Like many students from the north, Lucy Morville says she felt “culture shock” at being surrounded by southerners when she arrived at university. But she said the shock was even greater because it wasn’t what she expected when she enrolled at the University of York.
“I hadn’t travelled much down south before university, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, they’re all from London and Cambridge.’ It was such a shock to me,” she said.
“I’m from Burnley, in east Lancashire, and I was surprised there were so many people at York who weren’t from the north, because I thought more people would do the same thing as me and stay local.”
In her first year, Morville found herself living with 16 students but only one from the north. So she and her friends set to work to revive York’s Northern Society, offering events including a northern-themed fancy dress pub crawl that included northern icons Wallace and Gromit and the Gallagher brothers, with Morville dressed as a Pendle witch.
In spring, the society is holding a “Yorkshire Olympics” of events including black pudding throwing. The society also means students from different parts of the north are learning more about each other’s regions, she said.
Lucy Morville: ‘We go to university and get fun made of our accents, so it’s time to fight back.’ Photograph: Colin McPherson/The Guardian
Adelle Stripe, the novelist and journalist born in York, said the existence of northern societies recognises that the north contains many distinctive identities “under one great rainy umbrella”, rather than a single experience.
“The north is not homogenous. Politically and culturally, it carries many shades. It is not just pit villages, back-to-backs and post-industrial wastelands. It is also a place of wealth, verdant landscapes and architectural beauty. Language, history and economics vary enormously, even from North to South Yorkshire,” Stripe said.
“In an elite university, you might feel under-represented, so if this fosters a sense of community for students who are experiencing isolation, then it’s to be encouraged. I don’t think northerners need a society to do that, though, we are quite capable of finding each other without such formality.”
While many of the northern societies in the south seem keen to share their love of Greggs sausage rolls, and the logo of the London School of Economics northern society is a yorkshire pudding, the University of Cambridge’s branch has a more serious side.
Alongside a programme of events including punting, sponsored by an international law firm, Cambridge’s northern society states: “We know that applying to Cambridge can feel daunting – especially if you have never met anyone who has done it before. Our goal is to change that.”
A survey commissioned by the Sutton Trust, a charity aiming to boost social mobility through education, found that more than half of northern students at UK universities said they had “been mocked, criticised or singled out in a social setting” because of their accent.
One student from Newcastle said: “At interviews, I remember one boy from London asking a large group of people if they could ‘actually understand [my] accent’, which was pretty awful and not a nice first impression of university.” Others said they were asked by other students if their parents worked in coalmines.
For Morville, York’s northern society is a way of turning the tables.
“I feel like we go to university and get fun made of our accents, so it’s time to fight back. [Southerners] always ask if they can come to the society, and I say: ‘Not really, because it’s not really the point, it’s not the space we want it to be if there’s people from the south there.’”
But that doesn’t stop southerners trying to sneak in: “There was one girl, I think she came with her mates, and she was doing a fake scouse accent the whole night. People from that area were there, and one of them clocked it. She was found out and she revealed that she was putting it on.”
