Day 4

Stoke-on-Trent

We start in wet snow up through the University area which has a distinctly municipal feel, here amongst the terraces, the jewellers and Halal butchers. Stoke is really an agglomeration of five or six towns and already the place seems unsure where to place the emphasis exactly, a lot of stuff slipping down the cracks in between. 

Here are allotments, student digs, shut-up parks. Car dealerships suggest a permanent state of out of town. As we approach Hanley there’s a lot of derelict space fenced off, with only odd dumped sofas and bricks for perspective.

An 1828 journal puts Hanley as, 'A large modern town and chapelry and ranks next to Burslem in size, extent and opulence. The town is in an elevated situation, and the streets forming which are irregular, but many of the houses are well built.’

Today you have to adjust your vision slightly to see the 1828 town through the paint-overs and bolt-on shop fronts, but you can still just about make out the town’s reliced ambitions. Attractive buildings with broad roofs and ornate gabling defy their modern requisitions, which aim to simultaneously cancel them out and comment on their plight:

INDECISION

 DIGNITY

 TOFFS!

Orwell thought Hanley and Burslem,

‘… About the most dreadful places I have seen. Labyrinths of tiny blackened houses and among them the pot-banks like burgundy bottles half buried in the soil, belching forth smoke.’

The pot-banks have gone as has the industrial pollution, but there has been a major pay off. What was once a mass industry, an industry to found an identity upon, has all but been eradicated. What was once Wedgwood is now Waterworld and a dry ski slope, begging the questions a). What does Stoke need with a dry ski slope? and b). Would you swap an industry for a waterpark?

The only pottery we can find is at Moorcroft on the outskirts of Burslem where I suggest Ted picks up a souvenir for his girlfriend. He fingers a tiny vase, quickly putting it back down at £190. There’s no more potent symbol of the towns’ shift and decline than their being reduced to selling rare pieces at these prices, this tiny and obscure manufacturer lost in an area desperate for bigger designs.   

The towns themselves are detached signifiers, places come loose from their original meanings. What happens next in these places?

I like Stoke a lot but after a while the walk turns into a penance for all the time I’ve spent avoiding this sort of town. We keep our heads down but the miles turn over junction after junction of empty hairdressers, carpet dealerships and tattoo parlours, as busy roads seethe in the rain. The industrial units reveal, MADDOGS FIGHTING AND SOCIAL CLUB, MADDOGS BALLET; the Filled Oatcakes and Pikelets shop advertises THE HEARTSTOPPER.

Burslem itself is a tragic event and presents itself as a series of repeated visual motifs. The symbol, rightly, is the kiln; one or two of these are visible along with some grand looking towers up on the hill. You’re afforded this good low view because they’ve rubbleized the Doulton factory, buildings collapsing and rotting over another huge waste area. 

What must it do to a town’s psychology to have had such a catastrophe visited on it, and to have this catastrophe fester on like an open wound at the centre of the town?

A stripper falls out of a car and stumbles into a terraced house opposite the Doulton factory, followed by two lads with crates of booze. A guy pulls up next door on a cheap mountain bike and a dog barks at him from behind grimy net curtains. Two women, mother and daughter, talk about going into Weatherspoons and getting fixed up while the young girl with them looks on impassive. Children are neutral up to a point, but how long can you stay neutral in a place like this?

All Images © Ted Allen 2010