Northumberland Postcodes — England (ENG)

Northumberland

County Northumberland is one of two English counties that share a border with Scotland and is located in the country's far northeast. Alnwick Castle, Bamburgh Castle, Hadrian's Wall, and Hexham Abbey are just a few of the many famous landmarks in the county.

It is landlocked on three sides, sharing boundaries with the counties of Cumbria to the west, County Durham and Tyne and Wear to the south, and the Scottish Borders region to the north. The North Sea, the fourth side, extends eastward for a total of 103 km (64 mi) of coastline. Northumberland National Park occupies a sizable portion of this rural county, which consists primarily of moorland and farmland. Several pivotal conflicts with Scotland took place here.

The Business Sector and the Economy of Northumberland

Some international businesses, such as Coca-Cola, MSD, GE, and Drager, control the majority of Northumberland's industrial sector.

Northumberland relies heavily on revenue and employment opportunities generated by tourists. In the early 2000s, the county saw an annual influx of 1.16 million tourists, with 1.12 million being British and 50,000 being foreigners who spent a combined £162 million.

There was coal mining in the county during the Tudor era. There are still coal mines in operation today, and many of them are open pit miners. A proposal to build an open-pit mine at Halton Lea Gate, close to Lambley, was approved by the local planning commission in January 2014. 

Egger (UK) Limited, headquartered in Hexham, is a major employer in the Northumberland region.

Health care, pharmaceuticals, and biotechnology

The county's economy is heavily dependent on the pharmaceutical, healthcare, and rising medical biotechnology sectors.

Aesica Pharmaceuticals, Arcinova, MSD, Piramal Healthcare, Procter & Gamble, Shire Plc (formerly SCM Pharma), Shasun Pharma Solutions, Specials Laboratory, and Thermo Fisher Scientific are just a few of the companies that make up the roughly 11,000-worker Northeast of England Process Industry Cluster (NEPIC). Cambridge Bioresearch, GlaxoSmithKline, Fujifilm Diosynth Biotech, Leica Bio, Data Trial, High Force Research, Non-Linear Dynamics, and Immuno Diagnostic Systems are also part of the cluster (IDS). Major pharmaceutical production and research facilities can be found in the North Carolina municipalities of Alnwick, Cramlington, Morpeth, and Prudhoe. 

Northumbria University and Newcastle University are the two best universities in the area. Pre-clinical research, clinical research, pilot-scale production, full-scale production of active pharmaceutical ingredients/intermediates, formulation, packaging, and distribution are all part of the local industry. 

Culture of Northumberland

Northumberland is home to customs that are unique to the region and to England as a whole. The Northumbrian smallpipe is a sweet chamber instrument, very different from the Scottish bagpipe, and is performed by rappers, among other cultures. The Northumbrian tartan or check is sometimes referred to as the Shepherd's Tartan in Scotland. Due to its historical ties to the Lowlands of Scotland and the significant Irish population on Tyneside, traditional Northumbrian music is more comparable to that of those countries than to the rest of England.

Since the late Middle Ages, the region's border ballads have been well-known. Most of the minstrels who sang the border ballads in London and elsewhere in the 15th and 16th centuries were to the North, according to Thomas Percy, whose classic Reliques of Ancient English Poetry appeared in 1765. The 19th-century efforts of people like Sir Walter Scott spread the songs much further. William Morris thought these were the best poetry ever written, and Algernon Charles Swinburne could recite them all by heart.

Popular among these is "Chevy Chase," which recounts the Earl of Northumberland's determination to "maugre the doughty Douglas" by hunting for three days across the Border. "I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet," the great Elizabethan courtier, soldier, and poet Sir Philip Sidney famously stated of it. Ben Jonson once remarked that if he could have written "Chevy Chase," he would have done so for nothing.

Northumberland, like the rest of the North East, share many cultural traits with the Lowlands of Scotland rather than those of the South of England. One factor is that these areas have a same language and cultural heritage with the old Anglian Kingdom of Northumbria. Many words from Old English, such as bairn meaning "child," are not present in other varieties of contemporary English. 

Whatever the case may be, areas immediately to the north and south of the border have historically shared certain parts of history and legacy, leading some to believe that the Anglo-Scottish boundary is primarily political rather than cultural in nature.

The Northumbrian Language Society was established to protect the Northumbrian languages (Pitmatic and others) and to showcase local artists and performers in an effort to increase public knowledge of Northumberland's rich cultural heritage.

The bloody cranesbill (Geranium sanguineum) is the official flower of the English county of Northumberland, and the HMS Northumberland is the namesake ship of the Royal Navy unit of that name.