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| 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.
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| Barber's Tunstall; copyright the Sheriff |
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| No Ball Games |
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| 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.
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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Tunstall Public Baths; copyright Steve Birks |
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| 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.
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.
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.
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"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Award winning architecture in Tunstall |
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.
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| Postcard of Tunstall Town Hall in Better Days |
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.
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| Crap shop fronts: a horrible disfigurement |
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.
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| Jasper Square: grimmer than the High Street? |
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| Grim |
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| 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.
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