
A visit to the fourth edition of the British Ceramics Biennial[i] was a chance to revisit that most
singular of English cities, Stoke-on-Trent.[ii]
The Biennial occupies a cavernous factory floor, part of the former Spode china
works in the centre of Stoke, one of the six middling-size towns that make up
this conurbation of a quarter of a million people. The space is thrillingly
atmospheric, the Biennial presents work by artists of international standard
and showcases graduate talent from the Potteries and beyond, and there is an
ambitious programme of events and educational activities.
The Spode Factory |
This looks like exactly the kind of thing Stoke should be doing as it struggles to find a sense of purpose – and renewed economic vitality – in the aftermath of the shocking decline of the pottery industry in the second half of the 20th century. The Biennial confirms the continuing significance of ceramics – domestic and industrial – for the local economy, and the potential of craft and design skills to drive modern manufacturing and the creative industries. It also attracts visitors who, if they are prepared to give the Six Towns enough time, will find much to enjoy in the diminished but still palpable “Stokishness of Stoke”, as Matthew Rice calls it. Like Hull, Stoke isn’t the same as everywhere else. It’s different, not always in a good way, but definitely different.
The first three volumes in Nikolaus Pevsner’s The
Buildings of England were published in 1951. 23 years later, in 1974,
the last of the series, Staffordshire, was completed.[iii]
Pevsner included “Some Words on Completion”, noting that “the series is not
complete. It is only the first round which has run its course”. Several of the
early volumes had been revised by the time Staffordshire made its appearance,
and Pevsner told his readers that “the first editions are only ballons d’essai; it is the second
editions which count”. Staffordshire is still waiting for its second edition,
but we can reasonably expect that Stoke-on-Trent will receive more
comprehensive (and sympathetic) treatment than in the first. Pevsner dealt with
the entire conurbation in 15 cursory and dismissive pages, and his brief
introduction pulled no punches:
"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? Five town - or, to be correct, six - and on the whole mean towns hopelessly interconnected now by factories, by streets of slummy cottages, by better suburban areas. There is no centre to the whole, not even an attempt at one, and there are not even in all six towns real local centres."
"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? Five town - or, to be correct, six - and on the whole mean towns hopelessly interconnected now by factories, by streets of slummy cottages, by better suburban areas. There is no centre to the whole, not even an attempt at one, and there are not even in all six towns real local centres."
By contrast, Matthew Rice’s The Lost City of Stoke-on-Trent doubles as an industrial history
and an affectionate guide to the buildings
and landscapes of the Potteries, but even Rice has to admit that Stoke is
“a mess”:[iv]
“The five old
pottery towns (Hanley, Stoke, Longton, Burslem and Tunstall) are linked but
never in a felicitous or definitive way, and while each is held to have
particular specialities to an outside eye these are well hidden. The
all-pervading air of decay is common to the whole city…the linear and fragmented
nature of the city’s plan means that a drive through the middle of the area
takes you not from the outer margins to the obvious centre but through a whole
series of outer rings…”
Rice’s concern is that, faced with the challenge of post-industrial decline, Stoke-on-Trent
resorted to the wholesale destruction of a townscape which, “urban tragedy” or
not, was utterly unique. Almost all the bottle
kilns have gone: between the wars there were 4,000 of them, in 1958 2,000
were still in use, now just 47 remain – all listed but by no means all in good
condition. Even Pevsner acknowledged that the destruction of the kilns was “a
great loss”:
“…their odd
shapes were the one distinguishing feature of the Five Towns and used to
determine their character – kilns bottle-shaped, kilns conical, kilns like
chimneys with swollen bases. They have a way of turning up in views with parish
churches and town halls as their neighbours.”
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Aerial view of Fenton, 1930s |
You can get a flavour of the classic Potteries’ townscape in Longton, where the Gladstone Pottery has been preserved, miraculously intact, as an excellent (working) museum. There are other fine factories nearby; some of them are in a pitiful state but Hudson & Middleton is still producing bone china in the splendidly restored Sutherland Works. Just up the road, in Fenton, the Heron Cross Pottery is also still at work in a small traditional potbank nestled sweetly among the brick terraced houses so typical of Stoke. The bottle kiln, complete with small tree, emerges from the roof of the building.
Gladstone Pottery Museum, Longton |
Heron Cross Pottery, Fenton
Middleport, next to the Trent & Mersey Canal in Burslem, is another interesting neighbourhood. The Burleigh factory, recently restored by the Prince’s
Foundation, marks a step up from the workshop scale of Gladstone and Heron
Cross to true industrial production. China is still being produced here, and
sold in a chic shop, popular with American, Korean and Japanese tourists.
Across the road, in Port Street, a row of terraced houses has been smartly
refurbished; others now lie empty and shuttered, hopefully awaiting the same
treatment.
Port Street, Middleport - pottery on the right
Derelict houses, Middleport
What else? Hanley is designated the city centre and Pevsner’s description – “the most townish of the six towns” – still applies. It’s a thoroughgoing mess, but there are things worth seeing: 19th century survivals include the Town Hall (a Loire chateau originally built as a hotel), the former meat market (now the Tontines), the brick and tiled Staffordshire & Potteries Water Board and, next door, the Bethesda chapel. More recent civic buildings include the City Library and the rather grim Potteries Museum – a downbeat and unprepossessing home for the city’s superb, genuinely world-class ceramics collection. These are thin pickings for a town with aspirations to become a city. More ambitious is the new bus station, a bold and confident building designed by Grimshaw architects. The Smithfield site, next to the museum and the library, has been designated as Stoke’s Central Business District but demand for space in the first two buildings on site seems to be sluggish. The £55m development has been plagued by delays and disputes with the contractors: a plan for the City Council to occupy both buildings (so much for business) has been diluted but staff will shortly be moving into three floors of 1 Smithfield – a shiny, multi-coloured job by RHWL architects.
Broad Street, Hanley |
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Potteries Museum, Hanley |
1 Smithfield, Hanley |
As we have seen, Longton, though down at heel, is worth exploring for its rich industrial heritage. It is also home to the Centre for Refurbishment Excellence (CORE) which combines the new-build Stoke Studio College with the conversion of the former Enson pottery and the American Hotel. A £11.4m project, largely public sector funded, CORE is described as “a one stop, national centre of excellence for the construction industry and allied trades as they work towards a low carbon future”. My instinct is that it will be a struggle to survive in the age of austerity. I hope I’m wrong: it’s a very nice project.
CORE, Longton |
Short Street, Longton |
On Saturday we made a detour to Burslem, the “mother town” of the Potteries, to see Port Vale play Peterborough. There was no time to visit the town centre – the best of the five (or is it six?) according to Rice. I agree and, more important, so does Pevsner, albeit grudgingly: “It may not be up to much, but it is undeniably the centre…”Vale Park, much smarter and tidier than when I first saw it, is another interesting story. Port Vale led a peripatetic existence - latterly in Hanley – until they acquired the site in 1944 and began work on a 70,000-capacity stadium, optimistically styled the “Wembley of the North”. The new ground opened in 1950 but the grand design soon degenerated into an improvised botched job. By the 1980s Vale Park had “a strange lop-sided feeling; terraces exposed to winds which whip across the open surrounds, dark little corners, rickety fences, all overlooked by a cosy little directors’ box.”[v] It’s altogether better today, with the kind of friendly, fatalistic crowd you find at all lower league clubs.
Vale Park: the Wembley of the North
There was no time to visit Tunstall in the north and only a glimpse of Fenton, that problematic sixth town. As for Stoke itself, it’s got the rather fine mainline railway station and
Staffordshire University, but they’re separated from the modest town centre by
the A500 – the urban motorway that swings past (and in Stoke’s case through)
all six towns. It’s the civic centre but there’s nothing much else to recommend
it.
Former Free Public Library, Stoke with former Art School right |
It’s a modest enough list of assets and the Stoke-on-Trent’s small pleasures take a fair bit of finding, scattered as they are across this rambling, polycentric city. It’s not a city at all, really, just a federation of towns. The town (later city) of Stoke only came together in 1910; before that the Potteries were governed by separate boroughs and urban districts, each with their own municipal and public buildings. The result was the sextuplication of just about everything, and the long term consequences have been an absence of any kind of civic grandeur, and a surplus of hard-to-use property.
Stoke-on-Trent’s fragmented
urban form and the towns with their doggedly, but unsustainably, separate
identities posed plenty of challenges even before the city’s staple industry
fell into decline. The densely packed townscapes of potbanks, factories and
terraced houses were thinned out, leaving tracts of derelict land and
buildings. Some of these areas have been lying empty for decades, others have
been colonised by retail sheds, warehouses and cheap hotels – lowest common
denominator developments that smack of desperation rather than civic
confidence. Either way, Stoke’s distinctive character has been terribly
diminished.
The problems have been compounded by some truly deranged roads engineering. The A500, which runs
in a loop between junctions 15 and 16 of the M6, is a brute and the A50 spur
which runs past Fenton and Longton is no better. Stoke gets the worst of it,
because the A500 smacks straight through the town centre, but the whole
conurbation is dominated by these crudely over-engineered highways which,
acting as a magnet for traffic, have the perverse effect of creating chronic
congestion at peak hours. As if this wasn’t bad enough, the individual towns all
have absurdly complicated and disorientating one-way systems – the entry to
Stoke is a particularly mad example – and Hanley is enclosed by a necklace of
dual carriageways. The car is the only realistic way for the visitor to get
around and, with many higher earners living outside the city, car dependency is
a big issue.[vi]
There used to be a local train service but that is long gone. You can’t help
feeling that Stoke is the kind of place that would really benefit from a tram
system but the prospects of that happening seem remote.
Against all the odds, Stoke inspires affection, but its future remains uncertain. The
Centre for Cities, which monitors conditions in an urban area which also includes
Newcastle-under-Lyme, finds Stoke lagging behind on important indicators relating
to enterprise, productivity, employment in knowledge intensive business
services, employment rate, workforce qualifications and house prices. The same
organisation’s 2013 report on England’s mid-sized cities, identifies Stoke as
one of a group of “economically isolated cities” – the others are Blackpool,
Hull, Middlesbrough and Plymouth. These are cities with relatively weak and
less diversified economies and weak linkages to more prosperous regional centres.[vii]
A recent Oxford Economics report strikes a more optimistic note, highlighting
Stoke-on-Trent as a “hotspot” for productivity growth in the manufacturing
sector, above-average wage growth and a modest but significant increase in
employment in the digital and creatives industries.[viii]
These are encouraging straws in the wind but the big picture evidence from census
data, official statistics and the property market all suggests that Stoke is a
long way from the kind of strong and sustained recovery that would lift it up
the cities’ league table.
Matthew Rice sees this as a race against time. Can Stoke recover quickly and strongly enough
to generate demand for “the great factories, churches and chapels, pubs and the
terraces of neat Victorian housing, the pottery owners and managers’ houses and
the municipal palaces of one of the great cities of the first Industrial
Revolution”? It seems to me that Stoke has, very belatedly, begun to recognise
the architectural and cultural value of this diminished but still substantial
legacy. The Ceramics Biennial instils hope that the pottery industry may still
have a viable future. The problem is that, in places like Stoke, conventional
market wisdom still tends to put the restoration and re-use of historic
buildings in the too difficult category and the public money that used to be
available to address market failure is drying up. Let’s hope that Stoke can
find the energy and ingenuity to overcome these barriers and build a more
prosperous future.
October 2015
[i] Pictures
of the British Ceramics Biennial: http://bit.ly/1R6nKeL
[ii] Pictures
of Stoke-on-Trent: http://bit.ly/1MMIjJ
[iii] Nikolaus
Pevsner, The Buildings of England:
Staffordshire, Penguin Books, 1974. I've just discovered another invaluable and comprehensive source: Dorothy Baker, Potworks: The Industrial Architecture of the Staffordshire Potteries, Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, 1991
[iv] Matthew
Rice, The Lost City of Stoke-on-Trent,
Frances Lincoln Limited, 2010
[v] Simon
Inglis, The Football Grounds of England
and Wales, Willow Books, 1983
[vi] The
Centre for Cities Factsheet shows that the Stoke-on-Trent urban area (which includes Newcastle-under-Lyme) has the second highest proportion of workers travelling to work by car, and one of the lowest rates of travel to work by
public transport.
[vii] Centre
for Cities, Mid-sized cities: Their role
in England’s economy, June 2013
[viii] Oxford
Economics, Beyond the City: Britain’s
economic hotspots, June 2015
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