8 - Regionalism and Cultural History: The Case of North-Eastern England, 1918-1976

Summary

Regional cultural historians operate in a climate of a ‘new’ territorial politics in which the dangers of history as advocacy are likely to be felt more keenly in regional studies than elsewhere. Present-day regionalists in the North East have long argued for the strength of the relationship between territory and a shared culture, and evidence of a cultural geography of belonging continues to be central to the characterisation of north-eastern England as distanced from the national heartland. Recently this claim has been anchored in discussions of European regionalism as mobilised by the alleged declining significance of nation-states and national cultures. Additionally, since the 1980s a process of place marketing, characterised by the sale of cultural particularity and associated with the new urban and regional regeneration strategies across Europe, has further informed the question of regions. This chapter contextualises the claims of contemporary regionalism through an assessment of contemporary cultural practices including radio, television and cultural policy. Its particular concern is with the relationship between the media infrastructure in north-eastern England and the kind of ‘North East’ that was represented during the twentieth century.

In the modern period the contribution of broadcasting and cultural policy to making meaning in the cultural arena has been widely acknowledged. Despite Asa Briggs's early claim that broadcasting regions would feature strongly in the future of regional culture in England, there remains little understanding of how new communicative processes were played out in the regional arena. Evaluating the new cultural institutions can be useful in pinpointing some of the conceptual difficulties of regional history. Although the regional radio and television stations, alongside the new regional arts associations, used the descriptor ‘North East’ to refer to the territory, broadcasts, activities and audiences under their remit, each institution's boundary was subject to separate or conflicting considerations. For broadcasting, the technology of transmitters and wavelengths often dictated the territorial perimeter, whilst the North East Association for the Arts adopted administrative financial boundaries.