Tongue and Talk - The Dialect Poets: North West

Poet Daljit Nagra revisits the BBC's poetry archives and selects Tongue and Talk - The Dialect Poets, from a series exploring dialect poetry in different parts of England.

Actor and writer Catherine Harvey returns to her roots in north west England to see if the dialect poetry of the cotton mills of 19th Century Lancashire is still alive today.

The Lancashire dialect poets were once household names and their writings articulated the voices of cotton weavers and mill workers in Victorian industrial Lancashire with a mixture of humour and pathos. Catherine Harvey says,

"The vivid dialect remains with me, not as something quaintly archaic but present now in the way I speak and write, their voices resonating in the language heard around the north west today."

Producers: Ian Mackness, Catherine Harvey and Ashley Byrne

A Made in Manchester production for BBC Radio 4 first broadcast in 2018.