A Second City, and why it won't be in Yorkshire

I recently saw an article over at The Independent about Manchester looking to overtake Birmingham as the second city. As a Yorkshireman my first instinct was to scoff and say "but what about Leeds?" until after thinking for a moment, quickly deciding that Leeds was a terrible and sordid scumhole, and should never be declared the second city. I should know, I was born there.

This got me thinking, Yorkshire is a big place, but pretty much all of it's cities are....a bit shit, to put it bluntly. Out of our top two contenders for the second city, we have Leeds, which is 90% financial district and has very little personality or cultural output, and York, which has the historical advantage of being the old first city but which is essentially just a quite pretty city with nothing going on and a tendency to flood everywhere. Sheffield, Hull and Bradford, you could never really imagine having the kind of cultural and global impact that Manchester has had, with the one exception of his lordship Sean Bean, for whom all of Yorkshire is eternally grateful.

So why are Yorkshire cities a bit naff, and does this mean Lancashire is better? No, of course not. Don't be stupid. Lancashire is a terrible and awful place, and Birmingham is even worse, bloody southerners. But even more need for there to be a reason for this. As Yorkshire, God's own county, is so undeniably better than Lancashire or The South, why are its cities so terrible?

Yorkshire: Better than you

Part of the reason has to be that it's harder to hate each other when you all live in the same place. People from Yorkshire love to have a go at people in the next town over, and it's much easier to hate more people if very few people live where you do. When two people from Yorkshire first meet, their first task is to work out why they don't like the other person. This is much easier to achieve on a town level, as within a city you have to resort to districts and streets. As such, Yorkshire people much prefer living in towns and villages, as you save 30 seconds which could be much better spent drinking or grumbling about things not being as good as they used to.

Probably a larger reason is that the Yorkshire temperament means that we don't brag about our achievements half as much as Mancunians or Brummies. Ask a Manc what makes his city great and I bet within two sentences the words "oasis" or "the stone roses" will have been spoken. I mean yeah, they're good bands, but are they really that good that they form a cornerstone of your region? Ask a Yorkshireman what's great about their city and the answer will either be "It's not, it's shit" or you'll get things about the area and the people. When we talk about what is great about Yorkshire we talk about the moors, the hils, the spirit of the people. To me that's far more important than some band who whines about what they've smoked and drunk.

It isn't like Yorkshire cities don't have their output of famous people and bands, we just don't go on about it as what makes us great. So Sheffield has produced The Arctic Monkeys, The Human League and Pulp, which is great. But you don't hear them banging on about it.

Made in Yorkshire

All in all it's probably part of the Yorkshire spirit. We're proud as hell to be from Yorkshire, but trained from birth to be slightly ashamed of everything that makes Yorkshire what it is. The mining and industry of our past has been mocked so much, both from outside and within, that we hold a slight embarrassment about our history. But it is an incredibly rare occasion to meet a person from Yorkshire who is ashamed of being from there, or who doesn't claim Yorkshire is pretty much better than anywhere else. And rightly so. We don't need to prance around shouting about how awesome we are at producing bands or culture, or how our sporting achievements are better than our neighbours. We already know we're better than the rest of you, intrinsically and eternally. If we started harping on about everything we're great at, not only would it take all day every day, but we'd stop being that good. Only Southerners have to care about other people thinking they're any good.