Newtown

This pub sign in Fenton was probably put up in the 1960s and has a prophetic view of the future rising above the smoky past. Hanley represents a shining city on a hill- a vision from the perspective of the late 60s of what the future might hold. Manhattan on the Trent or so they hoped.

I lived close to here for the first ten years of my life in Lytton St, Stoke. It is an industrial landscape and particularly a sound scape. Factory hooters, the grinding sound of flint being crushed, the shrill sound of a saw from the coopers across the road, steam trains, the clatter of goods wagons in the siding and the chugging of barge engines. The canal in the 60s was still a working place with barges filled with bones, clay flint and pottery.
Instead we seem to have gone from industry and grime to no industry and grime. I took the bus into Hanley yesterday and the evidence of decay is all around. We went past the old shopping precinct; we went past the mosque boarded up and no sign of recent activity. True went the new Sixth Form and the new University building but then into Stoke with its boarded up shops and then Harpfields with weeds growing through the playground of the empty school.

Looking through the archives regularly as I do there have been many plans of what the future should have held. In 1973 for instance there was talk of a Stoke-Hanley Axis with grandiose plans. It is something that over the years we have not lacked are fanciful drawings and detailed drawings.

What has gone wrong? Is it indeed fair to blame the actions of officers and councillors of the last 40 years for the mess that we are in. After all other places such as Burnley and Hull are in the same position as Stoke. In fact the Centre for Cities has suggested that the gap between places like Cambridge and places like Stoke is widening and the vision represented in the pub sign looks like a mirage