In the best spirit of critical historical inquiry, the latest publication from the Arts and Humanities Research Board Centre for North East England History is by no means an internal exercise in regional celebration. Eschewing the fashionable surface gloss of cultural history, Graeme Milne brings a no-nonsense social science history approach, bolstered by sustained archival research and shrewd understanding of economic systems, to consider “the practical and technocratic varieties of regionalism” (5). Grounded in “practical issues of settlement, economics, transport and governance” (2), Milne's scrupulous study is deeply skeptical in tone, dismissing regional integration and identity in the North East in favor of more limited geographic, economic, and political “horizons” (207).

In line with his previous work on Liverpool, Milne deploys his expertise in maritime and economic history with surgical precision to dissect misperceptions and myths about the North East, “widely regarded as the most clearly defined and self-aware of the English regions, thanks largely to its isolation from other clusters of population, and a cultural exceptionalism rooted in the rise and decline of heavy industry” (1). In 1911, the North East mined 20 percent of the country's coal, 36 percent of its coke, and 40 percent of its ironstone, while making 37 percent of its pig iron and 36 percent of its ships. Seemingly uniform from the outside as one of the world's great export-driven industrial regions, the North East as anatomized by Milne is fractured and fragmented with little interconnection between its three riparian arteries. In the Victorian and Edwardian glory days, economic and administrative development occurred on a river-by-river basis, accentuating the dogged local particularism that prevailed along the Tyne, Tees, and Wear.

With the ports offering access to the northern seas and beyond, these individual riparian zones “offered sufficiently effective and coherent clusters for the purpose of the maritime-industrial economy” (202). While by no means ignoring the coalfield, the inland iron and steel works, and the expanding network of the North Eastern Railway (which saw no need for a London terminal), Milne accords pride of place to the coastal ports and river districts. With their own forelands and hinterlands, these “meso”-level spaces, he insists, were “far more important than the North East as a whole” (202), a judgment based on exhaustive analysis (not always easy reading) of such factors as industrial ordering patterns, shipping investments, and the institutional jurisdictions of the river authorities.

The development of the ports and rivers required innovative forms of institutional intervention, but pioneering as they were, the North East river commissions were by no means fledgling regional authorities. Impressive levels of cooperation and coordination in the moulding of new industrial landscapes failed to extend beyond the individual river systems. Furthermore, town quays remained jealously guarded within municipal jurisdiction as focal points of local pride and ownership, “separate from those of their neighbouring towns, and maintaining an often insular perspective” (114). As conurbations developed around the ports and along the rivers, administration and governance continued in fragmented manner: by the 1930s, some sixteen public authorities handled local government on Tyneside alone, an area about the size of single unified city of Birmingham. Public discussion of bridges and other means of interconnection was conducted in language concerned to establish and monitor boundaries rather than to build links.

This relentlessly revisionist approach to regionalism needs to be placed in comparative context, within the wider redrawing of the regional map of England by nineteenth-century historians to which Milne makes insufficient allusion. Although lacking any cultural identity, the intense but discontinuous urban belt of the so-called near north, stretching from Liverpool to Hull, is now seen as a highly dynamic regional economy in which towns and firms, seemingly separate and mutually antagonistic, operated in creative rivalry rather than feuding. Why was the synergy less positive further north? Here it is worth stressing that the dynamics of the North East maritime-industrial region operated within a different urban configuration, headed by an established economic capital city. As industrial activity spread along and across the three rivers, there was a determination to prevent the region becoming just a Greater Tyneside, subservient to Newcastle.

There is much to be learnt from this important and impressive technocratic case study of the fissures and fault lines concealed beneath cultural constructions of space and identity. Those who read Milne on the depth and resonance of local particularism will understand why those from the North East, but not from Tyneside, object strongly to being labeled “Geordies”—there is a need for studies of the distinctive microcultures to map on to the subregional horizons highlighted here. Indeed, had Milne's coolheaded text been available a few years ago, Labour politicians might well have abandoned plans for the creation of England's first devolved regional assembly in the North East, thereby saving themselves the embarrassment of defeat in the referendum of 2004.