Overview

Niven examines in depth an area of the country at the very forefront of current debates around identity, inequality and industry. A region with its own powerful sense of individuality – and its fair share of problems – the North, he argues, demands to be taken seriously.

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9781399414012

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Reviews

Incorporating sharp questions and big ideas, Niven shifts deftly between history, politics, culture and literature to offer a fascinating and provocative analysis of the marginalisation of the North. -- Madeleine Bunting, author of Labours of Love: the Crisis of Care Alex Niven’s elegant, heartfelt book is the best I have read about the North’s subordination by the South in modern England, and about how visionary northern culture of all kinds has defied that imbalance. -- Andy Beckett, Guardian journalist Alex Niven reveals the north of England in all its variety, potential and vitality. One Nation Under a Groove in book form. -- Lynsey Hanley, author of Respectable: Crossing the Class Divide A bold, compelling attempt to imagine a new future for England's industrial north by looking at its cultural and progressive past. -- John McTernan * Financial Times * The North Will Rise Again is thought-provoking, evocative, tenderly appreciative and optimistic. -- Katherine Backler * The Tablet *

A great book. -- Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester Incorporating sharp questions and big ideas, Niven shifts deftly between history, politics, culture and literature to offer a fascinating and provocative analysis of the marginalisation of the North. -- Madeleine Bunting, author of Labours of Love: the Crisis of Care Alex Niven’s elegant, heartfelt book is the best I have read about the North’s subordination by the South in modern England, and about how visionary northern culture of all kinds has defied that imbalance. -- Andy Beckett, Guardian journalist Alex Niven reveals the north of England in all its variety, potential and vitality. One Nation Under a Groove in book form. -- Lynsey Hanley, author of Respectable: Crossing the Class Divide A bold, compelling attempt to imagine a new future for England's industrial north by looking at its cultural and progressive past. -- John McTernan * Financial Times * The North Will Rise Again is thought-provoking, evocative, tenderly appreciative and optimistic. -- Katherine Backler * The Tablet * The history of the North of England is one of astonishing visions, great attempts to realise true progress, and painful deferrals of these dreams, so argues Alex Niven, who constructs this argument incisively, elegantly and movingly in The North Will Rise Again. Niven’s intervention is a timely one. At a moment where appeals to an insurgent, anti-establishment Northern identity are galvanised by the right and neglected by the left, never before has it been more urgent to revive the modernist, utopian dreams of those who made the region what it is. -- Fergal Kinney * Tribune * [Niven] sees the north as craggy cradle of tradition but also crucible of modernity, from T Dan Smith’s doomed architectural dreams of Newcastle as “the Brasilia of the north” to the experimental poetry of the 1960s centred around the Morden Tower poets … Niven is good on the melancholic, bitter-sweet descant of failure detectable in Victoria Wood, Phoenix Nights, Morrissey and others – the sad, plangent bottom note audible beneath the raucous swagger. -- Stuart Maconie * the New Statesman * A fascinating, expansive book, which takes in civic architecture, modernist poetry, postmodern art, independent filmmaking, and popular music, from the queer futurism of Frankie Goes to Hollywood to the utopian aspirations of Factory Records. -- James Greig * Dazed * A lively cultural and political history of the lands between the Tweed and the Mersey–Humber line … Niven skilfully connects Wyndham Lewis’s northwards-looking BLAST magazine and the Vorticists’ love of concrete and machinery with Yevgeny Zamyatin’s inspiration in the “grand mechanised ballet” of Tyneside shipyards, Aldous Huxley’s formative visit to the Imperial Chemical Industries’s huge plant in Billingham (which “opened the doors of his perception”) and on to the influence of industrial Teesside on the aesthetics of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. -- Dan Jackson * Prospect *

Author Information

Alex Niven lives in Newcastle upon Tyne. He writes regularly for the Guardian, Tribune and New Statesman, and has also contributed to publications including the New York Times, the Independent, Pitchfork, The Face and VICE. As well as Folk Opposition (Zero, 2011), he is the author of an instalment in Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series (on Definitely Maybe by Oasis, 2014) and New Model Island (Repeater, 2019), a critically acclaimed memoir of Englishness and regional identity. Currently a Lecturer in English Literature at Newcastle University, he helped to start the radical publisher Repeater Books in 2014.

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