A pre-election journey across Britain’s neglected north

A few days after the UK election was called, with one weather forecast predicting “a wall of rain and thunderstorms” across the north of England, I embarked on the first of many journeys by public transport. At Stockport’s recently renovated train station, the familiar words, “We are sorry to announce . . . ” bounced from the tannoys and around the platforms like abandoned campaign promises. My eastbound train was late. The westbound Liverpool train was also late. So was the northbound service from London to Manchester.

It was 11am on a weekday, but my train was standing room only. It was so tightly packed with passengers clutching luggage from nearby Manchester airport, so crammed with students, business people, families and pensioners headed towards Sheffield, that the member of staff pulling the catering trolley struggled to get it past us.

A couple of days later, a friend sent me a TikTok of the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, who had apparently caught a train. “The train was great, thoroughly enjoyed it,” he said. “Been taking lots of pictures and videos and sending them back to my kids.” My eyes narrowed.

The service I was on, running west to east across northern England, is one of those I hear about a lot from friends and acquaintances who live and work here. One messaged to say it took him four hours to get home on a rail replacement bus, a journey of about 30 miles. Another, a teacher in Manchester, had been doing some work with a school in Sheffield but got so sick of spending more than three hours on the train that he now drives.

“Then I went to a meeting in Essex via the Elizabeth Line,” he added, bitterly, referring to the £20bn, 73-mile link between London and its surrounding counties, which opened two years ago and is now the best-used line in the country. It crops up a lot in conversations about transport in northern England. “You can’t help but feel it’s almost a deliberate piss take,” he said.

This investment in the capital is viewed as highly symbolic in the north of England. The country as a whole has put up with years of poor services, high prices and lack of investment in creaking infrastructure, with the state of the railways increasingly coming to encapsulate a narrative of “broken Britain” in the months leading up to this election. But in the north, people and businesses that rely on those connections have long felt like particularly poor relations. Analysis of ONS data by the Northern Powerhouse Partnership found that in 2021 the median full time salary for people living in London was £37,500, more than £8,400 higher than in the north (£29,096). Stubborn productivity gaps between north and south remain.

My route has been the subject of many transport promises, with most still little more than a line on a map

As the election campaign got under way, I set off on the equivalent of a road trip, but using trains, buses and that agonisingly British combination of both, the rail replacement bus service. The route I chose has been the subject of many transport promises over the past 14 years of Conservative government, with most still little more than a line on a map. It took me through traditional swing seats, the so-called “red wall” of areas won from Labour by the Tories in 2019, and urban Labour heartlands. Nowhere did I overhear the election discussed. Everywhere, people were doing remarkable things to move their places forward, but were losing faith in the state’s will or ability to help.

Back on my crammed train from Stockport, a family of four was squeezed into the vestibule, standing around their holiday suitcases. The mother snapped at her restless son. “We’re on here until the end,” she said. It meant he had another two hours of this. 

Destination Grimsby

The North East Lincolnshire town of Grimsby sits almost at the end of this line. The former fishing capital of the world, it is being watched closely during this election. Its voters backed Brexit in 2016 and, three years later, what was once a Labour stronghold switched to the Tories. Sky News is holding a televised election special here the week after I visit.

As one of the communities that joined the Conservative party’s new electoral coalition last time around, Grimsby was a prime candidate for the “levelling-up” funds promised by central government and designed to revive economically struggling areas. But socio-economic indicators continue to run in the opposite direction. In North East Lincolnshire, healthy male life expectancy fell faster in the decade to 2022 than anywhere else in England and Wales. Everywhere I go on this trip, I overhear people talking about their health.

I am met in the town centre by Josie Moon, a community organiser in her mid-fifties with long silver hair and pink trainers. Home towns are like families, you can criticise your own, but outsiders beware. However, Moon, who is Grimsby born and bred, is in no doubt about the problems faced by hers. She points out all the empty shopping units and, as we drive through drizzle towards the docks, says that if they can, people here use a car to get around due to poor transport links. Bus services have reduced dramatically across the borough since 2010.

Moon explains how, in the days of the town’s fishing boom, the long strip of Freeman Street reaped the benefits of each trawl. “Three-day millionaires, they called them,” she says of the fishermen who would hit land with “money pouring out of their pockets”. They would keep a cab running to take them from pub to pub, while the local tailors worked overtime making them fancy suits. The wives waited until the men had gone back to sea so they could pawn the suits to pay the rent. “A couple of days before he was due home, one of the kids would go and get it from the pawnshop, brush it down and put it on the nail on the back of the bedroom door and he’d never know.”

The fishing industry began to die decades ago. These days Freeman Street is a mix of closed units, charities, slot-machine places, an empty cinema and some eastern European corner shops, the latter testament to the area’s immigration over the past 20 years. When I look it up later, Google’s snapshot of the street has captured a crime scene. On the nearby East Marsh estate, where Moon has lived since 2018, she drives me down Rutland Street, a row of terraced houses, mostly privately owned and let by absent landlords, that she describes as “probably one of the worst streets in the country, in terms of living conditions”. What are the houses like inside, I ask? “Tired. Old. They’re built on a marsh.” Damp? “Damp. Black mould. We’ve got massive childhood asthma.”

Housing conditions also come up a lot during my journey. At the bottom end of the private rental sector in particular, tenants find themselves powerless to get basic repairs, surrounded by damp and mould. Some fear raising the alarm too loudly, lest they get what’s known as a Section 21 notice, or a “no-fault eviction”. The government has been promising since 2019 to outlaw such evictions, which have been driving a spiralling homelessness crisis across the country. But the legislation was abandoned when the election was called.

Realising that “no help was coming” for their crime-ridden estate, in 2018 Moon and her partner began cleaning the streets on a voluntary basis with a small group of residents. Eventually, the group became East Marsh United, a grassroots organisation that now runs everything from clean-up days to theatre workshops out of a colourful unit in the thriving 150-year-old Freeman Street Market. After our tour around the estate, it is an unexpected and heart-lifting hive of activity.

East Marsh is littered with derelict homes. One day, someone at the council called the group. Would they like to buy a house that had been left empty by its absent landlord, with money from the government housing agency, Homes England? They said they would. From there, the group raised a community share offer. With the resulting £500,000, they bought 10 more abandoned houses, all of which are now being let.

Sian Evans previously lived on Rutland Street in a house with such bad black mould that the back bedroom was unusable. It was owned by a private landlord who lived in London. “He had never done anything,” Evans says. “One of the stairs was caving in, so he got someone to come out and just put a metal bracket on it to hold it up.” With East Marsh United’s help, Evans and her family have been rehoused in a property that was standing empty for 13 years.

The government caught wind of Moon and the group’s achievements a few years ago. On a visit to Grimsby in summer 2022, the levelling-up secretary Michael Gove toured the East Marsh estate. “We call it the poverty safari, don’t we, when all the rich white men come,” says Moon to a group of volunteers who have gathered to meet me. “It’s happened quite a few times now,” agrees Lisa February, an artist who joined East Marsh United in her early twenties. Moon continues: “So he rocked up in his suit and he was so nice. He’s very, very polite. He listened, he didn’t take anything down but he listened, he made sure everyone spoke and he synthesised and fed back what he’d heard.”

After Gove’s visit, the group had hopes of getting their hands on some of the government’s levelling-up funds. “He said: ‘I will be in touch, I think this is a really wonderful piece of work, I think you’re all amazing, you’re very dedicated.’ He went back to London and got fired.” (Gove was reinstated three months later.)

There are signs in Grimsby and in other places I visit of the levelling-up activity promised after Boris Johnson’s landslide election victory nearly five years ago. Much has come in the form of one-off grants to improve town centres and to make residents feel proud of their places. Almost everywhere I go, work is being done to the public realm, and heritage buildings are being renovated. But in many such places a basic lack of well-paid jobs and disposable income is also apparent. Turn the next corner, and you will often find yourself on another half-empty high street, its few remaining units dominated by bookmakers, charity shops and discount stores.

When I ask the group in Grimsby of their hopes for the election, there is silence. Hope exists, though, even if it is not vested in politicians. They are clear that it’s work that will take more than “three-year-funding cycles” and constant changes in direction from the state.

Since 2020, this work in East Marsh has been backed by Jason Stockwood, an entrepreneur originally from Grimsby who returned in the wake of Brexit, seeking to rebuild the kind of long-term institutions that once brought such towns together. Stockwood bought the town’s football club and has helped to organise a new philanthropically backed youth centre, which is now being built. It is an attempt, he says simply, “to tip the narrative away from the past to the future”.

I take a bus back to the middle of town where another Grimsby native is heading up the new youth centre. “When you come from a community that takes such a pride in its industries of yesteryear, it’s very difficult to route the culture of the community away from that,” says Lucy Ottewell-Key. “It takes, well, it’s taken 40 or 50 years to get to the point we’re at now.” She hopes the centre will help move things on. Its number-one focus is instilling “ambition” in the town’s youngsters, showing them a future is possible. She identifies green energy, in this case on the coastline, as key to that future.

With the youth centre’s steel frame rising, people have started to pay attention. Ottewell-Key has a warning for those who will form the next government. “This community cannot cope with another set of artist’s impressions. We’ve got to see tangible evidence of change.”

Destination Slaithwaite

A few days later on the other side of Yorkshire, I sit outside the Handmade Bakery in Slaithwaite, a pretty village in the Colne Valley. Basking in the sun by the canalside, I am talking trains with David Hagerty, a chartered surveyor.

Situated halfway between Manchester and Leeds and on one of two main rail lines linking these cities, this area seems like prime commuterland. But in 2018, Hagerty and his campaign group travelled to London to press for more reliable and frequent services, after the entire northern rail system collapsed due to a chaotic timetable change. Six people “trailed down” to Westminster, he says, but were told on arrival that there was too little space for them all to join the meeting.

“Someone said, ‘We travel on TransPennine Express, we’re used to being in confined spaces,’” Hagerty says drily, referring to the local rail operator. “They found us a larger room.”

Although services stabilised to an extent, they remained notoriously bad. During one particularly unreliable period last year, Hagerty emailed me a list of nine rush-hour cancellations, one after another, followed by the sentence: “The commuter town you can’t commute from.”

In May 2023, after pressure from northern leaders, TransPennine Express became the second major northern operator in three years to undergo emergency nationalisation. While reliability has improved, the trade-off has been fewer services. “I don’t think it’s understood at all,” Hagerty says of policymakers’ comprehension of the choice routinely faced by northern passengers: late or not at all.

Travelling to Slaithwaite on a Saturday I have to switch to a rail replacement bus for the final leg. An upgrade first suggested for the line in the 1990s is finally being carried out

I had travelled to Slaithwaite on a Saturday afternoon via Manchester Piccadilly. But the train is only running to the village of Marsden, where I have to switch to a rail replacement bus for the final leg. An upgrade first suggested for the line in the 1990s is finally being carried out. I ask two middle-aged women where they’re off to. They were originally going to go on the Transpennine “ale trail” for a hen do, says one, referring to a popular station-hopping drinking tour of Lancashire and Yorkshire towns. But because of the rail replacement, they couldn’t, so they decided to go shopping in Manchester instead.

Marsden is, coincidentally, where the north’s own version of the Elizabeth Line is now due. Ten years ago this week, Conservative chancellor George Osborne announced the north would get its own east-west high-speed line, dubbed Northern Powerhouse Rail, connecting cities from Liverpool to Leeds and, eventually, on to Hull, near Grimsby. In a speech at Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry, Osborne spoke of how northern cities could combine to “take on the world”. But in 2021, Boris Johnson curtailed the line to end in Marsden. He also cut Leeds out of the planned HS2 network, before last year Rishi Sunak cut Manchester out of it too, leaving no tangible high-speed plans for the north at all.

The north is not the only area to have lost out as a result of the chopping, changing and cancellation of infrastructure proposals in recent times. Yet the repeated scrapping of projects here has become notorious, playing into a sense that the reality of poor connections in the region, and the latent economic potential they are holding back, is simply not understood in London. Even a series of localised northern rail upgrades promised by the prime minister last October, intended as a substitute for high-speed rail, unravelled within hours as it became apparent some of them already existed and the rest had no clear timeframe.

Unsurprisingly, voters here have long since learnt to discount infrastructure promises. Of the government’s 2021 proposal to end the east-west line in Marsden, Hagerty says, “There’s been no opposition here to what will be a very intrusive thing at the top end of the valley. But I think that’s because not a single person around here believes it will happen.”

Destination Keighley

One day, I trundle from Manchester up to the West Yorkshire town of Keighley, on the fringes of Bradford, a journey of about 30 miles that takes the best part of two hours. Like Slaithwaite, it is in a classic Conservative-Labour swing seat. I see, for the first and only time on my travels, evidence that an election is happening: a “Vote Conservative” sign on the side of the party’s association building on the edge of town.

I’ve come to interview a group of education leaders. But when I explain that my tour is by public transport, people want to share war stories. “Shall I tell her about my commute?” says Mallory Morehead, programme manager at Bradford’s Centre for Applied Education Research. Morehead travels to Bradford, the country’s fourth-largest city, and its worst-connected, from the Yorkshire town of Ilkley, 11 miles away. But she doesn’t drive. Recently, due to a landslip near Shipley, a rail replacement bus has also been added into the mix and will remain until the end of the summer. “So it takes me to Bradford, from Ilkley, sometimes two hours,” she says.

Like those I met in Grimsby, the people gathered around this table are trying to move their town forward. In 2017, Theresa May’s government announced 12 “opportunity areas”, of which Bradford was one, providing £16mn for local partners to improve social mobility any way they saw fit. The resulting project was a “game-changer”, says Anne-Marie Canning, the Yorkshire-born academic appointed to head it up, partly because for once the government allowed people some discretion over what they did.

The project shared data between health and education systems locally, working with academics at three Yorkshire universities and the famous Born in Bradford study, which, since 2007, has been tracking the lives of 13,500 children in the city from birth. In three years, it improved the performance of 39 struggling Bradford schools by at least one Ofsted grade. Its work identifying eyesight problems in schools, known colloquially as “glasses in classes”, has been lauded nationally for improving reading.

Then, after five years, the government scrapped the programme. Were you surprised, I ask the group? There is a pause. “The Department for Education said, ‘We’d like you to give us a sustainability plan,’” is the diplomatic answer from Kathryn Loftus, who runs the legacy project on the ground. What does that mean? “‘Could you carry it on when we stop the money,’” says veteran headteacher Jane Dark, to a ripple of derisive laughter.

But they did. Local schools, with the help of business, chipped in a tiny amount each to keep the show on the road. Keighley’s resulting Act Locally partnership is now lobbying local health commissioners to put a dentist in a school, or in a mobile unit, as part of attempts to tackle its chosen priority: food insecurity.

The teachers here are all too aware of the interplay between health and education. Anecdotally, they know the impact of this issue on oral health and, in tandem, on how children perform. They know that in 2022-23, tooth extraction tripled in Bradford, which has some of the highest levels of child poverty in the country. Dark speaks of “children having every single tooth taken out at the age of six” at Airedale hospital due to poor diet. But they need more data to understand the scale of the problem in order to focus intervention.

Dark is blunt about the wider challenges too. In the past decade and a half, she has seen speaking skills upon entry to school deteriorate, as preventive services have been cut. Children in the area were hit particularly hard by lockdowns during Covid-19, and poverty has risen. The situation some families are living in has to be seen to be believed, she says. “Families with literally nothing in the house . . . I’ve personally paid for fridge freezers on recycling sites, been to pick them up and taken them to families’ houses.” Private landlords have a lot to answer for, she adds.

On the train to Keighley, I’d read a report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies about the chronic crisis in local government funding. From 2010, as council grants were reduced under the UK’s austerity programme, the government “by design” withdrew more than twice as much funding from the poorest areas than the richest. Bradford council’s finances are so bad that it was given the emergency power to use investment money for day-to-day spending a couple of months ago.

Separately, the IFS has warned during the election campaign that neither main party’s promises stack up without the need for further austerity. Yet for those sitting around the table in Keighley, while they can barely afford to run their project, they definitely cannot afford to abandon it. They have applied for National Lottery funding.

“Unless we do something, these children and young people will be the next adults. They won’t be working. There will come a point where this country won’t support itself because they’re not working and there’ll be that level of need,” says Dark.

Destination Stockport

Back where I started in Stockport, Tom Ogden leans on an elegantly striped banquette in the town’s most fashionable cocktail bar and gestures to the awakening strip of restaurants, cafés, art galleries and boutiques on the street below. “These are the streets you’d avoid when you were younger,” says the 31-year-old musician, of a town centre which, not long ago, felt pretty much forgotten. “You wouldn’t go down them.”

Britain’s lethargic economy may have dominated the election campaign, but Stockport has been having a moment. Long dismissed as a nondescript satellite of Manchester, perpetually blighted by the grey brutalism of its 1970s Merseyway shopping centre, public and private investors are now betting on the town’s revival. “It’s not embarrassing to be from Stockport any more,” beams Ogden’s partner and fellow Stopfordian Katie, who moved her hair salon here last year after buying the unit at auction, then opened the bar, called the Bohemian Arts Club, above it.

As it rides the wave of Manchester’s boom, Stockport is also a snapshot of how long it takes to turn a local economy around and how that happens. Half a mile away, in a new business quarter around Stockport train station, Steve Oliver summarises what the area used to look like: “A shit bowling alley, a shit cinema and a Laser Quest.” Topped off with the Heaven and Hell nightclub it was, he says, “Quite a horrible, dingy, threatening kind of place.” He marvels at the transformation.

Oliver launched musicMagpie, an online trading platform, out of his suburban Stockport garage in 2007. Coincidentally, that was the year I started out in the town as a reporter, when the big story was the collapse of the town centre’s regeneration plans in the financial turmoil of the credit crunch. In such situations, says Oliver, things can go two ways. “You can give up on it where it just continues to spiral, and we all see those images of just rows and rows of shutters.” Or you can invest.

Rail links have been fundamental to Stockport’s revival. Fast connections are taken for granted in London, where ‘you never think about’ getting on and off the Tube

Around a decade ago, the council here began to do that in earnest, as it saw that Manchester was taking off. Early adopters such as Katie and Tom Ogden later took the plunge. Now graduates and businesses priced out of Manchester are heading south down the West Coast main line, disposable income in hand. Its rail links have been fundamental to Stockport’s revival, according to Oliver. Manchester is just seven minutes away on the train. London is two hours in the opposite direction, when the trains work. He says fast connections are taken for granted in London, where “you never think about” getting on and off the Tube.

Upstairs in the Bohemian Arts Club, I sit with Nicola Headlam, an economist based in the town who headed George Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse agenda in Whitehall during 2018 and 2019. By that time, Osborne had left government and his premise was falling out of fashion, with Brexit dominating. Everything was being “smashed up by toddlers”, Headlam says of politicians during this time. Regenerating towns and cities, on the other hand, requires politicians across parties to pull in the same direction over a long period. Looking around the Stockport bar where punters are sipping cocktails, on a road that was all but empty five years ago, Headlam says the town is “about to go ‘whoosh’” in economic terms. But it has required money, including disposable income, to come in and that did not happen quickly.

It took decades for local leaders and businesses to drag Manchester from the ashes of post-industrialisation. In Stockport it has taken longer still. Converting Grimsby’s lost fishing jobs to green energy is another generational job, as is closing the inequality gaps in Bradford. Or building a high-speed railway line. None of this will, to quote Josie Moon from the East Marsh estate, be achieved within a three-year funding cycle.

Stockwood, who moved away from Grimsby to become a successful businessman and returned when his community voted to leave the EU, believes the key is to rebuild from the ground up. “Actually, what places need is to determine their own destiny and to be backed to get there,” he says. “That comes from your history, your story, telling a new story.”

Voters do not seem interested in the story they are currently hearing. On my travels, which also took me through Leeds, as well as Sheffield and Rotherham in South Yorkshire, and Hull and Goole in the east, I did not hear the election come up in conversation once. What I did hear was people discussing the biggest political issues of the day: housing inequality, health, skills shortages. These, alongside transport, are rarely mentioned by the politicians on the campaign trail.

Katie and Tom, who is the lead singer of the band Blossoms, intend to keep backing their town, and they are not alone. I tell them about a friend who carries a bag that says “Stockport isn’t shit” on it. She takes it everywhere, including to her head office in London. “I have that bag too,” says Katie. Wherever Tom goes on tour, he makes a point of telling people he’s from Stockport. “You’ve got to keep remembering what it was, haven’t you?”

Jennifer Williams is the FT’s northern England correspondent

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