‘Oh my gosh, they’re all from London and Cambridge’: York University’s northerners fight back
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/jan/04/oh-my-gosh-theyre-all-from-london-and-cambridge-york-universitys-northerners-fight-back
Posted by insomnimax_99
27 Comments
My course was full of Europeans and Chinese people, but I suppose that is less shocking that people from a hundred miles down the road
I went to uni in York. Most locals were absolutely lovely, but it was honestly shocking to see the number of people (both students and from the city) who had an irrational hatred of anyone not from Yorkshire. I’m not talking jokey banter hatred either, but genuine deep-seated bigotry. It’s baffling and really quite unpleasant.
There are 8 million Londoners so it’s statistically likely that some will be there, some of us even have northern parents
> [Southerners] always ask if they can come to the society, and I say: ‘Not really, because it’s not really the point, it’s not the space we want it to be if there’s people from the south there.’”
That sounds horribly narrow-minded. One of the many benefits of attending university is mixing with a wide range of people, who may – shock! – be from somewhere different from you. This helps broaden your mind and gain a better understanding of the world outside your particular region of one country.
Rather than “fighting” to spend time with the same people you already do at home, maybe take the opportunity to mix with people who aren’t the same as you?
I think “southern” is being used as a byword for posh public school students here.
There is an actual culture clash between state school northerners and public school southern toffs.
However, if they also mean just normal working class people from say, Portsmouth, then they really need to grow up
I think pointless hate based on the region of the country one comes from, and articles about it, is just what England needs right now actually
Geniunely nothing more trite than the North/South divide debate.
Yes, everyone from down south is a posh, stuck-up tory voter who doesn’t smile and everyone from up north is a cottage dwelling troglodyte with stone money in their pocket and cares too much about bread roll namings.
Shut the fuck up
25% of students aren’t even British at the University of York.
This article reads like something from 20 years ago.
Northern icons Wallace and Grommit?
The fictional characters based on northern stereotypes that were created in Bristol?
Although the article probably exaggerates the issue a lot, the byline doesn’t really reflect the rest of the article particularly well. The comments here don’t either though.
Asside from that, if the survey quoted is accurate crazy that over half of Northerners at UK universities feel they’ve been mocked/ridiculed etc…in a social setting, for having a Northern accent.
Seems very League of Gentlemen
https://youtu.be/F75d01l5AxM
My opinion as a northener in Cambridge:
Yes there’s legitimate reasons for northern students to feel frustrated, but aiming the frustration at other students who just happen to be born in the south is illogical.
Yes I feel stupid and less than eloquent reading texts out loud in supervisions in comparison to my Southern counterparts. Though I imagine a student with a thick Essex accent would feel the same.
Yes I have been told I don’t sound like I should be at Cambridge because of my accent. Once. By an international student. At a northern soc event.
The Cam northern society is great but class, privilege etc whatever really isnt as simple as north south or posh accent not posh accent and there’s nothing more irritating than listening to very intelligent people say such very stupid things.
Plenty of posh northerners at unis in the south too. If you’re at a good uni, chances are that you will encounter people who went to a state school/private school. It’s not the end of the world, if anything that’s the real goal. To be able to send your children to posh schools too.
I have a normal very understandable Northern accent and the amount of Southerners at my university, which was also in Yorkshire, who were incredible rude to me because of it was crazy. Pretending they couldn’t understand me, asking me to say things again because I “sounded so funny”, and correcting how I spoke. Also telling me I “sounded like a local” in a way which made being a “local” sound derogatory.
Irish guy living in the north here. Yere all the same, hate to break it to ye. The difference is between posh cunts and not posh cunts. North/south makes minimal difference to how sound a person is
It’s really interesting how students keep managing to find new ways to be completely and utterly pathetic wet wipes.
Same situation at Durham I found – many students there were from London and the south. In fact one of the colleges – Hild-Bede was known colloquially as “Surrey college,” due to the large amount of students from the southern counties.
One of the perks, for me, of University was not being surrounded by people from my home town.
You c*nt make it up. Why c*nt we just get along? It’s funny when I point out to my fellow northerners that they swear when they don’t mean to, especially the older generation. I’m guilty of this also sometimes.
I was a poor kid from the North East in 1999 and went to York University. My fellow students / hall mates were all from the south and London. They were wealthy and I was immediately side-lined. I couldn’t afford the lifestyle, didn’t have shared experiences growing up, it was awful. I was absolutely looked down on. I was so isolated I left.
“Yeah here up North we’re nice and friendly and cultured unlike those INBRED, INFERIOR SOUTHERN CRETINS WHO WITHER AWAY IN THEIR MANSIONS WHILE CONTEMPLATING OUR DEMISE”
Yawn. So tedious talking about generalisations of Northerners and Southerners. Tell me you’ve barely mingled with people not from your home town without telling me you’ve barely mingled with people not from your home town.
Londoner currently at uni in the north and I can tell you I find it very hard at times to connect with people and I get asked the strangest questions about my background and political affiliations that they would never ask other students. Obviously some people are lovely regardless but it does get to a point where you feel a bit unwelcome.
That’s ridiculous! And v narrow minded.
However I went to a Uni like York from the North and I was quite taken aback by southern public school kids. I didn’t understand why they all dressed the same way or why they all acted like they were about 40 at 18.
I had never come across anything like it before!
As a northerner who went to York, not even going to bother reading this (particularly as it’s the “University of York” not “York University” which is in toronto FFS). This same article has appeared plenty of times over the decades.
They used to say at York that due to student body churn, a campus community has a cultural memory of no more than five years.
The reality is that there has always been a split in the fresher demographic, this is partly deliberate or a result of deliberate recruitment policies, and York has traditionally been fairly good at bridging it. The University was specifically created as an alternative “Oxbridge for the North” with a semi-collegiate system, emphasis on traditional subjects, personal tutorial style teaching. There was a split by subject, for example the PPE and English Lit lot were mostly southerners who had been rejected from Oxbridge and almost universally had Bristol and York as their alternatives on the UCAS form, and were also more likely to feel the need to conform to that semi-RP accent in order to fit in at Drama Soc. In contrast, the science subjects tended to have a wider range, especially better northern representation, and people tended to be more chill and less pretentious. (By the way there’s at least one BBC reporter I sometimes hear on the radio who hung around with the Tories and had a hilariously put on posh accent at uni but has now regressed to cockney).
Yes, it was tedious at times and I can remember heading to the Indie society and having a dig at some southern grammar school eng lit students who fetishised northern maths students, and taking the mick of them while singing along to “Common People”, but everyone was mixed together and learned to get along as part of the university experience and the emphasis on college and society life gave people a chance to mix outside of their subject groups.
By the way in the early 2000s there was a fuss on campus as they decided to start charging differential rent for student rooms depending on services and this inevitably led to less mixing of students from differetn socioeconomic backgrounds in halls; before this mostly everyone paid the same per week and it was a lottery whether you ended up in a breezeblock walled cell (Wentworth before it was knocked down, yay) or ensuite in Alcuin, meaning the people you met in the shared kitchenette on that fateful sunday in october when arriving as a fresher could come from vastly different backgrounds and that was part of the experience.
It’s a class divide, not a regional one. There are plenty of well-off Yorkshiremen too. I was lucky enough to only work outside of term time, and got made fun of for that by some of the richest people I’ve ever met (from all over the country – although many argued their very southern hometowns were “actually in the midlands” or something). They always held nearly all of the part-time work, with favourable hours to work around weekends away in Europe, sometimes seemingly just so they could cosplay as ‘real students’ more believably.
> Lucy Morville says she felt “culture shock” at being surrounded by southerners
Wait, I thought we were meant to be the ones who are soft?