The second half of the twentieth century saw a surge in the number of public bodies that took on an obligation to encourage the cultural life of the people through the arts. Among them there was the BBC, the Arts Council, commercial television (and the promises it had to make under the 1954 Television Act), local government, and various public moralists who offered their services as makers and breakers of public taste. Some of them were committed to the people and looked for ways of working their own art into a living tradition. Others wanted to promote a cause or a career or their particular conception of the grand project. The Victorians built libraries and schools. The Edwardians enjoyed ritual and ceremonial. Interwar progressives taught in settlements for the unemployed or the Workers’ Education Association. From 1945, however, a new kind of cultural activist appeared, and everyone had to learn the faux language of regeneration through culture—nowhere more so than in the far forgotten corner of northeast England.

The people, however, already had a culture, and news of its degeneration was premature. Indeed, apart from the creative artists (who for the most part deal in what they have to deal in whatever the culture), the idea of the cultural region was always the work of a fourth estate that lived by its own initiatives. As Natasha Vall puts it, “The north east is a fruitful site to explore this continuing debate. With its historic contribution of cultural infrastructural deficit and tenacious vernacular traditions the region is a significant ‘ideal type’ for assessing the efficacy of cultural policy initiatives since 1945” (3).

We can better understand what Vall means by “cultural policy” if we understand that she is not interested in the popular and commercial. In other words, if she was out in Newcastle on a cold Wednesday evening in 1966 (like I was) and saw three poets and a dog coming one way from the Morden Tower and 40,000 people coming the other way from St. James Park, Vall would be more interested in the three poets and the dog. (I thank Gordon Burn for this image.) She is, however, especially interested in those who engaged with the “vernacular traditions,” and in this respect she departs from mainstream cultural and subaltern studies by showing a broad and open interest in the work of those who were committed to the region. Although the book contains a number of factual errors in economic and social history (e.g., she does not appear to know what back-to-back housing is), Vall deserves the highest praise for basing her work on the history of those northern institutions that fought for a regional hearing. Among these she includes BBC regional radio and television from the 1950s, the People’s Theatre in the 1960s, Morden Tower (1964), the Northumbrian Traditional Group (1964), Amber Films (1969), Beamish Museum (1971), Live Theatre (1973), Newcastle/Gateshead Quays (2001), and all those rare and precocious talents who ran and overran them. Cultural Region makes sense of the culture by making sense of the artists and arts entrepreneurs, and in this respect it is exemplary. If you want to study cultural regions and are not sure how, this is the place to start.

But the book also reminds one of the black holes and mysteries of cultural history. For the trouble with “cultural policy” is that so much of what gets decided on the inside is not open to those on the outside. Anthony Gormley’s the Angel of the North, for instance, was erected in 1998 to stand as “one of the country’s most recognizable pieces of public art” (152). But if like all art we cannot be sure what it means, neither can we be sure how it got there. The Angel was eventually paid for by the European Regional Development Fund, the Arts Council Lottery Fund, Northern Arts, and local business people. But the decision also had something to do with Gateshead, with environmental concerns about old industrial sites, with government inner-city initiatives including a recently successful Garden Festival, and with a plethora of meetings and committees, not one of which will yield the final decision. There is an absence at the heart of cultural history, this history included. We cannot know, and the author can only guess, how the Angel took wings. We do not know who said what to whom to seal the deal to nod the nod and wink the wink that set the policy that built the art that created the culture that identified the region (or not, as the case may be).

It is hard at times even to know just what Vall means by “cultural.” Repetition does not yield definition, and when she tries to do without it we are told that when a strong “regional consciousness” meets a strong “identity of the region” you get what the northeast has—a strong “awareness of the regional space” (5). But this takes us no further than where we were before, and Vall ends up skating round a tautology: consciousness plus identity equals awareness.

The book begins to lose some of its sharpness by the end, and it takes on the discourse of a culture pivotal on new structures that seek to capitalize on old networks, thus underpinning a rapidly changing cultural space modified in part by culture-led regenerative projects that allow reflection, and so on, on what this region has to offer. Well what does the region have to offer? I have before me a 2012 holiday package called “Welcome to North East England.” It’s bright. It’s purple. It’s helpful. And it’s enough to make you want to dump all this regenerative cultural region stuff and bring back the old degenerative industrial region stuff. At least in 1912, Newcastle/Gateshead Quays had a million people making something the world wanted to buy.