I said the town didn’t seem to be buzzing today. She was wearing a bright red hoodie and had a pink candy-floss hairdo. I spoke to Wendy, aged 19, in a deserted Hanley town centre on a weekday morning. Betting shops, tattoo parlours and charity outlets fill many of the town centre slots. House prices are half the national average. One of the town’s biggest employers is the international on-line betting giant Bet365, started in a Portakabin in Stoke by a local family in 2000. In the “new” Stoke, that ragged fringe goes on for 36 square miles.Īverage pay is 16% below the national average. Imagine the ugliest part of any city - the most rumpled, outer-suburban edges of London or Paris or New York. Overall, it is a dispiriting, characterless jumble. The new Potteriescape has islands of beauty or energy.
More than ever, there is no “there” there in Stoke-on-Trent. Whole sections of the city I remember have vanished - rebuilt or just abandoned. New dual carriage-way roads (partly EU-funded) carve and weave between the towns. Old pits and slag heaps have been turned into beautiful parks or shiny shopping centres. The re-born Stoke-on-Trent is cleaner and leafier. The pottery industry was declining but still produced everything from fine Wedgwood and Doulton dinner services to cheap tea-cups and municipal urinals. The six towns were relatively busy and prosperous. Above all, it had a purpose and an identity.
And yet the city - on the days that you could see it - had a grandeur, a strength and a perverse beauty. The Stoke-on-Trent that I knew in the 1960s and early 1970s was a hell-scape of slag heaps, steel furnaces, factory chimneys, bottle-shaped pottery kilns, jumbled terraces of red-brick houses, scraps of railways and bright green canals. As one local businessman said to me: “Never mind financial services. Other northern and Midlands cities - Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool - have recreated themselves as hubs for financial and other services. Stoke, without the character of a “real” city, has been unable to compete. Now a third identity crisis overlays the others. “Ah yer aw-right duck?” - never “love” or “dear” or “pet” or “darling”. I was pleased to discover that friends and strangers are still referred to as “duck”. Potteries people feel on the edge and in between - in the geographical heartland but, in some ways, isolated from the rest of Britain. Even the Stoke accent is unlike any other. An investigation into the booming cost of HS2 may axe the planned junction with the 19 th-century route into Stoke-on-Trent. It will be narrowly bypassed by the planned £88bn HS2 high-speed railway. Stoke falls outside the Government’s Northern Powerhouse project. North Staffs people have the warmth and openness of Lancastrians, the grit of Yorkshire people and the wit of Scousers. It is officially in the West Midlands, but it is culturally and economically more like industrial Lancashire or Yorkshire. The city has another permanent identity crisis. They talk of “The Potteries”, rarely of Stoke-on-Trent. Josiah Wedgwood devised assembly line production of pottery here in the mid-18 th century, 140 years before Henry Ford applied the idea to cars in Detroit.Īlthough the six towns bound themselves together as a city almost a century ago, they remain wary or jealous of one another. Coal was mined here from the middle ages. If that sounds idyllic (and it might have been), you have to recall that those towns - Stoke- upon-Trent, Hanley, Burslem, Tunstall, Fenton and Longton - were among the first intensely industrialised settlements on earth. Topographically, it is not a city at all but a curving string of six connecting towns along the upper valley of the River Trent in the northern tip of Staffordshire. Its town centres, stricken by the collapse of traditional shopping habits, range from the depressed to the derelict. The city’s public services have been hollowed out by the austerity drive of the past decade. Its pottery, steel and coal-mining industries were among the earliest victims of the de-industrialisation of Britain which began under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Stoke is the victim of a triple economic crisis and a triple identity crisis. I was profoundly depressed by what I found. I have often visited him since I left North Staffordshire but I have seldom explored the 21 st century version of Stoke itself. He lives in the beautiful Pennine hills just to the east, close to the village where we were brought up. Suggested reading Stoke, the city that Britain forgot
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