Fifty Great Things to Come Out of the Midlands. Robert Shore

England, boasting the highest density of roundabouts per capita of population. Motorists have been known to use up a whole tank’s worth of petrol driving from one end of Telford to the other: it’s only a few miles, but the roundabouts are addictive. Other Midland roundabout towns of note: too many to list.

       39) The Great Reform Act

      Shortly after the current Coalition Government assumed power, Nick Clegg promised the ‘biggest shake-up of our democracy since 1832’. Little Nicky has delivered nothing of the sort, of course, but it was good of him to remind us all of a genuinely defining event in British politics: the 1832 Great Reform Act, which laid the foundations of our modern electoral system. The foremost public campaigner was the visionary Brum-based economist Thomas Attwood, who founded the Birmingham Political Union (BPU) and played a crucial role in securing the reform of the franchise in the 1830s. As Lord Durham declared: ‘the country owed Reform to Birmingham, and its salvation from revolution.’

       38) Arthur Seaton

      Nottingham novelist Alan Sillitoe created the ultimate modern Midland folk hero when he penned his classic Angry Young Man novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958). Anti-hero Arthur Seaton is a fount of thrillingly rebellious quotations. Sheffield musical darlings Arctic Monkeys adopted one of Seaton’s most resonant phrases for the title of their album Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, while Manc miserabilist Morrissey drew on the novel for his finest lyric, ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’. Which neatly illustrates a general truth: whenever (if ever) you think of something good about the North, it’s usually the Midlands you’re really thinking about.

       37) Gary Lineker

      All Midlanders are nice people – that’s a scientifically proven fact – but that doesn’t stop them being high achievers. The sporting world’s Mr Nice, Gary Lineker, is a Leicester lad and was noted throughout his footballing career for his commitment to fair play: he was never even booked, never mind sent off. That didn’t stop him from becoming England’s second-highest all-time goalscorer on the international stage, of course. The Match of the Day host isn’t above poking fun at himself either: since 1995 he’s played an arch-villain in advertising campaigns for Walkers Crisps – who are also from Leicester.

       36) Rebecca Adlington

      Midlanders are also modest, almost to a fault – it’s one of the main reasons the splendours and accomplishments of the region are such a well-kept secret. Can you think of a more self-deprecating sporting over-achiever than Mansfield-born swimmer Rebecca Adlington, who, on I’m A Celebrity, was (I’m quoting) ‘so starstruck by Westlife singer and eventual victor, Kian Egan, she blushed heavily and couldn’t look him in the eye’? And she wept about her self-image too. She’s England’s most decorated female Olympian ever, for heaven’s sake! And a national treasure.

       35) Proper Dialect

      Some people think only Northerners do proper dialect. Not true. In fact, in terms of local lingo, Yorkshire is positively impoverished compared to the regional riches of Nottinghamshire. ‘Shift yersen’ (Get out of my way), ‘Ayer masht?’ (Have you made a cup of tea?), ‘Ittle norrocha’ (You won’t feel any pain) and ‘Ittim weeya poss’ (Hit him with your purse) are a few of the phrases you need to master before weekending in Mansfield. As for the West Midlands, visitors would be well advised to get their tongues around the following bit of Yamyam-Yowyow dialogue before setting off: ‘Yow all right, bab?’ ‘Yam. Bostin’!’

       34) The Major Oak

      You haven’t lived until you’ve stood beneath the thousand-year-old, 52-foot-high Major Oak in Sherwood Forest – history, mystery and majesty all rolled together in one great eye-filling spectacle. (Sort of.) This is where Robin Hood, Alan-a-Dale, Friar Tuck and the other Merry Men would conceal themselves to evade the attentions of the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham. ’Oodie and Maid Marian tied the knot a few minutes down the road in St Mary’s Church, Edwinstowe. They hold a festival here every August in celebration of the great Man in Tights: ‘For he was a good outlaw,/ And did poor men much good.’ How very Midland.

       33) The Olympics

      The Midlands didn’t get much of a look-in with the 2012 Olympics, despite the fact that Becky Adlington was born here and – perhaps even more significantly – the modern Games were essentially invented here. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the French aristocrat who founded the International Olympic Committee, admitted as much: ‘It was to [Thomas] Arnold that we turned, more or less consciously, for inspiration.’ Arnold was the headmaster of Rugby School – just down the road from Coventry – which in the nineteenth century pioneered the use of sport in education. Coubertin’s other big influence was the Wenlock Olympian Games in Shropshire – also in the Midlands, of course. It’s no coincidence that one of the 2012 Olympic mascots was called Wenlock.

       32) Rugby

      It was also at Rugby School that the sport of rugby – there’s a clue in the name – was born after some knucklehead who was supposed to be playing football got confused, picked up the ball and started running with it. Rather than telling the poor chap he’d got the rules wrong, his pals played along and in the process invented a new sport. (Something like that, anyway.) Now that’s the classic Midland spirit of innovation for you.

       31) Bob Dylan

      Not the American Bob Dylan, obviously – although he is a Midlander in US terms, hailing as he does from the central ‘flyover state’ of Minnesota – but rather the ‘East Midlands Bob Dylan’ (© Daily Telegraph), aka Jake Bugg. Some people – Scousers and Mancunians, mostly – think all great pop comes from Liverpool and Manchester, but actually the Midlands has launched all of the most important movements in modern music. Street poet Bugg is the natural heir to fellow Nottingham anti-establishment phrase-maker Arthur Seaton (see point 40 above).

       30) The Sally Army

      The East Midlands has been home to a long line of spiritual radicals, not the least influential of whom was William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army. Booth was a notable equal-opportunities employer, an idea to which Booth gave memorable verbal form when he exclaimed: ‘My best men are women!’ Indeed, Booth’s heady strain of Midland eccentricity was his greatest spiritual weapon: one survey estimated that on a particular weeknight the Salvation Army attracted 17,000 worshippers while the Church of England got only 11,000 through its doors.

       29) Motörhead

      The distinctively doomy sound of heavy metal was born in blood and anguish in a sheet metal factory in the West Midlands on the day that fifteen-year-old Tony Iommi – future guitarist with Black Sabbath – lost the tips of two fingers on his right hand in a gruesome industrial accident; but that’s a story for another day. Lemmy, the iconic hard-living Motörhead frontman, was likewise born in the West Midlands, amid the slagheaps of Stoke-on-Trent. In fact, most of the great hard rock musicians were born around here. No wonder the Download Festival – ‘Monsters of Rock’ as was – is held annually in the Midlands.

       28) Conkers

      The Olympics, rugby … most of the major sports and global sporting events originated in the Midlands. The region is also home to the World Conker Championships, which were established in 1965, when they were played out to a thrilling climax on the horse chestnut tree-shaded village green of Ashton in Northamptonshire. Since then, the competition has grown in scale and importance to such an extent that it’s had to be relocated to a larger venue, where one Sunday in early October gladiators mount a series of white podiums to do battle armed only with a nut and a bit of string.

       27) Stilton

      The distinctive blue-veined cheese may take its name from a village in Cambridgeshire, where it was marketed in the eighteenth century as a local speciality to travellers