Oh, these bleak winds and bitter, northern skies.

‘On that bleak hill top the earth was hard with a black frost, and the air made me shiver through every limb.’ So goes Emily Brontë’s description of Wuthering Heights.

It captured perfectly the scene I imagined would greet me on returning from warmer climes to my native Derbyshire this September. Nor was I far wrong: a torrential thunderstorm complete with lightning bolts hurled from heaven was in full flow, and the famously green hills and dales seemed as gloomy and inhospitable as Bronte’s Yorkshire moors: even the sheep took shelter. This is certainly not the kind of place, I thought, for art to flourish: people are far too busy simply battling to exist without admiring the quality of light on the landscape (or similar).

London is where the culture is: home to the largest concentration of galleries and museums in the country, the most prolific theatres and hundreds upon hundreds of writers, painters, sculptors, dancers…And why not? It is, after all, the capital. In 1762, James Boswell wrote of this metropolis ‘The noise, the crowd, the glare of shops and signs agreeably confused me. I was rather…wildly struck’. I often feel much the same.

But while the art in London may be noisier, more popular and better publicised, here in the North of England* people are quietly getting on with things. What things, however, remains to be seen. This blog will be a chance for the North to get a look in, a moment in the limelight: it will be a wake-up call to the forgotten charm, neglected beauty and often overlooked originality of the art from this cold climate.

*an area which shall be defined rather broadly