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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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?
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