Jonathan Meades, on the Midlands, in his column in the latest edition of The Critic magazine…

My uncle, Harry Turner Meades, was Town Clerk of Burton-upon-Trent from the mid-1950s till the early ’70s. He was a committed Midlander, a seldom acknowledged species which does not advertise itself, nor does it travel. […] He loved, could recognise and mimic [the] many [West Midlands] accents, which are routinely mocked. […] He felt at one with [the Shropshire poet] Housman. He longed to hear Shakespeare’s work spoken as it would have been in 1600.

Being a Midlander is not something you shout about: people will affect not to understand thou. His definition of the Midlands and its precise if often redrawn border with the North was adopted with amendments by his nephew in a film about Birmingham 20 years ago. I attempted to delineate the Irony Curtain that stretches across England from roughly Lincoln to round about Chester. Essentially, with the exception of Liverpool, north of the Curtain it’s all “Me, I speak as I find, I do — I can tell you’re not from hereabouts.” Whilst the Midlands are more, much more, nuanced and modest. Black Countrymen’s stoic uncomplaining humour is at their own expense. Reticence and irony are in the blood.

[… For outsiders, the West Midlands] is a place that’s hurried through, unappreciated, on the way to somewhere else, which reveals itself [to them] by being excitingly self-caricatural, grossly self-parodic. Hence the name of that film: “Heart Bypass” [1998]. Even the inhabitants overlook it. They are perhaps not as centrifugal as they were but the ease with which Midland cities can be escaped is [still] held up as a magnet: Cannock [Chase], Malvern, Clent, Kinver, Lickey, Bredon, Clee…