North West England holds the country's highest peak and deepest lake
One region of England collects most of its natural records. Scafell Pike in Cumbria, at 978 metres, is the country's highest summit. Windermere is its largest natural lake, Wast Water its deepest at 74 metres, and Broad Crag Tarn its highest. All sit in North West England, a region better known for Manchester and Liverpool.
The region runs from the Scottish border down to the West Midlands, squeezed between the Pennines to the east and the Irish Sea to the west, and takes in Cheshire, Cumbria, Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Merseyside. With 7,417,397 people in 2021 only Greater London and the South East outrank it for population among British regions. Two big conurbations around Liverpool and Manchester fill much of the south, while Cumbria and northern Lancashire stay mostly rural.
Protected landscape is abundant. The whole Lake District national park lies inside the region, along with slivers of the Peak District and Yorkshire Dales, plus areas of outstanding natural beauty such as the Solway Coast and nearly all of the Forest of Bowland. The climate is mild, damp and maritime, with the heaviest rain and harshest winters falling on the Lake District fells and the Pennines.
People are unevenly spread. Greater Manchester holds nearly 38 percent of the population, while Cumbria, the largest county by area, holds just over 7. Migration has shaped the place for centuries. Hundreds of thousands of Welsh people came to work the coal mines during the Industrial Revolution, and heavy Irish emigration in the nineteenth century, together with Lancashire's long-standing Catholic holdouts, explains why about one in five residents is Catholic. Liverpool, more than 800 years old and the closest major English city to Ireland, had one of Britain's first Afro-Caribbean communities and Europe's oldest Chinatown. The share of residents born abroad rose from 5.1 percent in 2001 to 11.7 percent in 2021.
Economically, the region has the highest output per person outside southern England, yet wealth is concentrated in pockets such as rural Cheshire and south Cumbria, and deprivation remains above average.
Source: North West England
