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The art gallery in Whaley Bridge, a community of 6,500 nestled in the rugged undulations of central England’s Peak District, has two paintings in pride of place.
One shows the international opera festival held every summer in the genteel spa town of Buxton, a 20-minute drive away.
Above it is a depiction of Manchester’s Corporation Street, a harder-edged urban thoroughfare an hour in the other direction.
The juxtaposition feels apt. Across this collection of communities known as High Peak a debate is bubbling. Should the towns and villages in this rural corner of the country secede from their ancestral county of Derbyshire and throw their lot in with the growing city nearby?
“It’s a no brainer,” says local Labour MP Jon Pearce. Moving at least some of the area’s communities into the conurbation of Greater Manchester would benefit residents, he claims. “We have to be open to where economies are going,” he adds, “and city regions are going to be drivers of growth across the country.”
Greater Manchester is, on some measures at least, booming. The north’s biggest city has been outpacing the capital on economic growth since 2015.
Many young professionals who work there opt to live in the crisp air of High Peak towns such as Whaley Bridge and commute in. Greater Manchester’s mayor, Andy Burnham, has plans to bring suburban rail lines serving the area’s towns into his local transport system over the coming years. Just as the London Underground binds parts of Essex and Buckinghamshire to the capital, so Manchester’s transport network may do the same.
Pearce’s idea has a secondary driver. Government ministers are embarking on the biggest local government shake-up in half a century, leaving large parts of England’s administrative map, including this one, up for debate.
For High Peak residents this is an opportunity, says Paul Swinney, director of policy and research at the Centre for Cities think-tank. “It’s part of Greater Manchester’s labour pool,” he adds, “and so the mayor should be able to control policy there.”
But what makes sense to economists does not always find favour with the public.
Historical attempts to redraw England’s notoriously tricky local government map have often been snuffed out. The deeply held identities of individual communities tend to defy the hard logic of agglomeration or bureaucratic tidying.
The village of Mosborough was taken out of Derbyshire and subsumed into Sheffield in 1967 despite objections. A group of community historians there told the BBC that High Peak residents should think twice about changing counties, noting that it might benefit the city more than rural communities.
In Derbyshire, a Change.org petition has sprung up in opposition to Pearce’s plan, arguing that relocation would interfere with the “identity, culture, and community ties” of the High Peak and could affect specific local interests adversely, such as the local economy and environmental protection efforts.
Barry Lewis, leader of the Conservative-led Derbyshire county council, calls the idea “bloody bonkers” and describes local residents as “fiercely independent Derbyshire folk”.
A Manchester resident myself, I set out to ask the residents in Whaley Bridge and was struck afresh by just how far rural Derbyshire feels from the city.
Armed with my art gallery metaphor, I prepared for vigorous debate about the merits of changing counties but was met instead with bemusement.
“Why?” is the most common reply.
One man, delivering a parcel to the local wine bar, dismisses any prospect of changing administration to Manchester. The city is, he says firmly, a “shithole”.
It just “seems a long way away”, says 79-year-old James, who is on his way into the station.
He does, he concedes, like Andy Burnham. “I could see an advantage to it if they dropped the council tax by half,” he ponders. “But they’re not going to do that, are they?”
jennifer.williams@ft.com
