Nobody agrees where the North of England actually starts
Ask southerners and northerners to draw the line between North and South, and southerners put it further south. Some jokingly start the North at the Watford Gap between Northampton and Leicester. The poet Simon Armitage suggests it begins around Thirsk or Richmond, which would leave out Manchester and Leeds entirely.
Officially the answer is simple. For statistics and government, the North means three regions combined: Yorkshire and the Humber plus the North West and the North East. Together they covered 37,331 square kilometres and held 15.5 million people at the 2021 census, with 18 cities. Older definitions use historic counties instead, from Cumberland and Northumberland down through Lancashire and Yorkshire, often with Cheshire added. Others use rivers, drawing the boundary between the Humber and Mersey estuaries or along the Trent.
The edges are blurry in both directions. Towns in Derbyshire's High Peak count as part of Greater Manchester's built-up area, and several Derbyshire districts joined the Sheffield City Region. The geographer Danny Dorling folds most of the West Midlands into the North, arguing that the idea of a Midlands causes more confusion than clarity. Narrower views shrink it to the North East and Cumbria, and Sheffield is sometimes placed in a so-called North Midlands. Crewe, Stoke-on-Trent and Sheffield have all styled themselves the gateway to the North. Some argue the region is too varied to count as one thing at all.
The land itself was sculpted by Pleistocene ice sheets that pushed as far as the Midlands, carving steep valleys in the uplands and leaving a former glacial lake that is now the fertile fenland of the Humberhead Levels. The Pennines run down the middle like a spine, and five of England's ten national parks lie partly or wholly in the North. It is also among the least wooded parts of Europe, which is why the government plans a Northern Forest of more than 50 million trees.
Unusually for a large European urban belt, its big cities are all products of the Industrial Revolution. Ancient centres such as Chester, Durham, Lancaster and York are now comparatively small.
Source: Northern England
