Guest Post: I’m sorry, I missed the bus

Jess Harpin sits in with recollections of growing up in Yorkshire, and the role of transport in our lives

I’m having a couple of week’s off writing the newsletter, so this week and next you have some very able stand-ins.

First up,

Jess Harpin

who writes

Can We Fix It?

(this week she gives her take on Trump’s tariffs). Jess is a freelance digital content creator, who has previously worked in social media for a number of popular podcasts and on Labour’s General Election campaign.

She writes for Wor Room this week about growing up in Yorkshire - I’m not sure if she meant it to be, but it reads a bit like a love letter to her youth, even with the disconnection and isolation which went with it. Perhaps that’s just me yearning for a bit of disconnection in this 24/7 modern world.

She talks about the realities of living in the public transport desert, and how quickly your perceptions can change once you move somewhere with better connectivity.

There’s also a great bit in there about how, after moving to London, she experienced a genuine thrill at the novelty of being able to just walk to a big Tesco.

Make sure you like and share this, and subscribe to Jess’s Substack.

Next week

Ellen Kate Boyle

of

Conversations By The Sea

is sitting in, writing about building in digital accessibility, and how digital inclusion is a big issue for the North East. She’ll also look ahead to the Access:Given conference she’s hosting later in the year.

For now though, over to Jess.

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Last week I had the horrifying revelation that, despite growing up in Yorkshire, I have finally been accused of becoming a *gasps* Londoner. I’d dared to complain about waiting fifteen minutes for the Overground. I got an eye roll from my friend, and a stern reminder that if I were up North there wouldn’t be a train at all.

Back when I were a lass, we never caught the train or bus –because, quite simply, there weren’t any. Even now, you’re still more likely to pass someone travelling on horse-back than by bus. Aged 16, I attempted to see friends in Leeds, a rough distance of 25 miles, via the one bus that left the village each day, before realising that it would take three and a half hours each way, and promptly gave up.

Train travel seemed almost futuristic. In autumn, as children, we’d cycle over the old railway tracks that were overgrown with brambles to pick blackberries. The stations didn’t even make it to the Beeching cuts– they disappeared in 1947 and 1932. At the time, it felt deeply exciting to have our own secret playground, but, in light of recent infrastructure cuts, there is an irony to us playing on abandoned rail tracks. Now, the nearest station is a fifteen-minute drive away. This might not seem like much, but if you end up walking that distance, your total travel time is more than double the time it takes in the car. It isn’t that you can’t go places up North, it’s just that any journey takes twice as long.

The IPPR recently released the statistics for public spending – and, after years of the supposed levelling-up policies promised by the Tories, in 2022/2023 London received £2,747 more public spending per person than the North. Some may argue London deserves more public spending because it has a larger population concentrated in a smaller area, and so any investment offers better value for money. But that is a vicious circle that intensifies the disparity – as more businesses move to London for the infrastructure, and people move to jobs accordingly.

Things are slowly beginning to change – Channel 4, the BBC and the Civil Service have started to move major departments northwards. But the private sector investment lags behind, so there’s still nowhere near as much pull to these cities – if you want to work in media, politics, fashion, marketing, corporate law, banking etc etc, you have to be willing to relocate.

Growing up in the North does have some considerable advantages. Unlike our Southern pals, we all had our own bedrooms, because the house prices of converted barns are still more reasonable than those of a poky studio in central London. We have a unique culture, synonymous with mines, brass bands and the Yorkshire pudding. I also had a childhood very much like those described in Enid Blyton’s novels – summers were spent playing cricket or racing our bikes against our neighbours. London kids will never know the thrill of catching six and out from a roof (the rules are the rules). In the whole time I’ve lived in London, I’ve never seen any children playing football on a side-street – hardly surprising, when there are so many cars.

The village is also quaint, but very, very quiet. The local stone is that honey-toned, Cotswold yellow colour. There is parkland that is privately owned, but does have some beautiful, centuries-old horse chestnut trees you can see from our garden, and that, come May, bloom into clouds of white flowers. The country estate supposedly hosted Princess Margaret while she was sent there to detox from her drinking habit. The reasoning (or so I was told) was to bore her into sobriety away from London, with the bonus that no paparazzi could face staying so long in a village which didn’t even have a pub. I have never had occasion to compare myself to Princess Margaret before, but I will say that by the time I hit my teens, I too was becoming quite bored by the confines of a village with only three streets.

In the face of overwhelming monotony, what was a teenage girl to do?

At school, my peers spent their summer holidays drifting around indoor shopping malls, and going to the cinema. Back home, when I wasn’t working for my parents’ shop, I helped with household chores, like washing, ironing, or picking fruit and veg. I developed a proficiency in jam-making, pruning flower bushes, and arranging sweet peas artistically in glass bottles. These skills have been no use whatsoever in the workplace, although if I could overcome my feminist principles and career ambitions, I’m convinced I would make a fantastic tradwife.

I had – and for this I am grateful – the time to read a lot. Mostly nineteenth-century novels which seemed weirdly more relatable. I was particularly fond of Madame Bovary, who I felt had really attained an aspirational level of provincial ennui. Not for me the chick flicks and rom-coms with their glamourous American lifestyles, which, as far as I was concerned, belonged firmly in the fantasy genre. That’s assuming I could watch a film – if we didn’t own it on DVD, then the chances of downloading anything on our dial-up internet connection were remote.

By the time I got to university, and my fellow students had begun exploring drugs and BDSM, I was experimenting with trips to the supermarket – for the first time in my life I lived within walking distance of a Tesco! I’d volunteer to walk into town for mixers, and carry them for a half hour back uphill, just for the thrill of browsing the aisles. I was also discovering that I could buy a take-away coffee, or go for a walk – just because I felt like it. The freedom was magical, but it also made me painfully aware of my own shortcomings. Unsurprisingly, the jam-making habit was not going to make me friends with the cooler, chain-smoking, gap-year-taking Londoners who arrived already brimming with confidence, Pret loyalty cards, and knowledge of foods like falafel.

Quite frankly, growing up in the North, it felt constantly like I was missing the bus.

By my second year of university, there was an enormous gap between those with hobbies and grad schemes, and those without - and quite a lot of that seemed determined by which side of the country you happened to live on. If you’re a Londoner, you had the ability to take on an unpaid internship locally, with access to people who could tell you about those schemes and how to apply to them in a way that those further North, especially in the countryside, could not conceive of. In London, you also have a level of freedom that allows you to be your own person so much sooner, as you can be independent as soon as you can get on a bus alone. This in turn gives you access to leisure centres (always facing cuts in the North) and a plethora of social opportunities. Growing up in the North takes so much longer, that I felt years behind my peers before I had even turned twenty.

For all that, I’m deeply conscious that I am one of the lucky ones. I know that my childhood was idyllic in many ways, and that boredom is a privilege. My parents were always incredibly selfless and did as much for us as they could – very possibly more than that. When I turned eighteen, I had enough qualifications to leave – but when I come back home I’m reminded of the scale of deprivation. In the last study taken, almost all of the UK’s most deprived areas were north of Birmingham. I know many couples where one member will travel to London for the week to work, before returning home at weekends – because it’s more economically beneficial to commute that far. The difference in median individual wealth between the South-East (£263,000) and North-East (£79,000) more than doubled between July 2010 to June 2012, and April 2018 to March 2020. Since levelling-up dropped off the policy agenda, no political party seems to think this is an issue, let alone provide solutions for it.

In London I live a life beyond my wildest imaginings. Last night I caught a bus at 11pm ON A TUESDAY. I catch trains whenever I like. I can go kayaking and then pottery-making within the space of one afternoon. No wonder Londoners are so smug – when everyone and everything is here, why would anyone ever leave?

There are things I miss about the North. The space – particularly on pavements (damn the slow walkers.) The smell of wet grass and cool evening air. My garden at home which has a magnolia tree and roses in different shades of apricot. I miss my family, and would like moving to have been a choice, not a necessity.

When I began to write this, I thought I’d make an argument with more stats and figures, because the North-South divide has already been well assessed in terms of inequality. But it’s harder to assess the impact of missed opportunities, because how can you measure things which have never happened in the first place? Diversity statistics focus rightfully on race and gender, but it means we don’t have a picture of, say, the number of people from the North who can access competitive grad schemes, or something as simple as a music lesson.

I’d like to think in the future things might be fairer, that living in the North is not an obstacle to overcome, or something which will put you behind. There are so many people who love their local communities and give that up to achieve financial success. In the future I’d like to think that growing up in the North won’t feel so much like missing the bus - but that will entirely depend on the actions of this government.