Lizzie Lovejoy, poet, performer and picture-maker, Co. Durham

Championing the northeast's evolving cultural scene

‘We are Northern. We are more than.’ It’s a sentiment that pulses through Lizzie Lovejoy’s work. As a poet, performer and picture maker, their creative life is steeped in the culture of the northeast of England.

But it’s not just the tourist-approved ‘high art’ culture of Durham Cathedral and the Northumbrian saints, nor a nostalgic tour of industrial heritage. Lizzie’s work is firmly grounded in the here and now, exploring the lesser-known branch lines of our native region. That might be flash fiction summing up aspects of Peterlee in 75 words – one for each year since the new town was established. That project inspired a ‘zine, and a longer poem, transforming a tangle of abandoned shopping trolleys into an elephant’s graveyard of old history in a new town.

It might be riding the rails, not to memorialise the oldest railway in the world but to tell the stories of today’s passengers, the modern, post-industrial northeast. Those stories, set to the beat of wheel and rail, form part of the wide-ranging Trailways project featuring musician Sam Slatcher and more up and down the route of the Stockton & Darlington Railway.

One of the challenges for northeast culture, especially working-class northeast culture, is the sense of Tall Poppy syndrome. Interchangeable villages made up of interchangeable terraces of interchangeable houses can easily breed a sense of knowing and accepting limits. Standing out, challenging, even indirectly, the established order, can be a risk.

“For me, a lot of that is about framing,” Lizzie explained. “Pride, and especially being proud of your world, has always been kind of embarrassing. It’s one of those very English things where you don’t shout about yourself or what you do; if somebody notices, that’s nice but you don’t take it any further.

“But in the beginning my creative work was more of a battle. It wasn’t about being proud of who we are and more about fighting to say that we deserve to be seen at all. A lot of my stuff is about working-class culture and other marginalised identities.

“When you reframe it, it’s not about being proud, it’s about fighting to exist. Then it’s easier to break through that barrier.”

In time, self-assertion can help to foster a new, more confident identity.

“Eventually, you feel like you’ve done enough fighting and you can start saying: ‘Yeah, we should be proud. We’ve done a lot of cool stuff, brilliant things have happened here.’

“That’s especially true of this younger generation, which has zero memory of a lot of our industrial heritage. They need to re-form a new identity about what it means to be in the northeast. We’ve got this history, but what does it mean now? We can’t live on the past forever.”

‘Why shouldn’t it happen here? Why can’t we have this?’

The generation gap is striking. For my group, pre-internet, leaving school in the mid-90s, it felt pretty clear that leaving the region was the only way to access opportunities. While there is a steady flow of people returning home, it rarely occurred to us to stay and create those opportunities in our early 20s.

Today’s generation seems more willing to take that chance, less concerned about getting permission. Technology brings people together in different ways, the world gets simultaneously bigger and more local.

“Part of why there’s such a thriving cultural scene at the moment is we have all these people saying: ‘look over here, we’ve got a cool thing, we can have this.’ Then other people in a different part of the region start to think that they can make it happen for them,” Lizzie said.

“Then we have access to the internet, which shows us potential. There are people who see potential for what things can be that just wasn’t there before, that whole ‘you can’t be it if you can’t see it’ thing.”

When a global idea becomes local, there can be a kind of epiphany. And when even people share that feeling, things can change.

“In my case, I left school, I worked a normal job, and I hated it,” Lizzie recalled. “It was awful, and I didn’t feel like it helped anybody else if I did it. That combination made me want to do something else, something that would feel meaningful.

“I was always told that I would have to go really far away, that it would never happen around here. Then there was a moment of ‘why not?’ Why shouldn’t it happen here? We’re a big part of the country, there are lots of people here, why can’t we have it?

“Thankfully, there were lots of people all at once who kind of independently but collectively agreed that they were going to make something happen. And now it’s booming.”

‘We have the right. We shaped all that, and continue to shape it’

The next step is nurturing. In a side room at Shildon’s Locomotion railway museum, Lizzie is running a writing workshop. It’s a small, but varied group; three generations from primary school child to grandmother. The exercises – word association, rhyme games – feel simple, but the end results prove surprisingly varied and intriguing. What started with simple ideas about rail journeys turned into family memories, worldwide journeys and flights of fancy.

That’s the kind of creative thinking that Lizzie is determined to develop. The “I am Culture” project is devoted to showing how everything we consider as “culture” can be seen from the ground up, rather than the top down, behind-glass approach.

“A lot of us have felt that we haven’t been given credit for different things, for our cultural input,” Lizzie said. “A lot of our young people believe that they have no voice, that it isn’t valued.

“This is where I want to reinforce that not only do they have a right to be a part of that culture, but they actually shaped all that to begin with and will continue to shape it.”

Projects like Trailways and the on-going Circes Island are built around stories from everyday life. It’s work that explores the quirks of northeastern dialect, where terms from long-dead industries flutter to life in day-to-day chatter. And work in schools, such as the 2023 project that put primary school children on stage in front of a vast crowd at Durham Miners’ Gala, reflects a switch in values within the education sector.

“We have to be open to the fact that the world is changing. Schools are starting to understand that the jobs they are preparing us for might not exist in 10 years’ time,” Lizzie said. “There’s a need to teach students to think things through creatively.

 “For so long, education has tended to teach that there are single solutions to things, that there’s one right answer. You memorize information and you spit it back out at the right time and tick the boxes.

“But kids have these brilliant minds that are capable of thinking of all of these things. They haven’t been shut down. Now’s the time to push them to preserve and encourage them.”

Catch Lizzie on stage with Sam Slatcher and Alison Curry at the Trailways performance and open mic in Newton Aycliffe on Thursday, Nov. 21. More details, and to sign up for a free ticket, click here. And keep up to date with Lizzie’s work on her Instagram or Twitter