out of Port of Hull and Newcastle International Ferry Terminal.

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