“There is not a finer county in England than Derbyshire,” wrote Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice. But what use is all that exquisite beauty if you’re unable to take the barouche to the Duke’s summer ball because the council can’t afford to mend the road?
That is the dilemma facing residents of High Peak, the peak-strewn (clue’s in the name) area of north-west Derbyshire that shoulder-barges its way up between South Yorkshire and Greater Manchester in a manner akin to a petty officer aggressively forcing his way between two would-be lovers who’ve been eyeing each other up across the canapés. (Look at a map, you’ll see what I mean.)
High Peak is home to semi-precious Blue John stone, Mam Tor and Buxton opera house – and also, curling its way through the hills like a ripped silk pelerine and proving just as damaging to the bank account, Snake Pass.
Snake Pass – or less romantically, the A57 – was built and paid for in the 1820s by the Duke of Norfolk and Duke of Devonshire; incidentally, the latter’s residence, Chatsworth House, inspired Mr Darcy’s Pemberley in Austen’s novel. But 200 years on, the task of maintaining it lies with Derbyshire County Council – and has exerted such demands upon their purse that they wish to withdraw from the exercise entirely.
If you’ve ever heard a radio travel bulletin, you’ll know Snake Pass. It is so prone to landslips, floods and overly-ambitious motorcyclists that it is shut for 70 days a year on average. Restoring a stretch of tarmac that recurrently gets buried under 500 tonnes of mountainside is no cheap task. And Derbyshire council have politely suggested that given Snake Pass is used primarily by the people of the two major cities it runs between, Manchester (to which it is geographically closer) and Sheffield, perhaps they could pay for it.
For this reason the 90,000 High Peak residents are potentially set to move out of Derbyshire – in a bureaucratic sense, anyway – and into Greater Manchester. “We like the name Derbyshire, but ultimately all our connections are into the North not into the East Midlands,” High Peak’s MP Jon Pearce told The i Paper.
Now, trying to work out precisely where the midlands ends and the north begins is like trying to land on the gas giant Jupiter – there’s no precise boundary; just at one point, you’re in it. (A Wikipedia page for the “north midlands” explains that it essentially consists of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and the fictional town of Brumley from JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls.) But there’s more to this swapping of regional identities than just one permanently rubble-strewn road.
Not coincidentally, this High Peak discussion is happening at the same moment the local government reforms being led by Angela Rayner are in discussion. It’s an example of how all around the country, the connection between our counties, our regions and the people that belong to them are in flux.
For example, England’s smallest county, Rutland – absorbed into Leicestershire in 1974, re-established in 1997 – is now on the brink of disappearing once again, as the “mega-councils” that will merge district councils with county ones take shape.
These unitary authorities are designed to have populations of around 500,000, and at just 41,000 people Rutland has no chance of meeting that level. So something bigger will take its place – something that might mean residents can finally be certain exactly who is responsible for collecting their bins, but something that will not be, fundamentally, “Rutland”.
Does that matter? After all, ever since the industrial revolution, towns and cities have been much more the essence of our local identities than counties. There’s something strange about looking at a map of the historic counties and seeing what we now know as the sprawl of Birmingham as just a village in Warwickshire, or Liverpool as a small port in Lancashire.
Anyone from somewhere obscure will tell you that’s it “not far from…” and name the nearest place that has a Football League club. And counties can get messed with at the stroke of a bureaucratic pen. Those 1974 reforms created Cleveland, Avon and Humberside – very much the Betamaxes of local bureaucracy reorganisation; names that live on only in residual police forces and Smiths lyrics.
But on the other hand, counties – especially our historic counties – are quite literally the bedrock of the country. They’re hard boundaries – you can’t be from “the outskirts of Worcestershire”, it’s a defined zone. But those boundaries are of course porous; you don’t need a passport to get from one to the other. In that sense there is something about them that allows an easily-acquired sense of pride and identity that does not need to come with some of the negative side of that coin.
That is the risk of some of these reforms: taking the councils out of the counties removes one more element of what they were, and you’re left with just a handful of cricket clubs as the only county-based elements of British life at all. And I think that is a shame.
Then again, all the county pride in the world won’t fill a single pothole.
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