Tunstall Part 1: It's Grim up North...Respect the Park

Tunstall Town Hall, May 2013 copyright the Sheriff, Mr John Green esq.

It's Grim up North

Tunstall is the most northern of the Six Towns, and I suppose you could also say it was my hometown, given that I am from the village of Packmoor a couple of miles further north. It is also the birthplace of pottery industry luminaries Suzie Cooper and Clarice Cliff, music hall star Little Gertie Gitana, and teeny-bopper idol Robbie Williams.

Tunstall is an ancient manor court, and there is mention of the name as far back as 1086, when it was a tiny village. A number of lordships controlled the village as it grew, until 1560 when the village was handed to the Sneyd family with whom it sat until the late 1700s.

The village grew rapidly as the manufacture of pottery expanded, and as the area was blessed with an abundant supply of coal and other raw materials, most notably clay, small artisan potters rapidly became big businesses. Names such as Adams, Greengate and Johnson - alongside Chatterley Valley and Goldendale - became synonymous with pottery and industry in the town, and by the early 20th century - thanks to the nearby Trent and Mersey Canal and the 'Loop Line', which linked Tunstall to the other five towns of the Potteries and the main railway line - Tunstall had grown to more or less how we know the town today.

Tunstall's heyday was probably the 1960s and 1970s, when firms such as W.H. Grindley and H&R Johnson employed thousands of local people, and the town's streets swarmed with workers who spent their earnings on the High Street.

How times have changed. Tunstall today is a completely different place. As Thatcherism and globalisation battered the town's traditional industries into submission, the town has nosedived into decline, alongside much of North Staffordshire. Indeed, there is very little of the Pottery industry left in the town, and the once thriving High Street is now a ghetto of artery-hardening food outlets, empty shops, and other depressing examples of the modern town centre; blitzed by monster supermarkets, out-of-town malls and the web.

The Sheriff - Mr John Green Esq. - and I recently paid a visit to the town; the following is the first part of our journey...

Respect the Park

Growing up in Packmoor, Tunstall was my hometown, and to me Tunstall started at the bottom of Little Chell Lane, and the entrance to Victoria Park, or Tunstall Park in common parlance.

'Welcome' to Tunstall Park

As a child, I spent many hours in Tunstall Park with my family, and have fond memories of the place. Kicking a ball around with dad. Catching small fish from the pools. Just idly wandering around in the fresh air. It was also in Tunstall Park where I first realised I had an interest in buildings and how they look: architecture.

Before the Sheriff and I arrived here, I could not remember the last time I spent serious time roaming the park, and I'm guessing there are a lot of local people that can say the same. The ragged state of parts of the park project a poor public image, and most probably persuade patrons that it isn't the best place to spend quality time. This is a terrible shame.

Respect

The park made the news recently when it was reported that the park's main pool had 'disappeared'. To me, this wasn't a great surprise: the park was laid out on a former industrial wasteland; former uses included an oil refinery, and numerous mine shafts littered the area. My guess was an old mine shaft had opened up, and this seems to have been the case. The City Council appear to have addressed the problem, though the pool is still not back to its usual levels. Given the area's history, you have to accept these things happen. However, the approach to putting things right are disappointing as usual; it appears that the solution was to simply dump a few tons of gravel in the hole.

Filling in Holes

Parts of the pool are also filthy, and the Boathouse is in a shocking state, and probably has been disused for years. It wasn't a good start, and it didn't put me in a particular positive frame of mind. However, I shouldn't have been surprised. Even when the City Council have managed to deliver positives for the park, they seem to get swallowed up in a storm of bad news. A couple of years back, the local group the Victoria Park Trust received a donation of £320,000 from the Johnson Foundation - a charity formed by descendents of the Tunstall-based potters - cash which was invested on a range of new facilities. This good news was quickly followed by reports of instant vandalism. Further stories and letters flooded the press, and locals spoke of roaming hoods and yobs, with some declaring Tunstall Park a "no-go area". And in the middle of all the chaos and correspondence, it was revealed that the City Council had spent tens of thousands of pounds providing 24 hour lighting in the park, the idea appearing to be that continued illumination would provide a deterrent to Tunstall Park's Night Stalkers. I'm not convinced that a few street lamps would stop our lovable hoodies from scribbling "fuck, cider, innit" with a felt-tipped marker on a park bench, but then I'm also not convinced that you'll find them enjoying a Moon-esque booze-addled trashing session at 3 o'clock in the morning in the middle of Tunstall Park. In other words, just what is the point of 24 hour lighting in the middle of a park?

Putting the Boot In: Filth in Tunstall Park, copyright the Sheriff

The wrecked Boathouse

Vandalism is nothing new to Tunstall or the park: it was originally designed and planned as a tool to combat rowdiness and anti-social behaviour of the growing urban populace in the late 1800s. Such antics were a problem for all of the city's parks. In 1949 a collection of ornamental birds was stolen from the aviary in Queen's Park in Longton.

The worst vandalism in Tunstall Park has been the municipal vandalism from Stoke-on-Trent City Council. Unlike the random, chaotic destruction of the Hoody Generation, this particular form of vandalism has been planned: many years of under investment and shameful neglect. Local historian Mervyn Edwards described the sad state of the park in his excellent Potters in Parks back in 1999; more than a decade later things aren't much better (save for the refurbishment of the Floral Hall). The park may have gained a couple of new basketball hoops and a climbing frame or two of late, but Victoria is still dressed in rags.

Tunstall Park dates from the 1890s when Tunstall Urban District Council acquired thirty three acres of industrial land on the eastern extremities of the town. The western edge of the site was used to construct what is now Victoria Park Road, with the land adjoining the new road allocated for housing, which was developed between 1900 and 1930.

Prolific Potteries architect A.R.Wood, who was the Borough Surveyor and had already built the nearby Victoria Institute and Jubilee Buildings and public baths, prepared a sketch plan for the proposed park, which was eventually developed over a period of eleven years (1897-1908) due to financial problems. It was originally intended to open the park in time to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, but eventually opened to commemorate the coronation of King Edward VII.

The park still retains many of its original features such as the main entrance gates that were produced by local art-metal worker William Durose, who had worked with A.R.Wood previously on the Victoria Institute and Jubilee Buildings (the gates are in a scandalously poor state), the recently renovated Floral Hall, and the Adams Clock Tower. Many of these features were gifts from local dignitaries during an era of diminishing public funding. Other features that have long since gone are the park's paddling pool, and the Glasshouse, both removed for "safety reasons".

Adams Clock Tower, copyright the Sheriff

The feature that I was most interested in when I visited the park as a child was the large boulder located near to the Adams Clock Tower. The reason for my interest was that I was told that it was the remains of a meteorite, a story I was gullible enough to believe. The thing is actually an erratic granite boulder that was discovered during excavation works and is thought to be a relic of the Ice Age, and it is estimated to weigh around six-and-a-half tons.

An Ice Age relic in Tunstall

Over the past few years, funding has been found and poured into Central Forest Park in Hanley, yet Victoria Park - a Grade II Listed public asset - has been allowed to continue its downward spiral. It is quite perverse. The recent charitable donation towards improving the park's facilities is welcome, but the basics simply have to be right for a public park to thrive. The park currently looks unloved, it looks as though our city doesn't care . And when this happens, it becomes an easy target. This presents an awful image for Tunstall, and an awful image for the city.

And so what are the chances of Tunstall Park seeing a future renaissance? We are now in an era of unprecedented austerity, cuts to public spending are only just starting to take effect and there are more on the way. The City Council has spent the past three years cutting budgets in response to this. Can things get worse still? Well, I am aware of at least one local authority in the North West that is planning to simply deliver statutory functions. This paints a pretty bleak picture for Tunstall Park. And it makes you want to scream: Tunstall Park could - and should - be spectacular, and a haven for local people.

So if the local authority cannot properly look after Tunstall Park, who can? The current Government's thinking around the Big Society would - in theory - seem to offer a solution to the park's malaise: if the local authority isn't capable of caring for it, why not move it on to a community group that can? Well, theories are great, but local evidence would suggest its not something that can work in Stoke-on-Trent. I was involved in trying to form a community group focused on improving the local environment in Biddulph some years ago, but the initiative floundered due to a lack of support from the local authority. And here in Tunstall, a local group was proposing to take on the public baths from the City Council, and this also floundered, due to a lack of support from the local community. The lessons? The Big Society will not work without the support of local authorities, support which is unlikely to be forthcoming in the current climate, and it won't work in predominantly working class areas, where people are rightly more concerned about getting through life and keeping a roof over their heads than bailing out a public sector that can no longer carry out its duties properly.

That said, though Tunstall Park has fallen on hard times, it still retains its Victorian charm and is still a wonderful local asset, a gift from more enlightened times.

An Introduction of Sorts

"The Five Towns are an urban tragedy. Here is the national seat of an industry, here is the fourteenth largest city in England, and what is it?"

Sir Nikolaus Pevsner

Bad Press

Stoke-on-Trent - the Potteries - has always had bad press. Priestley commented that the human race had yet to arrive here on his visit to the city in the 1930s. Pevsner famously described the Six Towns - or Five Towns as he and Bennett christened the Potteries - "an urban tragedy". In the Sixties, then Government minister Richard Crossman felt that the city ought to be abandoned and that any attempts at renewal would be a huge waste of time and money. In recent times Stoke-on-Trent has been named the worst place in the country to live, and Matthew Rice has said "Stoke-on-Trent should be lovely, but it isn't". Are such views accurate? Or does the Potteries possess unique qualities that are simply ignored or misunderstood?

The prevailing image of the Potteries to those farther afield is that of pits and pots, smoke and stench, despite the fact that the pits have long since gone, the pottery industry has changed beyond all recognition, and the city has one of the greenest landscapes in the country thanks to its Victorian parks and award-winning land reclamation programmes. Stoke-on-Trent has always thought to have been in need of 'cleaning up', and ridding the city of its smoke and grime generating industrial past has been a part of the clean-up. The pits and pots image of the Potteries may be a caricature, but as with all caricatures, there is an element of truth at its heart.

The popular image of the Potteries

If you read the local paper the Sentinel on a regular basis, there seems to be a constant stream of bad news stories, and a tirade of criticism aimed at the City Council. An outsider may get the impression that local councillors are parasites simply in it for themselves, and that the Council is corrupt, employing officers who couldn't care less about the city they serve, with most taking backhanders. It would appear that incompetence and apathy reign supreme. Whilst much of this is not actually true, the actions of the Council and the results that follow certainly leave you scratching your head, wondering what the hell is going on at the Civic Centre. This all adds to the city's dirty reputation.

More Bad Press?

Before we go any further, I should make a few things clear. I am a former employee of both Stoke-on-Trent City Council and Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council, and a former member of Biddulph Town Council, and so I anticipate that there will be people involved in the organisations named that will simply see what will follow here as the rantings of a bitter man that could not get his views and opinions across. That is not the case. For the past decade or so I have worked in the housing and regeneration industry and have worked closely with a number of local authorities and organisations throughout the Midlands and the North West and have seen what works and what doesn't up close. I have encountered local politicians who are genuinely committed to the communities that they serve and MPs that are not controlled by the diktat of party politics and the whip. I have collaborated with council officers that are unbelievably passionate about what they do and the places that they are trying to change for the better. This is experience, experience that leads me to believe that a lot of what has happened - and is continuing to happen - to the Potteries and North Staffordshire is wrong. Yes, a lot of the causes are far more complex and are to do with the prevailing political ideology of the past thirty years, but so many decisions made locally have had a negative impact, it is hard not to ask questions. Certain people may believe that I am arrogant in my views, but all I simply try to do is to pass on what I have learned from elsewhere. And no one will convince me that this is a bad thing.

I suppose what will follow here could be seen as more bad press. Yet another sad and twisted individual looking to stick the boot in, and ridicule a struggling city when it least needs it. But what you will also see is balance. The Potteries has so much going for it, and I will give praise where praise is due: I am a proud and passionate Potter, I love Stoke-on-Trent, the city is my muse and has shaped how I think and who I am. Anyone who knows me will tell you how I feel about the city. But I have to also face up to what is going on there, and its failings. I have to tell it like it is. Call it tough love. To me, the city is like an old friend that has fallen on hard times, lost jobs, been through a failed marriage or two, perhaps has a little drink problem; so sometimes you have to help them face up to a few things, point out where they are going wrong, but at the same time let them know their strengths and what they have going for them. This is what I'm hoping I will do here.

My Stoke-on-Trent

I must also make clear what I mean by Stoke-on-Trent.

The City of Stoke-on-Trent is determined by lines on a plan, artificial boundaries that take no account of true economic geography and the needs and movements of the people that live there. No one recognises such boundaries, including me. My Stoke-on-Trent takes in other parts of North Staffordshire beyond the city limits. Residents of such places would no doubt take issue with being lumped in with dirty old Stoke; I make no apologies, this is my territory. My Stoke-on-Trent includes parts of the Borough of Newcastle: Newcastle-under-Lyme, Newchapel, Kidsgrove, Mow Cop, Harriseahead. I also look on parts of the Staffordshire Moorlands as part of the city: Biddulph, Leek, the Churnet Valley, Alton and Cheadle. South of Stoke we have places like Barlaston (which are within the city limits) and Stone: these are also part of my Stoke-on-Trent. Even parts of South Cheshire reside within my Stoke-on-Trent: Alsager - a leafy home for many a Potter - has a Stoke-on-Trent postcode.

I may refer to the Six Towns, but my Six Towns are actually thirteen.

An Urban Tragedy - why?

As laboured previously, it was Pevsner who labelled the city "an urban tragedy" back in the 1970s on the Staffordshire leg of his Buildings of England tour. He lamented the state of the city's environment and its confused urban structure, describing "slummy cottages", and bemoaning the disappearance of Etruria and the bottle ovens that made the Potteries famous. But why was Stoke-on-Trent in such a state, and why has it seemingly not fully recovered some forty years later?

The landscape of the Potteries at the time of Pevsner's writing was influenced by the wrecking ball. As with most industrial towns and cities, slum clearance and the like had always been a feature in the Potteries since the end of the First World War, but two events brought demolition even more to the fore in Stoke-on-Trent: the formation of the planning system following the Second World War, and the 1950s Clean Air Act. The new planning system required local authorities to prepare local plans, and in Stoke-on-Trent, the Bennett/Plant plan was prepared, with a modernist vision of ringroads and 'precincts', which led to much demolition. The Clean Air Act meant that the bottle ovens that were such a distinctive feature of the city's skyline became redundant, and hence liabilities to the many firms that had them, and the response was - in the main - to pull them down. In addition, many sites associated with the industry that made the city famous were abandoned.

By the time Pevsner arrived in the Potteries, the Bennett/Plant plan had been abandoned in favour of new plans, leaving behind cleared sites and part completed projects (this becomes a recurring theme), and the pottery industry was undergoing a major facelift. This urban cocktail of modernisation and mass demolition frustrated Pevsner, and influenced his view of the Six Towns.

In the years following Pevsner's visit to Stoke-on-Trent, much change has occurred, but it all will sound startlingly familiar. Thatcherite economic policies and the on-set of globalisation had a devastating impact on the pottery industry, and with both coal mining and steel manufacturing also disappearing, the impact on the city and its residents has been enormous. This led to the city needing the renewal that Crossman ridiculed, and has seen the city benefit from thirty years of programmes, projects and initiatives, which have brought hundreds of millions of pounds of Government funding to North Staffordshire. But can anyone say that the city has improved? Indeed, many would argue the opposite. Maybe Crossman was right?

The latest era of change was ushered in early in the new millennium with the advent of the so-called Housing Market Renewal Pathfinders, arms length organisations created by local authorities and 'partners' such as the former Urban Regeneration Agency English Partnerships, and the recently abolished Regional Development Agencies, that were tasked with developing "innovative solutions" to "failing housing markets" in former industrial areas in the Midlands and the North. North Staffordshire was one such area designated a Pathfinder area, and the much loathed RENEW North Staffordshire was formed. The case for the Pathfinders was established under the watch of John Prescott in his role as Deputy Prime Minister, and was based on the work of academics at the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies (CURS) at Birmingham University. The experts from CURS looked at areas in former industrial heartlands and wondered why house prices lagged dramatically behind those in the rest of the country. This was at a time when there were extreme examples of 'abandoned streets' peddled by the press, with images of tinned-up houses in places such as inner city Liverpool, and tales of houses being bought and sold over a pint in a local pub for the price of a second-hand Ford Mondeo. CURS concluded that the problem was a massive over-supply of the type of houses that dominated such areas, in the main two-up, two-down terraces, and that no one aspired to live in such areas, and that those that did were not there by choice. But they also noted that such areas were quite often handily located near to town and city centres, and possessed rich assets that could be the foundations of new communities, such as canals and industrial heritage such as former factories that people like Manchester-based Urban Splash had turned into trendy lofts. Their conclusion was basically that such places could be ripe for gentrification, and suggested that hundred of thousands of homes could be cleared to help create new "sustainable communities". This was music to the Government's ears, who had pledged to revive the inner cities that had been abandoned by the previous Tory regimes. The property market was about to enter a period of boom, a boom which we now know was fuelled by an orgy of unsustainable and risky lending, but the Government fell for the work of CURS hook, line and sinker and made vast amounts of public funding available to the Pathfinders to develop strategies, assemble sites and attract the development industry to areas that they would have previously ignored.

RENEW North Staffordshire was formed in 2002, and the City Council used it as a means to clear housing that they had always wanted to, but had never had the resources to. For me, this was confirmed by the fact that the early RENEW teams were made up of secondees from the City Council's Housing Standards team. In addition, early RENEW promotional literature included images of 'abandoned homes' in Hanley, homes that were actually boarded up and waiting for demolition under earlier clearance programmes. The next phase of RENEW's gestation was to hire regeneration industry heavyweights to champion the cause, leading to jobs advertised at eye-watering salaries, and the spunking of hundreds of thousands of pounds on out-of-town consultants to produce masterplans, vision documents (Hanley South became 'City Waterside'), and area frameworks when officers at the City Council could have produced the same work for a fraction of the cost (most of the work has either been refreshed (leading to more fees for the usual suspects), or has sat on shelves gathering dust). Developers and housebuilders were courted, with the promise of access to a plentiful supply of land, and a comfort blanket of public subsidy. The scene was set for an orgy of property development underpinned by the taxpayer.

Once established and its strategic direction sorted, RENEW then got down to the dirty work. Senior people involved in the Pathfinder initiatives became infamous for talking the places that they were meant to be promoting down, a strange thing to do when attempting to attract private sector investment. At a Pathfinder event in Liverpool, one senior official addressed big-hitters from the development industry and described inner city Liverpool as a "living hell", and similar comments became common place in the Potteries. Colleagues of mine witnessed one official stating that Fenton "had no reason to exist", and state that "whole swathes" of Stoke-on-Trent needed to go. However, the worst of RENEW's work was their clearance activity. RENEW did not have the powers to carry out such work; this fell to the City Council. It all led to chaos and confusion, which probably helped both organisations, certainly from a PR perspective. The City Council were able to use RENEW North Staffordshire as a shield, whilst RENEW were able to fall back on the fact that they could not do this work as they did not have the powers to do so. Communities in and around Hanley, such as Birches Head and Shelton, and Middleport a few minutes from Burslem were targeted by RENEW, the common link between Hanley and Burslem being the city's canal system, and officers from the City Council were sent in to carry out 'Neighbourhood Renewal Assessments', with talk of areas being blighted by mine shafts and unstable land, and properties being unfit for human habitation. To me it seemed strange that these neighbourhoods had been sound for around a hundred years, but as soon as there was millions of pounds of taxpayers cash available to flatten them and make sites available for redevelopment, they were unfit for people to live in.

Walls come tumbling down in Middleport

RENEW turned some of the city's communities into battlegrounds, and residents were treated appallingly in some cases; housing market renewal has been portrayed in some quarters as "social cleansing", while Owen Hatherley described it as "slum clearance without the socialism". One such area was the Slater Street neighbourhood in Middleport, where around two hundred homes were targeted for demolition. Slater Street's 'crime' appeared to be to sit adjacent to a proposed project named 'Burslem Port', a project that involved the reinstatement of an arm of the Trent and Mersey Canal at the heart of a mixed-use development. The original concept plan for Burslem Port included a renovation-led revamp of Slater Street, but once RENEW had come to Middleport, Slater Street was primed for the bulldozer. I had a heated conversation with a Housing Standards officer involved in carrying out Neighbourhood Renewal Assessments in Middleport, and argued that a renovation-led approach to their work would be less costly and more sustainable (I stated my belief that the properties could be brought up to a modern standard for an average of £30,000 a property; compare this to the cost of a Compulsory Purchase Order for two hundred properties). My colleague stated that the City Council had invested in Middleport in the past, and that we were now back to square one. I asked why they thought that was the case, and the reply was that "people cannot afford to invest in the properties". My response was simple: they were dealing with the symptoms but not the cause. The one thing that all of the Pathfinder areas have in common, be it North Staffordshire or inner city Liverpool, is that of a failing economy through deindustrialisation. Thatcher believed that the hidden hand of the market would rescue such areas, and so did not pay much mind to the consequences to her economic policies. In the case of North Staffordshire, one can only assume that the hand of the market is still in hiding. The impact on the housing market is that it has become more localised, with house prices reflecting local affordability. Therefore, the housing market in North Staffordshire was not failing but actually working perfectly well. The housing market actually began to fail once RENEW got to work, as investors and speculators moved in. This caused a bubble in the market, which meant that the cost of purchasing the thousands of homes that RENEW were targeting ballooned. And then it all went wrong as the housing market crashed and developers and their backers became far more risk averse, and mortgages all but dried up. This blew huge holes in the plans of the Pathfinders, and saw some proposals reviewed and others shelved completely, leaving communities in limbo, blighted by the potential threat of the wrecking ball.

In 2010, the political environment changed with the election of the Coalition, who proceeded to implement the most savage cuts to public spending in generations. Amongst the victims of the Chancellor's Axe were the Housing Market Renewal Pathfinders, and as a result, RENEW North Staffordshire was wound up in 2011, leaving behind an almighty trail of destruction and part completed projects. As with other affected local authorities, the City Council campaigned for continued support from Government, arguing that people were trapped in wrecked neighbourhoods, and that they ought to be able to complete the job. To a certain extent, the campaigning was a success, as they secured "transition funding", designed to cushion the blow of the cuts to funding streams. Stoke-on-Trent of 2013 is not much different to the Stoke-on-Trent that was visited by Pevsner in the early 1970s: shaped by the wrecking ball, abandoned plans, unfinished projects, and swathes of dereliction and wasteland. Einstein defined insanity as repeating the same actions over and over, and expecting different results each time. It would appear that insanity is a disease that infects all those that pass the threshold of the Civic Centre.

It is incredibly frustrating. As a born and bred Potter with a passion for the city, I used to scratch my head and wonder why Stoke-on-Trent didn't seem to 'work'. I used to look at the city's assets, its strategic location mid-way between Birmingham and Manchester with its handy stop on the Branson Line; its stunning surroundings - the Cheshire Plain, the Peak District, the Moorlands, the Churnet Valley and Pugin Country - Alton and Cheadle - and the rolling Trent Valley; its unique built heritage, its old potworks ripe for new uses. I used to think, "why is this city not thriving?". Yes, the city had been ravaged by Thatcherism and globalisation, but the foundations were there to start anew. I then went to work at the Civic Centre for the City Council and found out why. I arrived at the City Council as the Government were pouring unprecedented levels of public money into North Staffordshire. It represented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to finally build a new economy less reliant on one industry (though that industry is still vitally important, as we will see), a chance to be innovative and respond to future needs and opportunities. Instead, the City Council saw it as a massive opportunity to flatten as much of the old Stoke as possible. We've not done very well out of this approach in the past: lots of crinkly tin sheds, seemingly the USP of the City Council's main partner of choice St Modwen, who have a virtual monopoly of the city's prime development sites; out-of-town retail, which alongside the boom in on-line shopping has sucked the life out of all of North Staffordshire's historic town centres; and the housing that has been built to replace the 'unfit' and 'unpopular' terraces is expensive, shoddy, jerry-built rubbish - witness Redrow's appalling 'Debut' range that offered a one-bedroom flat for £55,000, which are so small that anyone who was particularly athletic could touch all four walls at the same time - homes that are so sustainable that they only come with a thirty year guarantee. Shocking design and architecture. Development for the sake of development.

The 'comprehensive redevelopment' approach has never worked in Stoke-on-Trent. In fact, it rarely works anywhere. Long-term plans are too at risk from political and economic upheaval, and often become footballs which can win or lose votes. In addition, the human cost of demolition and relocation of residents and businesses can never be quantified, and therefore is never a consideration. Given that the public purse cannot sustain huge sums of money made available for compulsory purchase and clearance, perhaps we can now consider a more organic approach to change, that fully considers the needs of individuals, and respects the city's built environment. The economic downturn and subsequent recession could prove a blessing for North Staffordshire, and the Potteries in particular. It gives pause for thought and reflection. It allows us to finally sit down and take stock, reflect on the city's history and appreciate what it is that makes the place special, and what we can take forward and build on, to finally appreciate the opportunities that exist for Stoke-on-Trent.

For if Stoke-on-Trent is "an urban tragedy", it is a tragedy of missed opportunities.

What Will Follow

What will follow on this Blog is a tour of 21st Century Stoke-on-Trent, my Stoke-on-Trent. It will be an account of where we are, and where we could go. It will highlight the mistakes, and celebrate what is special. We will visit run down High Streets, and soulless retail parks. We will also view exceptional architecture and beautiful landscapes and places.

We will tell the world more about Stoke-on-Trent, and hopefully provide a few pointers to a brighter future.