Others do things
differently. Professor John Denham is
Director of Winchester University’s Centre for English Identity and
Politics. Interviewed by Wessex Society
for its magazine The Wessex Chronicle,
he recalled the situation in Southampton
during his time as a Labour MP there:
“I helped organise St George’s Day in
Southampton and Southampton’s a very diverse city – so how do you have a St
George’s Day which can involve everybody and yet is still an English
festival? The story we tell is that Southampton
is a great English city, that’s been there throughout English history, and it’s
always been made up of all the people who’ve lived there, which because it’s a
port city has always been people from all over the world. People can understand that you can be both
English and very diverse, through your history and everybody that’s come
together to make the city. A couple of
years ago I was working on this with a young Sikh woman councillor, born in
Southampton, and we discovered that we both had had relatives in the British
forces serving in the Far East during the
Second World War. That’s an example of
how family and local histories can be inter-twined as part of a common story.”
The
difference then is that Southampton projects the primacy of territory, locally
and nationally – loyalty to place rather than to race – whereas Bristol appears scared of
any continuity with its foundational past.
Curiously, when it comes to Wessex and the marking of St Ealdhelm’s Day, the
roles are reversed. Bristol
is happy to fly the Wyvern outside the Council House (or ‘City Hall’, for the
Anti-Mayor and his fellow deniers of distinctiveness); Southampton
still sits in stony silence, unmoved by calls to fly. Perhaps this will be the year Southampton sees sense?
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