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Old Bottle Kilns
An old bottle kiln at Longcroft Wharf, Burslem. Each kiln is unique. There used to be 2,000 in Stoke. Today, only 47 remain. Photograph: Bruce Adams/Daily Mail/Bruce/REX
An old bottle kiln at Longcroft Wharf, Burslem. Each kiln is unique. There used to be 2,000 in Stoke. Today, only 47 remain. Photograph: Bruce Adams/Daily Mail/Bruce/REX

The £1 houses and thriving potteries that are making Stoke boom again

This article is more than 9 years old
Dealt seemingly fatal blows by successive governments since the 80s, Stoke-on-Trent is at last starting to recover

When Gavin Pierpoint applied to Stoke council to become the owner of a £1 house in April 2013, his expectations were not high. For one thing, there was the selection process to get through, during which he would have to prove not only that he was capable of paying back the loan the council would make him for the property’s renovation – such a loan was a condition of sale – but that he was fully committed to becoming part of a community. For another, he couldn’t quite believe the council would fulfil its promises. Would these terraces, empty for several years, really be renovated to a decent standard? And how long would it take? At the back of his mind, too, were his anxieties about the area. “I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t concerned,” he says. “The boarded-up houses, the fly-tipping, the squatters; the reputation of these streets for prostitutes and drugs. I wondered how the people who lived here tolerated that, and what that [tolerance] meant for me.” By the time he found out that he was indeed one of the lucky ones – the council had 35 such properties on its books – he was well beyond excitement. “I left that to my mum,” he says, with a smile. “She was very excited. Even now she still sneaks in the occasional bowl of pot pourri.”

The council put the new homeowners’ names in one hat, and the addresses in the other, and matched them at random, the better to be fair. Pierpoint’s house is in Rutland Street, smack in the middle of the grid of 19th-century terraces. To reach these marooned streets, cruelly bordered by major roads and retail parks, you must go down the hill from the centre of Hanley, one of the six towns that the city of Stoke comprises (the others are Tunstall, Burslem, Stoke, Fenton and Longton) – a walk that would be unnerving at night, particularly for a woman alone. Once you’re here, though, the atmosphere is suddenly and unexpectedly hushed, as if you’d stepped into snow. The terraces have a protected feeling, hunkered as they are shoulder-to-shoulder against the world. A pessimist might see only the “for auction” signs, the rubbish that disgraces some of the alleys running between them. But I’m quite the Pollyanna when it comes to property, chalking up instead the freshly painted doors, the new blinds, the tubs of flowers.

Pierpoint, 26, is a civil servant. After university in Newcastle, he returned to Stoke, where he grew up, drawn back by friends and family. Thanks to his salary, renting a flat wasn’t a problem, and nor would a mortgage have been any trouble had he been able to save a deposit; the council’s £1 house scheme appealed because it gave him the chance to own his own place without the need of such a lump sum. Each of the properties in this scheme cost the council £30,000 to renovate, and like all the other £1 house owners – the description makes for a neat headline, even if it is not quite true – he will pay back a loan for this amount over 10 years at a cost of £293 a month, at the end of which he will be mortgage-free. Should he sell the house within five years, the council will claim any profit. Should he sell it before 10 years are out, the council will take a share of the profit, on a sliding scale (in year six, for instance, they would take 20%, and so on). Not that he is thinking of selling any time soon. “I like this house,” he says. “I like the high ceilings: they make the rooms feel bigger.” The terrace is a traditional two-up, two-down, with a kitchen and, beyond it, a bathroom in a single-storey extension in the back yard, cosy yet relatively spacious. What more could he want?

Emma Bridgewater’s factory in Stoke-on-Trent relies on its skilled local workforce. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer

But it’s not only his immaculate laminate floors and the lime-green walls of his made-over bathroom that will keep him here. The commitment he made in his application, the one in which he made it clear he planned on sticking around, wasn’t hot air. In this sense, the council’s undoubted rigour in selecting its new home owners has paid off. “I do want to make a difference,” he says. “I do want to help to improve the area. There’s no reason why it should be so down.” The council has matched this pledge and others like it with one of its own, which is that this nascent community will be supported in the months and years to come. “The people I mentioned, the ones I thought tolerated the antisocial behaviour. Now I’ve met them, I realise that they were worried, too, and they just didn’t know where to go. But since we moved in, we’ve been told exactly who to report things to.” The team in the housing department that is responsible for the Portland Street project is keen to encourage community bonding, and regular meetings are now held for residents: in the near future, they will even be allowed to decide whether the council spends some cash it has available on green spaces or on reopening the community centre. “We had a clean-up weekend recently. About 50 people attended, a good mix of old and new. There was some initial concern [among existing residents] that things were only being done for us. But people know now that whatever is done benefits everyone.”

Two streets away, Chris Benn and Rebecca Dennis, who are also part of the scheme, agree. “Our next-door neighbour is an Italian man who has owned his house since 1956,” says Dennis. “He’s seen the area go right down, and he would really like to see it go back up. He’s been lovely to us.” Benn and Dennis are thrilled with their £1 house, and all the more so because when they first applied to the scheme, they were turned down on financial grounds: Benn, a fitter in a car factory, is not on a fixed contract, so Dennis, a photography student at Stoke university, had to increase her own hours in order for them to bag a property. (“When I’m not at uni, I have two jobs,” she says. “I work in Asda, and then at the weekends, I sew teddy bears in a factory.”) After only a few weeks, the couple, who are engaged, already feel an emotional connection with their new home, telling me that should they ever decide to move on, they couldn’t countenance the idea of renting it out. “They might trash it,” says Dennis, uncertainly.

Moving to the front window, she points out a CCTV camera to me, a recent innovation designed to stop the fly tippers who would come from as far away as Sheffield and Leeds in the days when many of the houses were empty. “It has already made a difference,” she says. We consider the backs of the houses opposite. Her own, she feels, has the edge on these: unusually, the bathroom is upstairs. Is Stoke a good place to live? For her and Benn, it’s home: they both come from families who worked “in the pots”. But she likes it for its own sake as well. The Potteries Shopping Centre – after a while, you get used to the fact that almost everything here seems to begin with the P-word – might not have a branch of Zara, but there are compensations. “Other places don’t have bottle ovens,” she says. “And they’re beautiful.” She’s right about this. No two bottle ovens (the bottle-shaped kilns in which earthenware was traditionally fired) are the same, built as they were on the whim of the pot bank (ie factory) owners. In Stoke’s heyday, there were 2,000 of them. Now, just 47 remain. Walk out of Benn and Dennis’s door, and stroll to the end of Portland Street, and you can see one looming incongruously beside the dual carriageway, like a church spire gone wrong.

Local graphic designer Rachel Roberts in front of the house in Rutland Street she bought from the council for £1: ‘Things are starting to change.’ Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer

Back in Rutland Street I meet Rachel Roberts, a 31-year-old graphic designer. Roberts was one of the first to be accepted on the scheme, thanks in part to her strong connections with the area (the council was particularly keen to help those with existing links to Portland Street). “One set of my father’s grandparents lived on this street, and the other set lived two streets down. My great aunt Millie still lives two streets down; she’s lived there all her life.” From the Saturday-morning comfort of a new sofa, she contemplates her future. “I see this as my home. I want to get the loan paid off at least, and in that time I would like the area to get back to being more as my dad remembers it. I know things can’t happen overnight, and the streets do get loud at night, shouting and so on. But things are starting to change. My neighbours are lovely, and one has told me how much warmer her house is now the one next to it is no longer empty. I’m very keen to be involved in regeneration. I would love, for instance, the alleys to be repurposed as community gardens.” More vocal than some on the scheme, she would also like it to be a beacon, an example to councils everywhere. “New builds,” she says, with a sniff. “They’re very small. Sometimes, they go up in just a few weeks. But these houses have stood the test of time. I think the council’s better off renovating them than knocking them down.”

The Portland Street area, as she is well aware, was another unhappy victim of the Labour government’s Housing Market Renewal Pathfinders Programme – aka the Pathfinder scheme – a wilfully stupid and ultimately doomed project that has left many miles of terraced houses standing empty across cities in the north and the Midlands. It was begun in 2002 by the then deputy prime minister, John Prescott. The idea, in essence, was that Victorian housing would be demolished and replaced with new builds, and thus that failing housing markets in deprived areas would be renewed. It was controversial from the beginning, its opponents – the most magnificent of which was, and still is, Save Britain’s Heritage – arguing that a vital element of our built environment was being unnecessarily lost, and that the scheme amounted, as longstanding residents were moved on, to social cleansing. Many local people began campaigns against it. Some were forcibly evicted. What made the situation worse, however, was the change of government in 2010. The money dried up. Houses awaiting demolition were now left to rot. Residents who had not yet moved out were left stranded. In the case of Portland Street, Stoke council had bought up some houses from private owners, planning to demolish them. But that was no longer possible. The only money available now in terms of grants came from a new government keen to see empty homes – there are 5,000 such buildings in Stoke – brought back into use.

Will other councils look at Stoke, and follow suit? We must pray that they do, given how many perfectly good Victorian houses now stand empty, mournfully “tinned up” against the vandals. (Liverpool did, in fact, launch its own £1 scheme, but it has failed thus far, for the simple reason that new owners were required to pay for their own renovations – an increasingly expensive and terrifying prospect for most buyers, given the neglect inflicted on these homes.) The Portland Street project, it’s already evident, has benefits for both existing residents and the new owners, on the housing ladder at last. “My gut instinct is that it’s working,” says Zainul Pirmohamed, the programme manager whose idea the scheme was (she heard of a similar programme in Rotterdam while attending a conference there). “But this isn’t just a lick of paint. This is a 10-year project.” It’s also about more than money – though she believes it is proving to be highly cost-effective. “It’s bigger than that,” she insists. The scheme is also about such romantic and nebulous things as community, heritage, the fraught relationship between the past and the future. Such issues are complex wherever they occur: how does a place move on when the very reason for its existence has been virtually wiped out? But perhaps they will never be more fraught than in Stoke-on-Trent, a city that is not quite a city, and whose parochial otherness must be experienced to be believed: a place that is so central and yet feels so cut off, that is so very ugly and yet maintains the capacity to stun the visitor into silence with its unlikely beauty. If there is hope for poor benighted Stoke, the thinking goes, then there is hope for us all.

In a memoir of his 1930s Potteries childhood, The Vanished Landscape, historian Paul Johnson describes his father taking him to see the Sytch in Burslem, an immense stretch of ground composed of clay, black water, mud, industrial detritus and “fumigerous furnaces belching forth fire, ashes and smoke”. This was the “dark heart” of the Potteries, and the young Johnson was goggle-eyed at the sight of its inky slime; gazing at it, he understood why its name was spoken in an undertone even by Potteries “patriots”, why those who lived there were reluctant to admit to their address. But as he also knew, such coyness was the exception. Mostly, the fiery blackness of the Potteries – “this is what hell will be like,” his mother used to tell him, as they stared out at the “volcano nightscape” – was the source of a strange kind of pride. “There’s no wealth w’out muck,” people would say. Or, as one put it: “All progress comes fro’ sludge.”

During the 1950s there was full employment in Stoke-on-Trent, with around 70,000 people employed by the potteries. Today, that figure is 10,000. Photograph: Dave Bagnall Collection / Alamy/Alamy

And what wealth there was. The Potteries, it’s true, kept their workers, often women doing piecework, in low wages. But the boom that began in the 18th century – when it was discovered that if ground flint was added to local clay, covetable creamware could be produced – made the factory owners exceedingly rich, and with their money they built: look around the six towns, and you’ll find some of the most invincible-looking public buildings in Britain. Such civic pride is contagious, and it helped also to fund places such as the Wedgwood Institute in Burslem, named after the greatest potter of them all, Josiah Wedgwood, whose statue greets you as you emerge from Stoke station (funded by subscription and decorated with a series of terracotta panels depicting the processes involved in pottery, the Institute once housed the Burslem School of Art, where Johnson’s father was headmaster, and where such designers as Clarice Cliff and Susie Cooper were trained; it now stands, like so many buildings in the six towns, unaccountably empty). There was full employment in Stoke-on-Trent, which was granted city status in 1925, the six towns having become a federation some 15 years before (as well as the ceramics industry, there was steel to be forged and coal to be mined), and those who worked in the pots were highly skilled and proud to be associated with such names as Spode, Burleigh, Doulton, Minton and Wedgwood. How could they not be? In the Potteries Museum in Hanley, home of the largest collection of Staffordshire pottery in the world, I stood in front of the fabulous Minton peacock, an earthenware bird perched on an elaborately rocky plinth that in 1873 was fired in one piece in spite of its fantastical size, and wondered if there was anything the potters could not have made. These were businesses, but what wonders they produced, what art.

Then – you know what’s coming – disaster. The 1980s finished off Stoke’s pits, just as they did everywhere else. The steel industry floundered and disappeared. The potteries struggled on – everyone will tell you that Stoke only noticed what terrible trouble it was in long after other cities – but then they, too, looked like giving up the ghost. Production moved to China, where labour costs were cheaper. Many factories closed. Others shrank radically. Meanwhile, a new generation gave up on the idea of “best” china, the kind that was treasured and stowed in a sideboard till Sunday. Cheaper, mass-produced dinner services were now the order of the day – and they could be made anywhere. Today, an industry that once employed 70,000 people provides jobs for just under 10,000. It’s not hard to find symbols of this decimation. Among the saddest sights of all is that of the derelict Spode factory, which stands on a site acquired by Josiah Spode in 1776. Unoccupied since 2008, it is deteriorating rapidly (the council acquired it in 2010). Its magnificent China Hall, whose windows were positioned in order to secure the best light for painting china, is used for the British Ceramics Biennial (the fourth will be held in 2015), but otherwise it stands empty. This is all the more outrageous when you consider that it’s largely thanks to this building that the town of Stoke, which grew up around it, exists at all.

But the Potteries are not done yet. More recently, there has been a shift. The sense is that things are starting to change. Labour costs are rising in China, while British products are ever more sought after in the luxury market. Both factors stand to benefit Stoke. Factories have begun to take on more workers, and to bring some production back to the UK. Some are running at capacity; they fire seven days a week; profits are rising. (In order to meet his deadline at the Tower of London, it was to a Tunstall-based pottery that artist Paul Cummins, one of the creators of Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, turned for the hurried manufacture of more poppies last July.) A few companies, such as Steelite in Middleport, which sells to the catering industry, are growing exponentially.

Emma Bridgewater bought the Eastwood Works from Wedgewood in 1996 and now produces all her ceramics in the city. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer

Meanwhile, and more romantically, there are smaller newcomers, designers who have fallen in love with Stoke: Emma Bridgewater, who bought the Victorian Eastwood Works from Wedgwood in 1996 and now produces all her ceramics in the city, using methods Josiah himself would recognise (it tells you something that Bridgewater’s PR manager, Hannah Ault, is a Stoke girl – her father is in clay – who has returned after a long period in London, during which she worked at, among other places, Prada); and Reiko Kaneko, a young Japanese-British designer, who moved to Stoke from London to be near the Longton company that makes her porcelain wares, and to draw on the experience of the city’s mould and pattern-makers. “If something goes wrong with your kiln, you get it fixed here the next day, no problem,” she says, with a laugh. “It [ceramics] is in the blood here. In London, I worked in a building full of supposedly creative people. But everyone here is so much more fascinating to me. I love working with them, and they understand the value of my products, of the hand finishing, the fact that it’s labour-intensive.” Next year, she is to open a showroom in Stoke; she hopes it will become part of the city’s Ceramics Trail, part of its tourist initiative.

It’s not difficult to find people who will give you good news. “We’re putting on additional shifts,” says Brett Phillips, the finance director at Portmeirion and a man who strikes me as not remotely inclined to hyperbole or unnecessary optimism (a relative newcomer in terms of the Potteries – it was founded in 1 960 by Susan Williams-Ellis – Portmeirion also owns Spode and Royal Worcester, which it acquired in 2009). “We produce 50% of our overall production in Stoke. All our earthenware is made here. At the moment, demand is at about 170,000 pieces of best quality a week, and we’re just about managing to keep up. Capital investment will be next, and that’s likely to be substantial. Tunnel kilns cost around £750,000, and you need three in a factory this size.” Is it important to be in Stoke, or could that investment be made anywhere? “No, it’s important to be here. There is a still a skill base in Stoke. But there is also a cachet that comes with the heritage, particularly abroad.” What he says next amazes me. “Our third-largest market is South Korea, and they buy our most important pattern, Botanic Garden, almost exclusively. It’s the leading imported tableware brand in South Korea by miles, and it commands a premium price largely because it is made in Britain.” My stepmother’s china was Botanic Garden. Launched in 1972, it is decorated with floral illustrations from Thomas Green’s Botanical Dictionary. How peculiar that it should turn out to be the ceramic equivalent of Burberry.

Reiko Kaneko moved from London to Stoke to be near the Longton company that makes her porcelain wares. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer

Knowing all this, it’s surprising to find a local MP urging caution. Tristram Hunt, the shadow education secretary, has represented Stoke-on-Trent Central since 2010, when he was controversially parachuted into the safe seat (though he is now well liked in the city; people like his enthusiasm, and the fact that he doesn’t change his voice when he talks to them). “We might get the [employment] figures up to 15,000,” he says, when I meet him in the cafe at Bridgewater. “But you have to be realistic. Companies that are growing are also investing in mechanisation; where 14 pairs of hands used to touch every piece of ware, now only two do.” Even stranger, given that he is a historian with a special interest in the 19th century (his last book Ten Cities That Made an Empire includes a chapter on Liverpool), he seems wary of the past: “Finding a use for old bottle kilns is hard,” he says. Labour MPs do have a recidivist streak when it comes to housing – the Pathfinder scheme fatally ignored the lessons of the 1960s – but it’s frustrating that he won’t acknowledge that Prescott’s plan was a disaster, and dispiriting to hear him speak rather robotically of “uniform late Victorian housing of variable quality built on shaky land” (though even he seems to think the £1 scheme is an idea that might just work). Perhaps he’s just learned to talk local, having previously criticised the Labour council for its “obliteration” of the past. But then… what’s this? Ah, he can’t help himself, after all. “We should look to the era of Wedgwood,” he says, suddenly. “The era of entrepreneurs, designers, small companies, innovation.” Was he surprised by how fast the money was raised to save the Wedgwood Collection, one of the most important archives in the world? (A public appeal earlier this year met its target of £2.74m two months early, £15m having already been raised by grants and significant donations – a quite astonishing display of understanding and affection for the collection). “Am I not a man and brother?” he says, quoting Josiah Wedgwood’s celebrated anti-slavery cameo. “Emotions are so important, and brands are emotions…” This isn’t exactly an answer, but it’s quite endearing nevertheless.

Paul Johnson called his book The Vanished Landscape with good reason. So much has been lost. “The jolie laide had had a drastic facelift…” he writes, visiting the city after a long absence. “But in the process she had lost her strange, romantic beauty; and, I suspect, her soul.” Is this true? Perhaps. Stoke does resemble a mouth that is missing several teeth. The dual carriageways and retail sheds do the place no favours. The destruction needs to stop. There needs to be more of a plan if the towns are ever to become, as Tristram Hunt hopes they will, a new “centre of excellence” for ceramics (links with Central St Martin’s and the V&A are strengthening). As Matthew Rice (the husband of Emma Bridgewater, and one of the city’s most passionate advocates) urges in his book, The Lost City of Stoke-on-Trent: “Don’t knock down another thing. Not another tidy dark-bricked terrace or crumbling factory. Not a gate pier, Minton tile or boot scraper of it. Not until we know how to put it right…” Such remnants are, he believes, an anchor “to hold fast” while the place rethinks its character.

Prince Charles looks inside an old bottle kiln during a visit to the Middleport pottery in 2013. Photograph: WENN UK / Alamy/Alamy

Who could disagree with this? I spend my best hours in Stoke under the gentle tutelage of Fred Hughes, ex-policeman, former Labour councillor, former columnist at the Sentinel. Hughes was involved in the campaign to save the Bethesda Chapel, the “cathedral of the Potteries”, which you may remember from the BBC’s Restoration series, and he makes for a wonderful guide. It’s with him that I see the things that could make a person fall in love with the city: the chapel itself, which dates from the early 19th century and feels like some wondrous galleon as you stand on the bridge of its pulpit; the Burslem School of Art of 1905, with its generous studio windows, such a fine symbol of skill and self- improvement; and, best of all, the Middleport Pottery, the home of Burleigh. Acquired by the Prince’s Regeneration Trust in 2011, Middleport is still a working factory (half of the site is leased to Burleigh, whose ware has been made here since 1888), but it’s the buildings that stir you, not the pots, their preservation an achievement and a blessing, whatever you think of HRH: the blackened brick; the mahogany offices; the hand-written order books. Together, Fred and I walk up to Middleport’s single remaining bottle kiln. In Stoke, so much that was solid has melted into air. But not this. To the touch, it feels as indomitable as the hills.

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