It is 90 years since George Orwell travelled to the north of England to learn about the living conditions of the northern working-class, during the long Depression of the 1930s. Today’s figures show not much has changed.
George Orwell was very much of the south of England, educated at an Eastbourne prep school then gaining a scholarship to Eton College. Although he was actually born in 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, where his father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked in the Indian Civil Service, Orwell joined Eton in 1917, and for a while lived the epitome of a comfortable southern English life.
Orwell rebelled against this straitjacketing to become a champion of the underdog, including those living in the north of England. He married a Tyneside woman from South Shields, the renowned poet and writer Eileen O’Shaughnessy, who is buried in St Andrew’s cemetery, in Jesmond, Newcastle.
Concern about the north-south divide was already becoming profound in Britain in the 1930s as heavy industries faced shrinking markets. Newer industries were concentrated in the midlands and the south and Orwell came to see what was happening in the north for himself.
Observing with unsparing clarity
The Left Book Club commissioned Orwell to travel to the industrial areas of northern England to investigate and record what life was like for the industrial working class. Orwell went beyond simple observation, immersing himself in the harsh realities of the mining communities — descending into the pits, lodging in rundown workers’ homes, and recording every detail of their lives with unsparing clarity.
The end result was The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937. Almost 90 years later, it is still shockingly pertinent. The despair and poverty conveyed have a terrifying power that transcends time and national boundaries. The Road to Wigan Pier is also Orwell’s road to socialism as he examines his inner self. Born into the British middle class, he recalled how he gradually began to doubt and then hate the strict class barriers that divided British society at that time. Because in his mind, socialism ultimately means only one concept: justice and freedom.
Deprivation across England today
It is against this background that we absorb The English Indices of Deprivation 2025 published in late October. The report is said to be “a national league table of deprivation. The league table ranks neighbourhoods across different aspects of everyday life: income, education, health, crime, barriers to housing and services, and the environment, and combines them into one score”.
A lot of the media attention focussed on the fact that Jaywick, in Nigel Farage’s constituency of Clacton on Sea was the most deprived neighbourhood of all. Farage might like to think about doing something constructive about that, but it is more concerning where north east England local authorities stand.
The North East came top of the table for the percentage of deprived neighbourhoods in any region with over one in five (21.5%) described as deprived. The North East was unsurprisingly followed by the North West and Yorkshire and Humberside regions, with 20.2% and 18.5% deprived neighbourhoods respectively.
This contrasts sharply with only 4% deprived neighbourhoods in London, 3.9% in the South West and East of England. The South East outside London had a mere 3.3%.
Half of Middlesbrough’s neighbourhoods classed as deprived Middlesbrough came top for local authorities across the country, with a shocking 50% of neighbourhoods described as deprived. This was closely followed by nearby Hartlepool, in third place nationally, with 42.1% neighbourhoods deprived.
North East boroughs ranked by deprived neighbourhoods:
Sunderland – 28%
Newcastle – 26%
Redcar and Cleveland – 25%
South Tyneside – 21%
Stockton-on-Tees – 21%
Darlington – 20%
Gateshead – 19%
County Durham – 17%
Northumberland – 11%
North Tyneside – 8%
Clearly, there is a lot of variation within the region, but the fact remains that as a region, we are the most deprived in England. This has serious consequences, soon after a report stated that “almost 100% of children in 73 neighbourhoods in England are living in income-deprived families, according to new measures that factor in the impact of soaring rents. The new indices of multiple deprivation confirm that attempts at levelling up have failed to shift stubbornly high levels of deprivation in so-called left-behind towns and cities in the Midlands and north of England”.
Treasury orthodoxy dictates the rules
This should not come as a surprise to any of us and it hasn’t happened by chance. For decades now HM Treasury orthodoxy has dictated that the rules of the infamous Green Book must be followed. The result is an ever-increasing concentration of government investment in London and the South East. Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said that this bias will be overturned and we must only hope that real progress towards this is made in this month’s budget.
In the meantime, it’s the same old story of the North and particularly the North East. Neglected, with little interest from the Westminster based and focussed central government. At least when Orwell travelled north all those years ago, there was the beginning of a semblance of a regional policy, aimed at helping what we would now call ‘left behind areas’. What do we have now?
We need serious investment in our region and our people. Surely after so many decades of neglect we deserve it.
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