Episode 4

Historian Helen Castor looks at the radical middle - the revolutionary political gestures that have emanated from England's Midlands and redefined the rest of the country.

When some people hear the word Midlands, they think of Middle England, a socio-political label applied to people of traditional, rather conservative views. But despite lying geographically in the middle of the country, Midlanders as a tribe are not at all middling in character. The middle of England is far from Middle England.

The West Midlands was the engine of parliamentary and civic reform in the 19th century. Birmingham, proclaimed the Congregational minister Dr Robert Dale, was capable of deeds "as great as were done by Pisa, by Florence, by Venice in their triumphant days". One of those great deeds was the 1832 Reform Act, which created our modern electoral system. The foremost public campaigner in securing the reform of the franchise was the visionary, Brum-based economist Thomas Attwood. "The country owed Reform to Birmingham," declared Lord Durham, "and its salvation from revolution."

The East Midlands, home to the nation's great individualists - from Robin Hood via Arthur Seaton, the anti-hero of Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, to Margaret Thatcher - presents a different case. The beginnings of the USA can be traced to the East Midlands' tradition of gritty, cussed individualism, and the Separatists who later sailed to the untamed expanses of North America aboard the Mayflower. The Notts-led Pilgrim Fathers established a colony there in 1620 and bequeathed several defining legacies to the modern nation - not least the so-called 'Mayflower Compact', which laid the basis for the first democratically elective government in the New World.

Produced by Robert Shore and Ashley Byrne.
A Made in Manchester production for BBC Radio 4.