A long way North

At the end of last week we ran some focus groups for a client in Newcastle – and believe me, it’s a long way North. We got on the 12.30 from Kings Cross, and from the moment we boarded the train it was like stepping back into the 1970’s. The interior of the train was beige, the trolley cart bounced from seat to seat as the nice lady struggled to wheel it up the carriage. But aside from the 70’s décor and the risk of losing the odd finger as the cart juddered by, it was a really easy journey to the beautiful city of Newcastle.

In talking to some of locals their pride in the city really shone through. We were told tales of great shopping opportunities with the flagship Fennicks store being a ‘miss it, miss out’ destination. We were treated like alien beings when we confessed to being from London…but once we had passed the visual examination to confirm we were not, in fact, from Mars, conversation resumed as normal.

Imagine our surprise then, when we saw hundreds of people in a queue in the cold and dark of a November evening. After a few minutes one woman made her way up and down the long line of workers….it was obviously pay-day, and she was the wages clerk, giving cash to each and every worker. This is one of the main cities of the North.

It was then that the culture gap really began to sink in…and it’s felt both ways. One of the key outcomes from the focus group – England doesn’t end at Leeds! There’s much more of England to engage with. This was reinforced the next morning when listening to the Today Programme – where the party funding row seemed remote to the point of irrelevance. It neither touches nor interests many of the people we spoke to. The challenge for us, as politicos and communicators, is to make the issues and opportunities at Westminster relevant to the whole nation, not merely the London chattering classes.