England Has a North-South Divide, Too. But Where Exactly Is It?
WATFORD GAP, England—There is no Mason-Dixon Line in England to settle debate about where the North ends and the South begins. So physicists at Sheffield Hallam University used artificial intelligence to draw one. Their conclusion: The line runs right past Watford Gap rest area, a clump of fast-food outlets and gas pumps on a highway 80 miles from London.
In England, as in the U.S., differences between North and South extend beyond geography to encompass money, class and culture. Northerners say they are friendlier than Southerners, whom they often regard as snobs. Southerners don’t much like to travel too far into the North, which they see as a land of rain and fading factory towns.
Southerners often call their evening meal “dinner"; Northerners call it “tea." The scientists’ goal was to replace preconceptions with something more tangible. “A lot of our identity is carried in the food we eat, isn’t it?" said Robin Smith, one of the physicists. “So we thought, would that make sense? By examining our food habits, would it reveal some kind of divide?" Smith and his researchers fed the locations of popular Northern and Southern chain restaurants into the kind of artificial neural network that also is used to predict the outcome of nuclear reactions.
Their objective was to identify the line separating Greggs stores, a northern favorite selling sausage rolls and steak pies, from Pret-a-Manger, a London-based chain whose menu includes vegan avocado wraps and specialty coffees. England has been wrestling with the North-South question for generations. George Orwell suggested the divide began to take shape during the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the great Northern factory towns of Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds.
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