Tunstall Part 4: On the Backstreets...Sweet Soul Music...Beyond Here Lies Nothing

On the Backstreets

Away from the High Street, Tunstall picks up slightly in terms of activity and the presence of people. The Sheriff and I picked over Alexandra and Jasper Squares, and the cheap, tacky tin sheds that act as Tunstall's shopping magnets, and though there was people aplenty, we saw little to raise the spirit and warm the soul. And so we moved on to Tower Square, and what I call the Backstreets of Tunstall: Paradise Street, Forster Street, Oldcourt Street, Roundwell Street, and Hose Street.

Tower Square

Tower Square demonstrates much that has gone wrong with our towns and cities: we have allowed the car and vested interests to triumph over the pedestrian and their opportunity to enjoy town centres as places to dwell, relax, idle away the time and be inspired. Tower Square has all the ingredients to be a great urban space, and alongside the Town Hall, be the true heart of Tunstall. Instead, we have allowed the place to become a giant, short-stay car park, the City Council cowed into submission by businesses who fear that someone's inability to park their car twenty feet away from their front door will deter them from choosing to shop there, which is complete bollocks. If you are developing a town centre business on the basis that your customers have to park their cars more or less on your threshold, then you deserve everything you get. Such vested interests have meant that instead of being one of the town's main attractions, you have to dodge traffic to cross the square. It is incredibly sad.

More cars than people

Many of the businesses are small independents, though the ubiquitous Bargain Booze looms large ironically rubbing shoulders with small pubs that I guess are probably on their last legs: Tunstall probably isn't top of most people's lists when it comes to a night on the town, unfortunately.

At the top of Tower Square sits one of the town's oldest buildings, the Chapel of Methodist New Connexion. Dating from 1821, the building is one of the most important of the Methodist Movement. In 1797, divisions in the Methodist church were becoming apparent, and a group broke away from the main Methodist body over issues such as discipline, and became know as the 'Kilhamites', or most popularly, the 'Methodist New Connexion'. The new Methodists had great success throughout the Potteries, and built a number of places of worship, including Bethesda Chapel in Hanley, and the chapel on Tower Square.

The former Chapel of the Methodist New Connexion

The chapel has long since been abandoned, and was last used as offices by a local firm of lawyers, with the building now on the market looking for new occupiers.

Off Tower Square is an ironically monikered street - Paradise Street, which formed part of an estate developed from 1821 by the Tunstall Building Society. At the time there was much slum housing in the town, and the Society was formed to improve living conditions for local skilled tradesmen, and built two streets - the aforementioned Paradise Street, and Piccadilly Street - which provided a much better standard of housing than that available. Virtually none of the estate is left, swept away by the wrecking ball with much replaced by utopian modernist Council housing which can be seen at the end of the street.

Modernist housing, Paradise on Paradise Street?

The remains of the Tunstall Building Society's estate is now a Chinese take away, and a little backstreet pub, the Paradise.

The Paradise

At the heart of the Backstreets is Forster Street, which was created through the redevelopment of an old potworks - Phoenix Works - to provide new town centre housing. Forster Street is also home to two prominent buildings (well, prominent for me), and both the Sheriff and I were both pleased to note their continued well-being: Forster Street Pet Stores, and the Wolstanton School Board Building.

Forster Street Pet Stores

The former is a traditional corner shop where I picked up my first pets, some goldfish whose names now escape me. When I was at Primary School, we had class pets, and pupils were chosen to look after them during school holidays. One Christmas, I was lucky enough to be picked to look after the class gerbil. I became quite attached to the little desert rat, and it was a wrench when it had to go back to school in the New Year, so much so that I badgered mum and dad to death about getting one. They eventually relented, and I collected Jedi (I was a Star Wars nut as a kid) from the stores early in 1986.

I am sure that this is a story that can be repeated by many people that grew up in and around Tunstall, and I was pleased to see that the shop is still as busy as ever, sticking two fingers up to the out-of-town Pets at Home at Festival Park. The store is set in a traditional corner shop with the original dual aspect window and corner entrance, and sliding sash windows, and in some ways it reminds me of Arkwright's, but without G-g-g-g-Granville and a dodgy old till.

Opposite the pet stores is the Wolstanton School Board Building which dates from 1880, and was probably built as part of the new housing development that replaced the Phoenix Works. The building used to terrify me as a kid, probably due to Pink Floydian visions of vile teachers and psychopathic headmasters that seemed to dominate our schools back then.

Wolstanton School Board Building, now SureStart: we don't need no education?

Built to the back of the pavement and fifteen bays of local red/brown brick with decorative diaper work and frieze panels below the large upper floor windows, the building dominates the street. The building has been in use in recent times as the Tunstall SureStart centre, but as the City Council attempts to balance its books and juggle its services in the shadow of Osborne's Austerity Axe, the future could be bleak for this landmark building. Things tend to disappear in Tunstall.

Sweet Soul Music

There is a light that never goes out: the site of the Golden Torch

A couple of streets away from the scene of my animal acquisitions and schoolboy nightmares is one of the most important cultural sites in the Potteries, though you wouldn't think so. Hose Street is a small dead end street, a tiny row of terraced houses surrounded by nondescript industrial units, but once upon a time, Hose Street was the heart of the Northern Soul scene, a scene that, although most of those that still celebrate it are, let's say, getting on a bit, refuses to fade away. Hose Street was the home of a soul club famous throughout the world, the Golden Torch.

The soul of Hose Street

The club closed years over forty years ago, and the building itself is gone having burned down. The site is now used as a car park by a local business, but the site is marked by a plaque commemorating the club.

The former Golden Torch before the fire that destroyed it; copyright soul-source.co.uk

The building was thought to have dated back to 1824, with part of it used as a church, and by the beginning of the 1900s, it became a roller skating arena before becoming the Regent Cinema. A guy called Chris Burton bought the building in 1964 for £27,000, and he went about bringing music to Tunstall, having had success promoting shows over in Stoke. The first big act he brought to the venue was Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, but the venue plodded along until he took the decision to bring the first soul act to town in 1967, Inez and Charlie Foxx. The gig went down a storm with locals, and this convinced Burton that a soul club could be a success, and other big names went on to tread the boards in the backstreets of Tunstall including Edwin Starr, the Drifters, and the Stylistics.

Many years ago, I used to hang out at the Green Star a few miles away in Smallthorne, where I used to share beers with a few old friends. Occasionally you would get the odd bar band playing there, the majority of which were awful to be quite honest. However, one night, a bunch of old guys showed up and played a pile of old blues, rock, R&B, and soul covers. The lead singer looked like a complete 70s throwback, but he did have a fantastic voice, and had a knack for connecting with his audience, telling old stories and gags between songs. I asked someone at the bar the name of the band after John Fogerty's heavy blues shot Proud Mary, and I almost spat a mouthful of scotch over him when he told me they were called 'Hutch's Gang Bang'. Hutch was the frontman (I have no idea what his actual name was), and one of his old stories was that he had sang at the Golden Torch with Ben E. King, presumably when the Drifters played there. I'd like to think that the story was true; Ben E. King's take of Leiber and Stoller's Stand By Me is a song that I love, and I love the idea of a young blues wailer named Hutch from the Potteries getting up and belting out a tune or two with a bunch of legendary soul men from the States.

The Golden Torch is gone now, but people still remember. There were two other  major Northern Soul clubs, Manchester's the Twisted Wheel, and Wigan Casino. There was a recent battle in Manchester to save the building that housed the Twisted Wheel, but the battle was lost and the building is in the process of being torn down to make way for a cheap hotel. This is not a recent phenomenon: the Cavern in Liverpool was treated with disdain during the 1980s, and legendary Manchester club the Hacienda has also bitten the dust to make way for a pile of 'luxury apartments', christened the 'Hacienda Apartments'  in an attempt to appease angry old ravers. I once suggested that the Place in Hanley should be listed to reflect its cultural significance as people such as David Bowie and Led Zeppelin had played there back in the day; my tongue was planted firmly in cheek, but my point was that sites that have significant cultural and musical history are often cast away without a second thought. But the important thing is that the music will always live I guess.

Beyond Here Lies Nothing

"...foreman says these jobs are going boys, and they ain't coming back..."

Bruce Springsteen

Given that Tunstall is one of the world famous Six Towns of the Potteries, the visitor would be forgiven for scratching their head at the lack of a visible presence of the industry that the town renowned for. Some of the earliest examples of pottery activity were to be found in Tunstall, with manor court rolls from the 1300s highlighting several men in the area named Le Potter and Le Thrower. The real growth of the industry in the Tunstall area followed the opening of the Trent and Mersey Canal which passes through Chatterley Valley to the west of the town, and the Loop Line which gave the town its first rail links. Potters such as William Adams capitalised on these innovations to expand their businesses, and Tunstall thrived alongside major players such as W.H. Grindley, Admiral Smith Child, and the Johnson Brothers, with potworks such as the previously lamented Phoenix Works, Unicorn Pottery, and Alexandra Pottery all prominent.

Today very little remains of the pottery industry in Tunstall: no bottle kilns remain, potworks are very few and far between, and manufacturing is virtually non-existent, with highly skilled jobs replaced by opportunities to stack shelves or serve junk food. However, tucked away on the backstreets is a small potworks, a little hidden gem, and I was dead keen to drag the Sheriff along to take a look before in inevitably disappears.

Oldcourt Pottery stands in a ragged state on Oldcourt Street, and is highly visible from Chatterley Valley and the D-Road, but if you were stood on Tunstall High Street, you would know nothing of it.

The ruinous Oldcourt Pottery

Oldcourt Pottery is a complex of different buildings and structures that stand forlornly at the junction of Roundwell and Oldcourt Streets, and are varying states of decay. The main building is a Victorian-era red/brown brick pile, with a prominent five story corner block, and is unusual in comparison with other potworks from that period. It has been suggested that Oldcourt Pottery was once a brewery, its near neighbour the Coach and Horses hinting that this may be the case.

The Coach and Horses

The complex has changed hands many times over the years, and parts of it are in various uses: a local dance studio is based here, as is local councillor, the odious Lee Wanger, who became notorious for being naughty during the noughties, making his way onto the Sex Offenders Register. Incredibly, enough Tunstall residents have voted for him since that he still stalks the town and the Civic Centre.

Who votes for Lee Wanger?

There have been proposals in recent times to redevelop the complex, including a residential conversion as apartment living became the in thing, but nothing firm or sustainable has come to fruition, and the buildings continue to decline.

I often wonder about English Heritage's approach to making judgments on which buildings to grant listed status to, and the reasons for doing so. Architectural quality, age, rarity, cultural significance are all given as reasons to list a building. I have wondered many times whether Oldcourt Pottery should be considered given its uncertain future and that there is next to nothing left of the pottery industry in Tunstall.

Should Oldcourt Pottery, a vivid reminder of Tunstall's pottery heritage be given some protection before it disappears completely, like much of Tunstall's past?

Tunstall Part 3: Lest We Forget...So Much for the Big Society...In or Out of Town? - High Street Blues Part 1...

Lest We Forget

Tunstall War Memorial Garden

Over the road from the site of Barber's Palace is a little green oasis which Mr Barber also had a hand in, the Tunstall War Memorial Garden. The garden was gifted to the city back in 1929, when Mr Barber was Lord Mayor of Stoke-on-Trent, and is reminiscent of a London square, with quality terraced housing looking out over an urban greenspace. The War Memorial Garden sits at the heart of neighbourhood which was once very popular with the middle classes; the neighbourhood remains popular, but with different classes - the middle classes have long since fled urban Tunstall - and also immigrants to the Potteries, which is reflected in the garden's signage, which includes a demand for "no ball games" in both English and Urdu.

Barber's Tunstall; copyright the Sheriff

No Ball Games

Respect

Respect is a word that the City Council likes to use a lot when it comes to the city's parks and greenspace. The Sheriff and I saw a request for "respect" as we surveyed Tunstall Park, and we witnessed a similar demand in the War Memorial Garden, but obviously for different reasons, as here sits Tunstall's cenotaph.

There has been plenty of disrespect shown to the garden over the years, with youngsters chastised by elders for using the space as a place to practice for future Test Matches. But as has been the case with Tunstall Park, the most disappointing show of disrespect has come from the very organisation demanding it: the City Council. What they don't seem to get is that respect is a two-way thing. Their neglect of Tunstall's greenspaces over the years has led people to believe that they are not important, hence the reason for their misuse (in places) and continued decline.

Not Lords; copyright the Sheriff

The City Council has carried out a range of improvements in recent times, and these were much welcomed and long overdue. However, these were only delivered after a lengthy campaign by local resident Doug Green, who was like a dog with a bone in his haranguing of the local authority.

Respect is Earned; copyright, the Sheriff

The recent tragic murder of drummer Lee Rigby has sadly drawn attention to the braindead Far Right following their predictably nauseating reaction to the tragedy. In Tunstall, we have people from many walks of life, and of many faiths living peacefully, side by side, and the Tunstall War Memorial Garden is a fitting heart to such a community.

So Much for the Big Society

The War Memorial Garden is a nice place for contemplation and reflection, a place of calm in a busy town. The garden is surprisingly quiet given the hustle and bustle of the nearby retail parks, and the heavily trafficked Boulevard. Also surprisingly quiet is another building that overlooks the War Memorial Garden, Tunstall Public Baths. Empty. Silent. Closed. A tremendous public asset and service mothballed for the want of £360,000 towards repairs. For that is the reason given by the City Council for closing its doors.

Tunstall Public Baths; copyright Steve Birks

The Baths from the War Memorial Garden

In its response to Government cuts, the City Council chose to axe a range of services and close a number of public buildings, one of which was the Public Baths in Tunstall. As well as providing a place for locals to keep fit, and for children to learn to swim (yours truly learned to swim there), the Public Baths is also an attractive building. Built in 1889 by A.R.Wood, it forms part of a public service hub alongside the Victoria Institute and Jubilee Buildings. It is a lovely red brick and terracotta pile, linked to the main buildings by a courtyard range to the rear. It is a tidy, dignified place, a great public asset. Yet as with many others - both in the Potteries and throughout the rest of the country - the public are now kept out.

It appears that the 'strategy' for water-based activities in the north of the city was to steer 'customers' towards the private facilities about a mile up the road at Dimensions, a leisure centre owned and run by a well-known local millionaire, who was prepared to offer discounts to capture a new audience. Some may argue that this is a sensible approach to local service provision when the local authority is facing tough decisions and a large maintenance bill, but that's not really the point. For the want of a few hundred thousand quid, a tremendous public asset and service has been canned so that the carpetbaggers from up the road can pick off local custom. Public bad, private good.

Our Prime Minister believes that communities could survive the austerity drive, and unveiled his vision of the 'Big Society', where well-meaning and kind-spirited individuals would step into the breach and save vital public services, in the eyes of some an army of jams and Jerusalem grannies to bail out the public sector. Well, the Big Society has not saved Tunstall Public Baths from the axe. The Amateur Swimming Association offered to help the City Council and offered to source grant funding to support the building but to no avail. A local community group proposed to take the building on and keep it open, but were given around five weeks to work up a Business Plan by the Council, and their proposal eventually floundered due to a lack of local support. As I've laboured previously, the Big Society will not work without the support of the local authority, and people in working class areas will be more concerned with getting through life rather than propping up a public sector than can no longer function properly.

But all of this misses the point. Keeping the baths closed is a self-defeating exercise in false economy; swimming pools tend to deteriorate dramatically when not in use, therefore keeping the place shut to save money will probably just lead to the Council picking up a bigger bill in the long-term. But then why would the current crop of local politicians care? They won't be around to pick up the tab. A classic example of the short-termism of local government, reinforced by the current austerity drive. A lethal combination.

In or Out of Town? - High Street Blues Part 1

The decline of Tunstall can be understood by a walk down Tunstall High Street, where in just a few short minutes you can view the inevitable outcomes of Thatcherite economic policies and deindustrialisation, globalisation, bad property management, the growth of internet shopping, and piss poor town planning. However, Tunstall is not alone in suffering.

The plight of the nation's town centres and traditional High Streets seems to make headlines on a regular basis. Last year, the Local Data Company published a report that took a snapshot of the position of our town centres, and it made for grim reading, and made the headlines nationally. I was anxious to get my hands on a copy of the report, but on visiting the Local Data Company's website, I was disappointed to find you could not download a copy; however, I could order a copy - if I had over a thousand quid spare. Luckily the Guardian provided a handy summary, and so had obviously splashed out on the report. Perhaps that's why the paper went up by 20p not too long afterwards?

Some of the statistics provided by the Local Data Company paint a very bleak picture: one in seven shops on our High Streets are vacant, and in the more depressed locations, the vacancy rate is one in three. The worst hit small town was Leigh Park, near Portsmouth, whist the worst performing large town centres were Blackpool and Stockport, with vacancy rates of more than 25%. Both Dudley and West Bromwich in the Black Country had vacancy rates of around 30%.

The reason for the decline of our town centres is a complex cocktail of changing consumer habits, planning policies, poor town centre management and bad property management. For more than twenty years, shoppers have deserted town centres for out-of-town malls and megastores very often only accessible by car, with planning policies often supporting and encouraging such developments, whilst the Internet Generation often prefer to shop on-line from the comfort of their homes, avoiding the declining and often hostile environment that is presented by many town centres these days. The current economic crisis has only exacerbated matters, with traditional High Street retailers such as Woolworths disappearing forever.

As a response to the malaise of the town centre, the Government appointed 'celebrity' retail guru Mary Portas (this Government is seemingly even more obsessed by celebrity culture than the previous lot) to prepare a plan to deliver the resurgence of Britain's town centres. This she did, but the Government have paid little more than lip service to its recommendations, and the resources they have provided are a joke.

In the Potteries we are well acquainted with such troubles: we have them, but multiplied by six. Add the town centres of Newcastle-under-Lyme, Kidsgrove, Biddulph, Leek, and Cheadle, and it is clear that North Staffordshire faces some serious challenges.

Those challenges are perfectly illustrated by the experiences of Tunstall.



*

"The small shop flourishes in this quarter, as it does in all such quarters. Even after you have given yourself the strongest dose of individualistic sentiment, it is hard to look at these small shops with anything but disgust or to find good reasons why they should not be promptly abolished. They are slovenly, dirty and inefficient. They only spoil the goods they offer for sale, especially if those goods, as they usually are, happen to be foodstuffs. One large clean shed, a decent warehouse, would be better than these pitiful establishments with their fly-blown windows and dark reeking interiors and blowsy proprietors...down every poor side-street, you will find these dirty little shops"

- J.B.Priestley

 

By the late 1980s, Tunstall was hurtling head-long into serious decline: much of the town centre's accommodation was considered unfit for modern purposes; the town centre environment was grim and intimidating; the new retail-led development at Festival Park loomed large; and the pottery industry - which had large representation in and around the town centre at the time, at Grindley's and Wedgwood's who occupied the Alexandra Pottery - started to shed jobs at an alarming rate. Confidence in the town plummeted, and fell even further when Grindley's eventually closed their doors.

During the 1990s, plans began to emerge to deal with Tunstall's degeneration: planning policies were put in place to 'expand the town centre' to the east of the High Street (or to build an out-of-town retail park in Plain English), allocating sites such as the aforementioned Grindley's and Alexandra Pottery sites, and the former Unicorn Pottery site for retail and leisure developments; the City Council secured cash from the Heritage Lottery Fund to renovate the market, and the Single Regeneration Budget for town centre improvements, and pressed on with plans to build a by-pass to the north of the town - not recognising the conflict and irony in pressing on to construct a road designed to relieve congestion in Tunstall whilst encouraging new development adjacent to the town centre which would then attract more traffic onto the town's roads...

No doubt spurred on by the 'success' of Festival Park, this led the City Council to encourage and approve the development of the Asda superstore off Woodland Street, and the monstrous and soulless out-of-town sheds - home to the usual out-of-town suspects such as Matalan, Next, and Pizza Hut. The development incredibly managed to win an award for 'innovative design' from a regeneration agency, presumably because it had little or nothing to compete with. The argument that no doubt convinced the Council to approve the plans was a kind of trickle down theory: people will flock to the new development, and then on to the High Street, and so hey presto, a regenerated town centre. The demolition of the Alexandra Pottery was a particularly sad loss, with the developer paying lip service to the history of the site by christening the dull and uninspiring scheme 'Jasper Square' and 'Alexandra Park', and providing a piece of public art - a huge aluminium sculpture of a shard of pottery discovered whilst turning a historic pottery site to dust. The town centre may have been struggling, but it could have been tackled differently. Priestley's words above were written in the 1930s, but they could've been written in the 80s, and influenced town centre planning policies.

Award winning architecture in Tunstall

The Sheriff and I were down on Tunstall High Street following our walk in the park, the weather was grim, and the place looked like death. The High Street was virtually empty. It was dirty. Shops were closed or closing. And it teemed with traffic despite the 'improvements' to the local highway network. The whole scene left me in a mean funk.

We didn't hang around on the High Street. There really is nothing to make you want to do so. And the thing that peeved me most was the state of the Town Hall. I have raged about the building's condition for years, and through other forums, but I will repeat it again here: the condition of Tunstall Town Hall is an absolute disgrace and it defines the town's decline.

Tunstall Town Hall is one of the city's finest public buildings, but also one of the most neglected, and was the work of the ubiquitous A.R.Wood. The town hall symbolises the town and its decline, but although the building is in a terrible state, it is still a dominant and reassuring presence, towering over the High Street and Tower Square.

Postcard of Tunstall Town Hall in Better Days

It is the town's second town hall, completed in 1885 ahead of Tunstall becoming an urban district. A Neo-Renaissance masterpiece in brick and ashlar, Pevsner described it as "ill defined", but it provides the eastern extremity of Tower Square with an excellent set-piece. The building was also designed to incorporate two banks, a covered market hall to the rear (which still thrives, in part due to the City Council's excellent refurbishment), and a parade of shops fronting the High Street, an early example of a mixed-use development.

But now the Town Hall is rotting, a situation that is unlikely to change in this era of public austerity. But then it has been in an appalling condition for over twenty years, but the mistreatment of the building is nothing new: the insertion of shop frontages out of character with the building was initially allowed years ago, and they continue to be a horrible disfigurement to this day.

Crap shop fronts: a horrible disfigurement

The Town Hall is crying out for a new sustainable use. The development of the neighbouring retail parks presented a great opportunity to find new uses for the building, and indeed, it could have been the centrepiece of a thoughtful, well-planned and well-designed development, providing a clear link with the High Street and Tower Square, and the opportunity for people to flow freely between the new development and the town's traditional heart. Instead, the opportunity was either not recognised or ignored, and this beautiful building has been allowed to rot. The state of Tunstall Town Hall presents an awful image, and surely deters private investment in the High Street and wider town centre: if the local authority is not willing to properly invest, what encouragement does that provide to the market?

Just around the corner from the Town Hall, the retail parks continue to thrive. The stores teem with shoppers, and the local roads struggle to cope with the traffic. As the retail parks hum with activity, the High Street stores continue to close, and those that are occupied are depressing and unattractive, with the High Street's offer now seemingly restricted to artery-hardening food and snacks, cheap booze, cigarettes, and second hand goods, whilst the town centre environment has spiralled back to the bleak days of the 1980s. The last nail in the coffin of the out-of-town apologists' arguments was hammered home when Boots left their High Street store to join the Alexandra Park bandwagon. The one Big Name left on Tunstall High Street is Burtons, and it is surely just a matter of time before they also jump ship, which would surely then draw the out-of-town vs town centre debate to a close.

Jasper Square: grimmer than the High Street?

Grim

Saturday afternoon, Tunstall High Street - where is everyone?

But the presence of the usual suspects on our High Streets is not a sign of local economic vibrancy. Perhaps the correct response to the worry of what to do about fleeing retailers is to simply let them go? How many town centre projects over the past decade have relied on the Big Names, only for many not to succeed? In Bradford there is a great hole in the ground where they expected a big shopping mall. Big plans for Hanley have been mooted for years. Maybe if the Big Names were bid farewell, the town centre property market would simply have to adjust, and investors and landlords would then have more realistic expectations of what their properties can achieve for them. This may then see town centres become a haven for innovation and entrepreneurship, and exciting, organic change. The foundations are there, there is hope. The light may be dying, but its not dark yet.

Tunstall Part 2: In Praise of Father Ryan...Downtown

The Roman Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart, Tunstall; copyright, the Sheriff

In Praise of Father Ryan

Overlooking Tunstall Park from Queen's Avenue is the Roman Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart which is one of North Staffordshire's major architectural statements. I have written previously elsewhere of the church, and some of that is reproduced here; I make no apologies.

The morning that the Sheriff and I visited Tunstall was grey, damp, cool and miserable. It was more like October than May, and at times, I was colder than a polar bear's jockstrap. However, although the sun had done its not too surprising disappearing act, the copper domes of the Roman Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart lit up the sky for us.

The church was the vision of Father P.J.Ryan, who in 1925 appointed prominent architect J.S.Brocklesby and issued him with a challenging brief: to trump the local Protestants and build the biggest, most imposing and beautiful church in the area. Brocklesby took on the challenge, but unfortunately for him, Father Ryan had absolutely no intention of implementing his architect's plans. He dragged Brocklesby all over Europe to draw inspiration from continental places of worship, and his ideas grew and grew.

Father Ryan was an infuriating client for Brocklesby, so much so that the exasperated architect quit the job and never completed his commission: Father Ryan himself was responsible for the end product, and with the help of local labour, the church opened its doors to worshipers in 1930. It was a remarkable achievement, particularly given that this was the time of the Great Depression.

Father Ryan was held in great esteem throughout North Staffordshire, and legend has it that when he died in 1951, his funeral procession was five miles long and brought the area to a stand still: an amazing show of respect and affection.

The most amazing thing about Father Ryan though is his church. A true architectural statement and a wonderful legacy and gift to Tunstall. The Church of the Sacred Heart is one of the first buildings that I took an interest in, and the sight of it always takes me back to summer days spent in Tunstall Park with my family.

We have just been through an era of unprecedented public spending in North Staffordshire, with the previous Government pouring hundreds of millions of pounds of funding into the area to invest in regeneration projects and initiatives, and yet we have delivered hardly any new architecture of note. The only public body that seems to have seriously invested in improving local infrastructure is the NHS, who have built a series of new health facilities throughout North Staffordshire. Though welcome, none are of any architectural quality.  And the private sector have not covered themselves in glory either. It is incredibly sad and infuriating.

And it is a real shame that today's local architects don't take a closer look at the Potteries' architectural heritage for inspiration; the city has many fine buildings, great learning material, yet much new design throughout North Staffordshire struggles to rise above mediocrity. This is a particular problem with new ecclesiastic architecture. Time and time again fine old chapels and churches are left to deteriorate or sold off to vandals for new, often inappropriate uses, while the congregation moves on to a new building. And new places of worship are often greatly disappointing: mediocre low-rise, single-storey brick and tile boxes that give no indication of what the building is there for (is is a doctor's surgery? a nursery? a community centre?), greatly lacking the art that is inherent in the edifices that they replace. The reason for that is perhaps a lack of characters like Father Ryan. Characters with vision and drive, and a passion for what they believe in. People that refuse to accept second best. It could be argued that the state of historic religious buildings and modern church design in North Staffordshire are symbols of the decline of the church.

Downtown

 

Growing up in Packmoor, Tunstall was 'my town'. I've spoken of my love for Tunstall Park, and the hours I spent there. My dentist was in Tunstall Health Centre. I bought my first records in Replay Records on the High Street. It was also the place of many firsts for me. My first job was at the former Co-op supermarket, fetching in trolleys and stacking shelves. I did work experience in a local architect's practice. And my first trip to the pictures to experience the silver screen was to the old Barber's Palace on the Boulevard. Tunstall means a lot to me.

copyright Steve Birks

When visiting Tunstall, I always feel that I have 'arrived' when I turn onto the Boulevard (formerly Station Road; the Boulevard is a much better moniker) from Victoria Park Road. The Boulevard might not be a classic urban street in the sense that Deansgate in Manchester or Princes Street in Edinburgh are, but the approach to the heart of Tunstall along the Boulevard always gave me the sense of arrival, even though the route is severed by a by-pass.

The Boulevard, Google Street View

The growth of this end of the town began during the 1870s with the construction of the Potteries Loop Line, and Tunstall Station (hence the Boulevard's former name). The introduction of this important connection between the towns of Kidsgrove and Hanley led to an increase in development, in particular the laying out of Victoria Park, the building of new housing as the town's population expanded, and the construction of a range of public buildings by the Borough Surveyor and Potteries architect par excellence, A.R.Wood.

In 1880, the area was mostly wasteland and earthworks, and the Boulevard was just a small lane called Mill Street. In 1890, Wood built the Victoria Institute and Jubilee Buildings to commemorate the golden jubilee of Queen Victoria, with the public library moving there in 1891 where it has remained to this day. It was also home to an art and science school, a museum, public baths and a fire station: a fine example of Victoria-era paternalism.

Victoria Institute and Jubilee Buildings; copyright Steve Birks

The development of this public service hub led to the neighbourhood becoming a very popular place to live, and a series of terraced streets were built, including Stanley Street and Park Terrace, which dates from 1893. The late 1890s saw the transformation of a small recreation ground connected to the public baths, which eventually led to the creation of the War Memorial Garden (more of which will follow).

Opposite the War Memorial Garden is the scene of my first encounter with the silver screen, the site of the former Barber's Palace cinema. Barber's Palace was a large Art Deco picture house, built by George Herbert Barber in 1909. Barber was a strong advocate of religious and temperance subjects and began to give lectures. Eventually he began to use moving pictures instead of slides, leading to the building of his first cinema in Tunstall, where he eventually built a second. He went on to build further 'palaces' between 1909 and 1913 in Hanley, Fenton and Biddulph. He also went on to build another five in Buckinghamshire.

Barber was an interesting and influential character. As well as his cinematic ventures, Barber spent many years on the local political scene, serving as a member of Stoke-on-Trent City Council for 23 years, including a stint as Lord Mayor in 1929-30. He was also the author of two books: Small Beginnings and Early Days of Chemical Recoveries from Coal. He also went on to make early air flights around Europe, Palestine, Egypt and Russia.

But for this particular young kid from Packmoor, his most important contribution was his first 'Barber's Palace'.

'Barber's Palace', 1920s (L), and with its altered Art Deco facade, abandoned in 1993 (R); copyright Steve Birks

My generation is probably the last for whom a trip to the pictures had a genuine sense of magic. I will never forget my first visit, and the excitement I felt entering the strange and mystical building. The film I saw was E.T. some 30 years or so ago, and I was enchanted. I also cried like an English footballer at the World Cup when the alien cleared off home.

 

Films and cinema were still special back then. Computer generated special effects may be impressive, and Hollywood stars slick, but the whole package - including the mass marketing through today's multi-media sources - just has no soul. Everything is almost force-fed to you, and so the build-up of excitement as the opening of a new film approaches is gone. Film today is less art and more product.

And the same can be said about the buildings in which you have to watch Hollywood Blockbusters these days. The Potteries once had a host of fine cinemas. Now you have to pay a visit to the monstrous Festival Park to 'the Odeon' and sit in an awful tin shed, eating popcorn that is more like cardboard and for which you need to take out a mortgage to pay for. This, apparently, is progress. Maybe it's a sign that I'm getting old?

I recently visited the cinema with my Better Half, and was left agog by an anti-piracy ad before the film started. The ad depicted an abandoned, derelict Art Deco cinema, and suggested that piracy results in the decline of the film industry and shuts cinemas, when actually the growth of out-of-town retail parks and the fleeing of cinemas to such locations has accelerated this trend. I'm sure the stupid bastards that peddle such propaganda don't get the irony.

Whilst my memories remain, Tunstall's Barber's Palace has long since gone, replaced by a drab exercise in CABEism, a crappy block of flats. Apartment-living was never going to truly come to the Potteries in the way it boomed in cities like Manchester, and certainly not to Tunstall. Clearly the idea of this particular scheme was to take advantage of views over the War Memorial Garden from their frontage on the Boulevard. But it also 'enjoys' stunning views of the Brittain Adams gas showroom's depot and warehouse, and the arse-end of the vile Alexandra Park retail park. The flats aren't that old, maybe four or five years, but their gob-on balconies are starting to look worse-for-wear already, and there is also evidence of damp on the building's frontage, probably because it doesn't benefit from much sunlight.

CABEism in Tunstall

Copyright, the Sheriff

This new block of flats encapsulates all that was wrong with the approach to housing during the New Labour years: pile 'em high in the search for higher land value, built to crap standards and questionable architecture. But despite much talk of the importance of housing, this Government has not demonstrated that it actually gives a shit. Desperate to get back to the 'good old days' before the bubble burst, housebuilders and developers have successfully lobbied the Government to introduce the 'Help to Buy' scheme which effectively provides a taxpayer-funded guarantee towards unsustainable and risky lending patterns, which helped to create the boom and led to the bust that followed. So once again, we will all pick up the tab for an orgy of casino property development. Do the politicians ever learn?