Beatrix Potter was many things. Children’s author, illustrator, conservationist, Northern Powerhouse.
The latter may surprise you, because the Northern Powerhouse is generally thought to be a government policy about regenerating the economy of the north of England, rather than a label for a person who once happened to lvie there.
But the Department for Communites & Local Government just tweeted this, so I guess it’s official:
Click to expand, if that’s the sort of thing that does it for you.
Three things about this are bothering us.
1) Potter wasn’t even a proper northerner. While he parents were Mancunian, and she’s associated with the Lake District, she grew up in the uber-plush London district Kensington, of all places.
2) Hang on, isn’t the Northern Powerhouse thing meant to be about the region’s cities? The village of Near Sawrey, where Potter spent much of her later years, is a very long way from up-and-coming Manchester. What the hell has it got to do with the official policy of using improved transport links in the M62 corridor to leverage the benefits of aggregation?
More to the point though:
3) We’d love to be wrong, but: it’s not entirely clear that one more children’s book is going to be quite enough, in itself, to regenerate the economy of an entire region.
Now stop mucking about and fund HS3.
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