Introduction

The North East of England has an intense but paradoxical relationship with the classical past. On the one hand, children and teenagers in this region have historically suffered from worse opportunities to access education in classical subjects in the state education system than those anywhere else in England, although important steps to correct this have recently been initiated. 1 On the other hand, the research into working-class engagement with ancient Greece and Rome over the last four centuries, initiated by Edith Hall when she was first Professor at Durham University between 2001 and 2006, 2 and published in A People’s History of Classics by her and Henry Stead in 2020, revealed an intensity of interactions in this region between lower-income people and classical antiquity unparalleled anywhere else in Britain and Ireland.