Given the fact that Doncaster is slightly further north than Manchester, I think it scrapes into the true north but Hamerton is definitely in the Midlands. The real debatable margin is the line roughly formed by Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Lincolnshire as I would hazard portions of these lie in both the north and Midlands.
It really depends what you want to consider north and south. I have lived in the north, the south and the Midlands and everyone has different ideas of where is north and south. Also, I don't think anywhere in Wales would particularly appreciate being dumped in with "the south". Wales is Wales (I am part Welsh!)
I know: but I still haven't recovered from sharing a house with 2 lads from Huddersfield when I was at college, so it always amuses me how much it annoys Yorkshire folk if you say that South Yorkshire is in the Midlands
As a resident of the region under debate: - anything in Yorkshire or Greater Manchester is the North, without question - southern parts of Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire are definitely the Midlands - there is a line, running east-west just south of Chesterfield and Mansfield, above which the culture tends a little more towards Yorkshire than the Midlands (this is encouraged/exacerbated (according to your view) by the fact that it's where the TV regions switch over - we get the Yorkshire versions here, Derby and Nottingham get the Central ones) so the northern thirds or so of those counties are more-or-less culturally Northern, even if government stats will still have them as Midlands I'm half Yorkshire, half Black Country and brought up in the North-Midlands Buffer Zone, so I'm anyone's guess. At least the North and Midlands are both north of the bath-baath divide...
Your accent isn't all that different from that of Helly's father, who was born in Doncaster and (from what I recall) went to university in Sheffield.
North Notts should definitely be over the 'North' line as well - take that line more or less straight from the Derbys/Notts border to where it hits the Lincs coast and I'd say that was pretty bang on. Yeah, there's a lot of South Yorkshire in there - my Dad's from Rotherham, and being closer to a Chesterfield accent than my Mum's native Halesowen it tends to dominate. That said, the closeness of the Chesterfield and Rotherham accents mean I really struggle to 'do' either of them on their own, whereas I can drop into pure Black Country without missing a beat.
If we're going on accents I'd take the line a little lower in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, you don't need to go far north of Derby and Nottingham before the accents thicken very noticeably (it's as if living in the large urban areas have took the rural out the accents to some extent). I have relatives who live close to Ripley who sound Yorkshire too bee (pronouncing the boo in book for instance).
Its not that far off.. I passed a sign yesterday saying 'Welcome to the Midlands' about 8 miles south of Oxford.
There used to be a handwritten sign on the road from Weymouth to Dorchester, that said 'Welcome to the North'.
Linton, Paradise, Shepreth and Hamerton are all reasonably close to eachother within the East Midlands/East Anglia area. All of which are strong examples of the different approaches to running a small zoo!
I think the suggestions that Hamerton is in the Midlands are stretching it, but Linton ( 100yards from the Essex border) and Shepreth (a couple of miles from Hertfordshire) are definitely Southern England, as for Paradise Wildlife Park, that is about 3 miles from the M25, there cannot be any possible argument to call that the Midlands, it isn't east anglia either!
