The North Will Rise Again

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents The North Will Rise Again by Alex Niven, read by Dan Pye.

"Incorporating sharp questions and big ideas, Niven shifts deftly between history, politics, culture and literature to offer a fascinating and provocative analysis of the marginalisation of the North." Madeleine Bunting, author of Labours of Love: the Crisis of Care

An in-depth exploration of the importance of the North of England in the modern era.

The North Will Rise Again covers the colourful adventures of its inhabitants, the expansiveness and optimism that defines Northern culture, and the recurrent sense of failure and despair that is at the heart of one of the West’s most impoverished regions.

By telling the story of the North in the last few decades, Alex goes in search of answers to some of the big questions at the forefront of British politics and society today, touching on live issues including the North/South divide, austerity, the impact of Brexit, the collapse of Labour’s ‘Red Wall’, and calls for regional devolution. He concludes with a powerful argument for a revival of northern politics and society by way of what he calls ‘radical regionalism’.

A native Northerner himself, having returned to his home city of Newcastle with his family in the last few years, Alex also includes elements of memoir and stories from his own family history to reflect some of the key arguments of his book.

To what extent are the crises of the last ten years partly the result of fundamental divides and inequalities in the geography of England? How did the North become a place of lost potential and broken dreams? And what can be done to make it one of the most dynamic and forward-looking places in the world once again? Niven considers all these questions and more in this lively and highly topical book.

Critics Review

A great book.
Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester
Incorporating sharp questions and big ideas, Niven shifts deftly between history, politics, culture and literature to offer a fascinating and provocative analysis of the marginalisation of the North.
Madeleine Bunting, author of Labours of Love: the Crisis of Care
Alex Niven’s elegant, heartfelt book is the best I have read about the North’s subordination by the South in modern England, and about how visionary northern culture of all kinds has defied that imbalance.
Andy Beckett, Guardian journalist
Alex Niven reveals the north of England in all its variety, potential and vitality. One Nation Under a Groove in book form.
Lynsey Hanley, author of Respectable: Crossing the Class Divide
A bold, compelling attempt to imagine a new future for England's industrial north by looking at its cultural and progressive past.
Financial Times
The North Will Rise Again is thought-provoking, evocative, tenderly appreciative and optimistic.
The Tablet
The history of the North of England is one of astonishing visions, great attempts to realise true progress, and painful deferrals of these dreams, so argues Alex Niven, who constructs this argument incisively, elegantly and movingly in The North Will Rise Again. Niven’s intervention is a timely one. At a moment where appeals to an insurgent, anti-establishment Northern identity are galvanised by the right and neglected by the left, never before has it been more urgent to revive the modernist, utopian dreams of those who made the region what it is.
Fergal Kinney, Tribune
[Niven] sees the north as craggy cradle of tradition but also crucible of modernity, from T Dan Smith’s doomed architectural dreams of Newcastle as “the Brasilia of the north” to the experimental poetry of the 1960s centred around the Morden Tower poets … Niven is good on the melancholic, bitter-sweet descant of failure detectable in Victoria Wood, Phoenix Nights, Morrissey and others – the sad, plangent bottom note audible beneath the raucous swagger.
Stuart Maconie, New Statesman
A fascinating, expansive book, which takes in civic architecture, modernist poetry, postmodern art, independent filmmaking, and popular music, from the queer futurism of Frankie Goes to Hollywood to the utopian aspirations of Factory Records.
James Greig, Dazed
A lively cultural and political history of the lands between the Tweed and the Mersey–Humber line … Niven skilfully connects Wyndham Lewis’s northwards-looking BLAST magazine and the Vorticists’ love of concrete and machinery with Yevgeny Zamyatin’s inspiration in the “grand mechanised ballet” of Tyneside shipyards, Aldous Huxley’s formative visit to the Imperial Chemical Industries’s huge plant in Billingham (which “opened the doors of his perception”) and on to the influence of industrial Teesside on the aesthetics of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.
Dan Jackson, Prospect

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