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Fifty Great Things to Come Out of the Midlands
Fifty Great Things to Come Out of the Midlands
BY ROBERT SHORE
Contents
Fifty Great Things to Come Out of The Midlands
About the Publisher
Fifty Great Things to Come Out of The Midlands
Everyone knows what they think about the North and South of England; the clichés abound. But what about that big, anonymous stretch of land in between: the Midlands? Despite being home to a vast swathe of the English population, it’s a region that has neither identity nor purpose. Or that’s how it can sometimes seem, anyway. But, as the following list reveals, quietly, without fanfare, the Midlands has been the source of almost everything that is good about English – and, indeed, world – culture and history.
Here, in order of ascending stupendousness, are my top fifty things to come out of the Midlands:
50) Watchmen
Americans may have created Superman and Batman, but it was a Midlander who reinvented the superhero genre for the post-Cold War era. Alan Moore’s Watchmen even made Time magazine’s top 100 novels of all time in 2005 – the only graphic novel to do so. Despite his success, Moore continues to live in his native Northampton. When he was invited to appear in The Simpsons in 2007, a producer had to fly from LA to the Midlands to record his part. Rorschach, Doctor Manhattan, Silk Spectre – secretly, behind those masks and disguises, they’re all Midlanders.
49) Gravity
Midlanders are very grounded people, so it should come as little surprise that it was a Midlander who first discovered gravity. Former Grantham schoolboy Sir Isaac Newton first hypothesised the inverse-square law of universal gravitation in his 1687 page-turner Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. As the noted versifier Alexander Pope wrote: ‘Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; / God said “Let Newton be” and all was light.’ The Royal Society recently named humble Midlander Newton as the most influential scientist of all time (Einstein came second). Beat that, smarty-pants London!
48) The Sistine Chapel
Did you know that the Midlands is home to what archaeologists have recently dubbed ‘the Sistine Chapel of the Ice Age’? Creswell Crags, an unassuming-looking limestone gorge on the Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire border, contains the most extensive cache of prehistoric bas-reliefs anywhere in the world. The subject matter of the engraved images – created by modifying the natural limestone topography of the caves – includes animals as well as what appear to be the earliest human nudes in the history of British art. That’s right: Ice Age Midlanders invented Britart.
47) Mercians