03-27-2014, 04:21 AM
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#2598 (permalink)
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lol first that article yesterday now this in the Guardian:
Why the Midlands is the best place in Britain | UK news | The Guardian
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From Shakespeare to Walkers crisps to oxygen, there's more to the Midlands than Spaghetti Junction. In fact, it's where anything of any value – ever – started life
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The US is usually configured in terms of a culture clash between either north and south (Yankees v Confederates) or east and west (New York v California): the vast American Midwest, patronisingly portrayed as the home to bumpkins with straw between their teeth, is treated with disdain or mistrust. A similar state of affairs exists in England: hence the general attitude to Birmingham, the one place in the Midlands that people think they know something about – and all of it (roads, architecture, accent) negative.
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Why should Midlanders start to identify themselves with their broader homeland as volubly and visibly as northerners do with theirs? Quite simply because almost everything of any value, ever, started life in England's belly: the Midlands has served as the womb and birthing pool for most of the ideas and innovations that have driven English, and indeed world, civilisation since the earliest times. We have just never been very good at telling people about it. We are too modestly capable, too contentedly accomplished. Just too Midland, in other words.
Take the Industrial Revolution. That's often thought of as a northern phenomenon, but the truth is that if Britain entered the 18th century an agricultural nation and left it the world's foremost industrial power, it was almost entirely thanks to the ingenuity and enterprising spirit of Midlanders. The Lunar Society, so named because its members met in and around Birmingham on the Mondays nearest the nights of the full moon, included many of the most innovative thinkers of a particularly innovative age: not just steam pioneers Matthew Boulton and James Watt, but the chemist and freethinker Joseph Priestley (he discovered oxygen – that's right, thanks to him we all started to breathe more easily), Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood: major figures not just of the Industrial Revolution, but of the wider, globe-reconfiguring Enlightenment.
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Their individual contributions were at least as significant as those of Voltaire and Goethe and Benjamin Franklin, so it is only fitting that the Brum-based movement has been honoured with the geographically specific designation of the Midlands Enlightenment. Though I'm guessing that most readers will never have heard that grand-sounding title before.
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The standard English spoken today is Midland in origin; thanks to Shakespeare, many of its most common phrases are too. Reader, your tongue is a Midlander.
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British media speaking positively about Birmingham & the Midlands? Whatever next  .
They just posted this too: 20 great things from the Midlands | UK news | The Guardian
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Last edited by Cuthbert; 03-27-2014 at 05:28 AM.
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