The Midlands – that great swath of England squeezed between the self-mythologising power blocs of north and south on the national map – has an image problem. And that problem, essentially, is that it doesn't have an image.

Even in this great age of identity politics, coming from the Midlands is tantamount to coming from nowhere in particular. Professional northerners are legion, but professional Midlanders? Why, the very word "Midlands" is rarely employed outside the specialised news contexts of weather and travel. There are a lot of roads in the Midlands – it's a very popular place to travel through – and as for weather, there's as much of it in the Midlands as anywhere else. But beyond that, what are the term's associations? There's the correspondence of the (London-born) classical actor John Gielgud, where he refers to the zone between his legs and midriff as "the Midlands". We all come from there at a biological level, but in identity terms there is little social cachet in announcing that you hail from the nation's meat and two veg.

Personally, I blame the Midlands' anonymity on the national media's obsession with the so-called "north/ south divide". There are few cliches journalists and broadcasters in Britain find less resistible than that which pictures the country in terms of a sharp and simple opposition between north and south, with the north cast as the great English "other", the rebellious, working-class outrider to the normative, establishmentarian south.

Binary oppositions of the north/south kind dominate geopolitical thinking, and not just in England. The US is usually configured in terms of a culture clash between either north and south (Yankees v Confederates) or east and west (New York v California): the vast American Midwest, patronisingly portrayed as the home to bumpkins with straw between their teeth, is treated with disdain or mistrust. A similar state of affairs exists in England: hence the general attitude to Birmingham, the one place in the Midlands that people think they know something about – and all of it (roads, architecture, accent) negative.

You are free to ignore the media, of course, but it is dangerous and disorienting to ignore the signs on the M1. If you are driving up the country from London, the northern propaganda begins at Archway roundabout, where a signpost announces "THE NORTH" in block capitals – if you take the M1, you must be going there, it tells you. Note that it doesn't just say north – a direction – but The North, a place. The message is repeated, in the same bold lettering, all the way up the M1, next to each and every place name. Only when you get to the edge of Milton Keynes – where the region actually begins – does "The MIDLANDS" finally get a mention. And then, as suddenly as it appears, the word vanishes again, so that the names of all the major towns and cities of the East Midlands – Northampton, Leicester, Nottingham – are unerringly accompanied by the words "The NORTH". No wonder a lot of southerners think the north begins as soon as you leave London: that's what the road signs tell you.

As a result, no one knows what Midlanders as a distinct group are like. Everyone is happy to trade cliches about northerners and southerners – "southern fairies" v "northern monkeys", to adopt the terms of Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels – but very few would find much to say about the Midlands' "identity". And that includes Midlanders.

Spaghetti Junction … there are lots of roads in the Midlands. It's a very popular place to travel through. Photograph: Alamy

Aye, there's the rub (to quote that great literary Midlander William Shakespeare): no one is more sceptical about the existence of an overarching Midland identity than Midlanders themselves. Midlanders are spiky individualists who don't appreciate being lumped in together, thank you very much. This is unfortunate, because, as the adage has it, there's strength in numbers. "I hope you're not going to pretend I've got anything in common with those crisp-bag fiddlers down the road in Leicester," one Nottingham friend warned me when I said I was writing a book that tried to define a one-size-fits-all Midland identity. (Just in case you're wondering, Leicester is the home of Walkers Crisps.) There is also a sharp east/west divide within the Midlands. My friend Jerry, who, like me, is an east Midlander, gasped when I told him I was going to visit Coventry. "That's where things start closing in," he said, adopting unwontedly apocalyptic language. "It's the beginning of the Birmingham conurbation, and the little pockets of countryside are under siege. Suddenly, it's all people with orange tans driving Jaguars – it's just different over there." On Jerry's personal map, the western portion of the Midlands is marked with the words "Here be monsters".

No wonder Midlanders have an image problem when they can't – won't – even agree that they come from the same place. It's a problem that's built into the very term "the Midlands", which, as my Collins dictionary informs me, can function as either a singular or a plural noun: Midlanders live in a place of indeterminate number – one or many. There are no such problems with the names of north or south, of course. There's only one north! And despite the traditional rivalries between the city-states of Newcastle, Manchester and Liverpool, northerners are generally willing to subscribe to a single, unified identity. "The north" has real genius as a piece of branding. The words "I'm a northerner" pack such a punch.

The Midlands, by contrast, has never really gone in for branding. We don't believe in blowing our own trumpet. Around Birmingham, tourist-board types like to talk about the region as "The Heart of England". But try saying "I'm a Heart of Englander" and it just sounds silly. The associations of the word "Midlands" itself are no better: fair to middling, stuck in the middle, middle age, middle management, midlife crisis.

But why does the Midlands deserve to be named and celebrated in national culture? Why should Midlanders start to identify themselves with their broader homeland as volubly and visibly as northerners do with theirs? Quite simply because almost everything of any value, ever, started life in England's belly: the Midlands has served as the womb and birthing pool for most of the ideas and innovations that have driven English, and indeed world, civilisation since the earliest times. We have just never been very good at telling people about it. We are too modestly capable, too contentedly accomplished. Just too Midland, in other words.

Take the Industrial Revolution. That's often thought of as a northern phenomenon, but the truth is that if Britain entered the 18th century an agricultural nation and left it the world's foremost industrial power, it was almost entirely thanks to the ingenuity and enterprising spirit of Midlanders. The Lunar Society, so named because its members met in and around Birmingham on the Mondays nearest the nights of the full moon, included many of the most innovative thinkers of a particularly innovative age: not just steam pioneers Matthew Boulton and James Watt, but the chemist and freethinker Joseph Priestley (he discovered oxygen – that's right, thanks to him we all started to breathe more easily), Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood: major figures not just of the Industrial Revolution, but of the wider, globe-reconfiguring Enlightenment.

Their individual contributions were at least as significant as those of Voltaire and Goethe and Benjamin Franklin, so it is only fitting that the Brum-based movement has been honoured with the geographically specific designation of the Midlands Enlightenment. Though I'm guessing that most readers will never have heard that grand-sounding title before.

Why is that? Why don't more people know about this? In part, it is because English history tends to be written from the perspective of that north/south divide. Take the medieval period. The so-called "father of English history" – the Venerable Bede, author of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People of c AD731 – was a northerner with a strong anti-Midland prejudice, while the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was commissioned to big-up the achievements of King Alfred "the Great" (oh, please!) in the medieval south. But in fact, contrary to what the Wessex-favouring Chronicle says, it was Mercia, the Anglo-Saxon precursor of the Midlands, that really unified England. Back in the 8th century, the prestige of King Offa during the "Mercian Supremacy" was recognised not only in England but on the continent, where he maintained a correspondence with Charlemagne, incomparably the most important lay figure of the period; Pope Hadrian was also a pal. It is only because of the recent recovery of the Staffordshire Hoard from a field near Lichfield that views of the Midlands' role in medieval English history are beginning to be revised.

Mr Darcy, well-known Midlands resident.

The name of Alfred the Great's ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom was revived in the wider public consciousness when Thomas Hardy wrote his series of "Wessex" novels, starting with Under the Greenwood Tree, 1872. Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, tried to do something similar for Mercia with his 1911 novel The Lair of the White Worm, but the idea didn't catch on in quite the same way and the experiment ended there. (Ken Russell's film version of Stoker's novel, starring Amanda Donohoe and a young Hugh Grant, is a Midland cinematic classic, to be filed alongside the Nottingham-set Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.) As a result of Hardy's act of ancient remembering for the south-west, the current royal family includes an Earl and Countess of Wessex. If/when Prince Harry marries, wouldn't it be a good idea to make him Earl of Mercia and give his wife the title Countess of Mercia?

One way or another, we desperately need to hear more from the middle. It's amazing how different some key bits of recent national history – the decline of traditional mass manufacturing, the 1980s miners' strike, the career of Margaret Thatcher even – look when viewed from the perspective of the Midlands. All sorts of fresh illumination would flow from a little centre-based seeing: people would no longer find the Birmingham accent so annoying, and would start to think warmly about taking mini-breaks in the east Midlands. My home town, Mansfield, is lovely at this time of year if you're thinking of booking an Easter holiday and want to avoid the traditional tourist traps.

And Midlanders certainly have the literary skills to write their way back into national history. The Midlands has been shaping the language of our poets since time immemorial. The two greatest early English poems, the eighth-century epic Beowulf and the later Gawain and the Green Knight, appear to have been written in Midland dialects. (It's a contentious subject but the local connections are undeniable.) The identities of the poets are unknown – anonymity being the natural state of the Midlander – but from "Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum" to "Siþen þe sege and þe assaut watz sesed at Troye", the Old and Middle English poetic traditions are dominated by Midland voices.

Even that Londoner Geoffrey Chaucer, AKA "the father of English literature", wrote in an East Midland dialect which, by the 14th century, had been taken up as the language of the universities and the court. The standard English spoken today is Midland in origin; thanks to Shakespeare, many of its most common phrases are too. Reader, your tongue is a Midlander.

• Bang in the Middle by Robert Shore is published by the Friday Project on 10 April. A free ebook, 50 Great Things to Come out of The Midlands, is available now at amazon.co.uk