by Nick Corble
The problem was, although Middlewich was undoubtedly trying hard to make something of its waterside heritage, it was, if you’ll pardon the phrase, swimming against the tide of change. Even one of its boatyards had recently gone bust. Perhaps the breach in the canal offered another metaphor? Something had finally given. With its large housing estates and people working away from the town, it must have been hard work to foster a sense of community.
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Continuing along the canal, I bumped into a couple from the Isle of Wight out on the water for a week. Before I knew where she was from I mentioned I was from ‘down south’, a description I’d fallen into using as my home town of High Wycombe rarely featured on anyone’s mental map. She remarked how where she came from they regarded the rest of us as coming from the ‘north island’, which certainly put me in my place.
It was time to get away from the water outside Alsager in Cheshire, where the promise of a pottery on the OS map lured me to make a detour. Immediately off the towpath, I came across a lorry driver with his wagon, staring blankly at the canal bridge and the sign that said there was a seven-ton weight limit.
‘Satnav bring you here?’ I asked. He nodded and said something I couldn’t quite make out above the sound of his still revving engine. We were both looking at the bridge. ‘What’s your weight?’. Lip-reading, I made out the words ‘Nearer nine’. I looked down to the farm where the pottery was supposed to be and suggested he could turn around there. He nodded in resignation, and I left him in order to check out the pottery, as a little something for the wife might be in order. It was shut.
Meanwhile, the silence-shattering sound of the ‘beep, beep’ of the lorry’s reverse filled the air and I checked to make sure I wasn’t in his path. I needn’t have bothered, as at that moment, the beeps stopped, the engine gunned, and he took the bridge at a speed too great for me to get his licence plate, even if I’d thought of doing so. In three seconds, he’d gone. I checked the bridge for cracks, but he’d got away with it.
I entered Alsager via the Salt Way, which unsurprisingly was another old railway line, used to carry salt, as well as products from the local chemical industries to the potteries in Staffordshire in the 1850s, bringing back coal for those industries on their return journeys. Later, towards the end of the century, it had been used to take passengers to Trentham Gardens in Stoke, a service that continued until 1930, with the goods line closing in 1970.
Alsager is a pleasant small town with a side line in ethical trading (it’s a Fairtrade Town), and I reflected that this sort of direction, looking forward rather than to the past, might be more effective than Middlewich’s strategy. An information board for Milton House in the middle of the town, whose grounds are now a public park, told how in the 1860s the house belonged to John Maddock Jnr, whose family owned an earthenware factory in Burslem in Stoke. The house’s next owner, one William Young Craig, made the house self-sufficient in not only fruit, vegetables and flowers, but also eggs and coal, even producing its own electricity. Perhaps this was where the town got its green credentials from? Alsager still has a high street and even a Costa, something Middlewich couldn’t offer, which must make it the only place with a population above three men and a dog that hasn’t. It also has a huge modern health centre, although its defining feature, its lake, or Mere, was hidden behind housing.
Alsager also still has a rail line, and a station it is proud of, with a number of plaques screwed to a wall commemorating various wins as ‘Station of the Year’, something it has achieved without having either a ticket office or even a ticket machine. What it does have is a level crossing and an efficient service to Crewe in one direction and Stoke to the other, and points beyond. It was time to let the train take the strain. The first leg of my walk had come to an end.
Stage 2
Alsager
to
Alrewas
54.7 miles
127,831 steps
4
Pot Luck
The next section was going to be tricky, with my diagonal line cutting a neat north-west to south-east transverse through a largely rural Staffordshire. Much of the route was through open moorlands, some hills and considerably less convenient places to stay. To ease matters, my wife Annette had agreed to ferry me around and we’d taken a cottage for the bank holiday May Day weekend, a decision swayed by a good weather forecast after the first day. The route also offered an opportunity for some catching up, not only with the course we’d followed twenty years previously, but also with both Annette’s and my alma mater, Keele University.
Annette thus became the first person to physically ‘walk with me’ as we negotiated an open stretch to Newcastle-under-Lyme, where both previously-left car and a bed awaited us. On reaching exposed fields, I immediately spotted an owl flying low over the newly sown crops, and I wondered whether this might be an omen. Maybe it was, as the next few days turned out to be challenging, not so much because of the walking, more for the obstacles put in our way.
Without the reassuring presence of towpaths, it became more important to track our route, both on the map and by following footpath signs. When planning the walk, I’d decided against investing in a handheld GPS, partly because I thought my phone could do the job, but also because I wanted to spend my time looking up, rather than down at a screen. This strategy depended on there being a full complement of signs of course, but as it didn’t take long to discover, the local landowners delighted in making life difficult for walkers, either by failing to replace missing signs or by pretending footpaths didn’t exist at all. The nominal width of a public right of way is a metre, but it looked like whoever was responsible for maintaining them in Staffordshire had got their metric and imperials mixed up and settled for a foot. Crops were also sown right up to the edge of fields, creating a quagmire along the edge, which in turn made for heavy walking.
Surviving any initial obstacles put in our way only meant being confronted with others. Electric fences turned out to be a popular choice. These fences looked benign, a thin strip of fabric stretched over flimsy plastic poles, but they packed a punch. At one point, Annette slipped in a pool of mud so fresh we suspected it had been deposited there especially that morning, and in trying to regain her balance grabbed a fence that turned out to be live. Luckily for him, the local farmer didn’t make an appearance at that point, but as we negotiated a way across his land it felt as if he was tracking us through binoculars and having a damned good chortle.
To top things off, in line with the forecast it began to rain. This was just as we were approaching the highlight of this stretch, the Wedgwood Monument, propped proudly on top of Bignall Hill. Classified as a sub-HuMP (yes, the initialisation is correct), a prominence over 100 metres high, the monument turned out to be a stone edifice with three steps leading to a tall stone plinth with a pointy bit on top. From here it was supposedly possible to catch views out over Cannock Chase, the Peak District and Snowdonia, although we could barely make out Newcastle through the gathering mist.
Quite naturally, given the area we were about to enter, we’d assumed the monument was to Josiah Wedgwood, but we were wrong. It was in fact to a John Wedgwood, a local coal mine owner who, rather modestly, left a sum of money in his will for the construction of a grand obelisk overlooking his old mine. The executors of his will duly fulfilled his wish and, in 1850, eleven years after his death, the monument was completed. According to some sources it also included his tomb, although where they’d kept the body for over a decade remained unanswered.
Imposing though the monument was, until fairly recently it was much more so. It toppled in a storm in 1976, and what’s left now is but a stump of what it once was, a sympathetic representation perhaps of the local coal industry, once a huge part of the Staffordshire economy. Decaying concrete posts were scattered around the monument, suggesting that in the recent past it had served a greater purpose, as a lookout post during the war perhaps,
although I could find nothing to support this theory. Maybe it was just to deter visitors, a theory more in line with our experience of Staffordshire so far.
We continued along our path, and were just congratulating ourselves for having left the domain of our malevolent farmer when we were confronted by a large pool of water that had reclaimed the footpath for ducks and anglers. We walked our way round this and, slaloming through some boulders left at the entrance to a path, found our way into Apedale Country Park. This, it turned out, occupies the site of the late John Wedgwood’s colliery, now home to a Heritage Centre. Discarded railway tracks and rolling stock were scattered amongst disused buildings, where coal was still mined up until the 1980s. It’s still possible to go underground, but only as a paying tourist.
We were approaching the outskirts of Newcastle, and as I’d already discovered, whenever you approach a stretch of open land near a town, so dog walkers start to appear. Before long, these were complemented by two youths, each clutching a can of cider, who left behind a strong smell of something aromatic and illegal. Passing a Speedway Stadium (‘70 mph, no gears, no brakes’), a sport I hadn’t realised still existed, we entered some housing. A recently built care home on one side of the road faced an uninspiring-looking industrial estate on the other, where signs offered ‘Professional Battery Solutions’ and ‘Dynamic Pump Services’, which did leave me wondering about our modern attitudes towards the elderly if this was the best we could offer them as their final view. Still, it could have been worse. A little further on, and totally randomly, a cemetery had been carved into the hill.
A young man pushing a baby buggy walked past us as we entered a housing estate, the buggy containing an infant with two cans of Stella at its feet, presumably for later.
It was then that it happened. An older man, walking at his own pace, and possibly returning to the care home hoping to smuggle in a can or two of his own, uttered the universal Staffordshire greeting: ‘Hello me duck’.
We were homing in on the Staffordshire of our memory.
That night, we chose a chain pub to eat in, both for convenience and because there was little other choice. After Annette had given our order to the waitress, who then proceeded to type what looked like the opening chapter of her autobiography into an iPad, a woman on the table next to us cleared her food debris onto her partner’s plate and then swiftly lifted up her own to examine the base. Not only were we in Staffordshire, we were also close to Stoke, for this was a characteristic of ‘Stokies’: checking out the provenance of their crockery.
‘Churchill,’ she announced, adding ‘I’m impressed.’
Churchill is one of the few local potteries still going. It operates out of Tunstall, one of the five towns made famous in the novels by Arnold Bennett. The others are Hanley, which operates as the main centre; Burslem, which is regarded as the mother town and birthplace of the pottery industry; Longton and Fenton (not the dog in the famous YouTube clip). Absent in that list are Newcastle-under-Lyme and, you may have noticed, Stoke itself. Use of the name Stoke-on-Trent to cover the whole area began in 1910, primarily because Stoke was where the train station happened to be.
Stokies tend to have a self-deprecating attitude towards their city, and if my walk into the centre from Newcastle was anything to go by, this might not be an unreasonable approach. Devoid of both a footpath and of my wife, who’d nipped off to do a bit of shopping, I had little choice but to walk alongside some busy main roads, lined with small convenience stores, tattoo parlours, tanning salons and other salubrious establishments. I’d hoped to pass somewhere where I could buy some oatcakes, that rare example of a local food speciality, but I was disappointed. There was one shop dedicated to them, but perhaps inevitably, it was shut. Seemingly for good. A savoury pancake around eight inches in diameter, oatcakes are made using oatmeal, flour and yeast and are generally cooked on a hot plate. They provide a good base for both sweet and savoury fillings and I’d been looking forward to sampling them again after discovering them during my time at university. I’d last tasted them the last time I’d passed through this way in 1999.
Stoke’s polycentric nature doesn’t do it many favours, with little to distinguish between Bennett’s different towns to the outsider, although apparently there’s a lot of snobbery between the different locales. Inhabitants of Burslem for example, would not want to be confused with someone from Longton. This was almost ironic, in a sort of ‘It may be a dump, but at least it’s my dump’ kind of a way. Large, dirty civic buildings in rust-coloured brick dominated what I assumed was the centre. The grandeur and optimism they must once have expressed was now diminished by their surroundings. Brown tourist signs offered a Cultural Quarter in what appeared to be a cruel joke.
Not surprisingly, these supposed attractions focussed on the city’s Potteries heritage, providing another example, after the Anderton Boat Lift, of the country’s talent for tapping into its past in an attempt to underpin the present. When J.B. Priestley passed through the Potteries at the start of the Great Depression, he’d regarded them as unworthy of the potters, who he saw as craftsmen, masters of a skilled and difficult profession. That may well have been true in his day, but my own experience of working in a pottery as a student in the early 1980s was rather different. It was a dehumanising job, ruled by conveyor belts and systems that, even to my innocent eyes, looked inefficient and doomed to be carried out by people earning even less than I was, probably on another continent.
Even in Priestley’s time, the writing had been on the wall. In his tour of the area he visited what was regarded at the time as a cutting-edge factory making ceramic electrical insulators. Back then, this had represented the future. In fact, what he witnessed was only a passing phase at the very dawn of an electrical and electronic revolution we are still living through today. Perhaps the future is always out of reach, with change coming faster than our ability to adapt to it?
Given my quest to understand brink-of-Brexit England, I’d taken the fact that Stoke sits plumb on my diagonal line as one of the deciding factors to undertake the walk. After all, Stoke has earned itself the sobriquet of being the ‘Brexit Capital of Britain’. Journalists being journalists, this label had stuck, even though it is factually incorrect. Sure, Stoke voted 69.4 per cent in favour of leaving the EU, a high proportion. But less than the nine other areas whose vote had exceeded 70 per cent. The tag had in fact been created by the ex-leader of UKIP (a not terribly exclusive club) Paul Nuttall, when standing in the 2017 parliamentary by-election in Stoke Central. So when anyone, including a journalist, uses this term to describe Stoke they are actually propagating UKIP ‘fake news’.
Although Brexit continued to dominate the newspaper headlines during my walk, and to dominate politics, there was little evidence anywhere I went that it was the burning issue on people’s minds. It was difficult to escape the impression that people had been asked a question and, in the absence of a proper debate, had responded instinctively; after which they’d just got on with their lives.
Conversations I’d had so far with those favouring Leave had emphasised a wish to protect what they had against perceived outsiders. Walking around Stoke, it was hard to see what was so precious it needed to be preserved. Stoke was a poor city in Priestley’s time, and is a poor city now. A survey2 commissioned by the BBC just prior to my visit revealed that in a listing of average weekly wages in the 64 areas with a population of more than 135,000, Stoke came 54th, with an average wage of just £455, against the national average of £539. A few days later I had a conversation with a woman called Julie, who recounted that she’d grown up in Stoke in the 1950s and like many people there she’d been raised in dire poverty. Where she lived there was no inside toilet and she didn’t have a bath until she was fifteen.
I found myself comparing Stoke with Liverpool, which in the same survey came out pretty much in the middle of average weekly earnings. Both had experienced fundamental changes in the basis of thei
r local economy; both had struggled to come up with a replacement. But Liverpool had come across as having more heart, more soul. That heart was its centre, including its civic buildings and its industrial heritage, where the local authorities had made an effort to spruce the place up, as if it was expecting important visitors. Stoke suffered from having no discernible historic centre and looked resigned to its fate. It had lost its coal mining, most of its potteries, a steel industry and even the vast bulk of employment at one time offered by the tyre manufacturer Michelin. It felt like Stoke had run out of luck. It was punch drunk, a washed-up fighter incapable of stopping further blows. To make matters worse, in the same way that one of the ways Liverpudlians defined themselves was through their football teams, so Stokies coalesced around the magnificent new stadium of their local team, Stoke City. As a final blow upon a bruise, during our time there the team was relegated from the Premier League.
Also like Liverpool, Stoke had attempted to become a European City of Culture, bidding for the status in 2021. They made the shortlist and, in an attempt to publicise their bid, had launched a plastic duck into space as a homage to their local greeting. There is a video of this on YouTube, and when I watched it I’d anticipated seeing a small rocket blast off from a field somewhere. Instead, it was little more than a powerful drone, which following a less than dramatic ‘three-two-one’ slowly meandered its way into the upper atmosphere, smiling benignly at the camera in front of it, before coming down, probably over somewhere like Latvia, the reaction of whose locals could only be imagined. Stoke eventually lost its bid to Coventry, and, in an ultimate twist of fate, in the end wouldn’t have been granted the status even if they’d won – because of Brexit.
