Has the private car come to the end of the road?

Last week a commons select committee reported that if we're serious about tackling climate change then it could be time to give up driving. Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

White van man and his brothers and sisters in petrol were not happy. If the racket on the internet and radio talk shows is any guide, they will only surrender their steering wheels when someone prizes their cold, dead arm away from the open driver's side window.

Their anger is based in the fact that the private motor car has been sold to them as an icon of personal freedom for more than a century. The nagging question is though, have they and the rest of us been sold a massive and poorly house-trained pup?

My hometown of Stoke-on-Trent is a, mostly, linear city made up of six individual towns, it should be the ideal setting for a first-rate public transport system. What it's got though is an embarrassingly awful one, faced with that it is hardly surprising that driving looks like the best option nine times out of ten.

In many ways though it really isn't. Over its short history the private motor car has filled the atmosphere with pollution, caused us to cover ever more land with tarmac and contributed to rising levels of obesity.

In addition to all that having to own a car has saddled families that are struggling to make ends meet with another expense.

The truth is we might well all be a lot happier, healthier and maybe richer too if we consigned the privately-owned car to a museum. In which case why don't we?

There, as Shakespeare might have put it lies the rub!

Part of the problem is that we haven't yet properly grasped either the size of climate emergency waiting in the wings, or the radical measures needed to deal with it. Rather like the residents of Pompeii we keep telling ourselves that even though the volcano is smoking it hasn't erupted before, so it won't erupt now. Things didn't end well for them; they won't for us either.

There is also a staggering lack of imagination on the part of local and national government. Building a decent public transport system is undeniably costly in the short term and usually requires a significant leap of faith.

In a political culture where playing it safe is the order of the day and the accountants tend to hold the whip hand progress is often sluggish at best and sometimes nonexistent.

A sizable slice of blame has, alas, to rest with my own team, the environmental movement. Too often we talk in terms of what people mustn't do, demanding that the dress code for the promised land requires we all wear a hair shirt.

The fantasy world of autonomous ‘pods’ that replace the petrol hungry tin box on the average suburban drive might always be slightly out of reach. Even if it did come about knowing this country’s talent for making chaos out of the mundane it would only be a matter of time before the whole system was brought down by the wrong kind of snow or leaves on the line.

The truth is that though things are looking had humans have the intelligence and the resilience to turn the situation around. We are more than capable of creating a society that is greener fairer and better for everyone.

As it happens, I don't own a car; but it I did that is the sort of world I'd happily give it up to build.

New group encourages men to speak about their struggles with mental health issues

“We’re nobody special, just two blokes who are tired of seeing men killing themselves”.

I’m sitting in an upstairs room at the base of Changes, a charity offering peer support to people living with mental health issues in my hometown of Stoke-on-Trent. Gathered around on the sagging sofas are half a dozen other men, all of them, like me sipping coffee and looking a little uncomfortable.

Out of more than six thousand suicides recorded in 2013 78% involved men, according to the 2014 Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey one in eight males in the UK, 12.2% of the population, showed symptoms of a common mental health problem (source: The Mental Health Foundation).

Despite the size of the problem and its obvious social impact it isn’t something we talk about. Thanks to generations of social conditioning out stiff upper lips stay firmly closed.

This is something Ron and Craig, the likeably blokish duo behind Men Unite, a support network that began on Facebook and is now expanding into the real world want to change.

They might just do it too; in a matter of months their group has grown from a handful of friends to more than a thousand members in sixty-seven countries.

Both men spoke with genuine honesty about their own brushes with mental distress.

Craig talked about struggling with drug addiction and the troubles that follow on from it, debt, deceit and, for him, a short spell in prison. He has since rebuilt his life and career.

Ron, the owner of a successful construction business, spoke about how earlier this year he had found himself standing on a bridge next to the nearby Britannia Stadium on the point of jumping. “Best f*****g view in the city” he jokes, an example of the gallows humour men are programmed to use to mask their emotions.

What he says strikes a chord with Chris*, a softly spoken man who, until tonight has never spoken openly about his struggles with mental distress. He describes how despite having a good job and a happy family life depression hit him with a sucker punch a little over a year ago.

Sam*, spoke about how he had ‘struggled with depression’ all his life and as a result been bullied at school. Through volunteering with Changes, he has found recovery and a way to help others.

The message behind the Men Unite ‘project’, if it can be call that, it is early days and both Ron and Craig would, I’m sure, be the first to admit, are still very much flying by the seat of their pants, is one of solidarity. They don’t want to be victims whining about their troubles; they want to find a way to live with them without being overwhelmed.

That is why they are working with Changes, MIND, Staffordshire Police and the NHS to help men develop ways to be open about the challenges they face and of supporting each other to move on into recovery.

Later over coffee I speak to Sue*, a full-time worker with Changes, “things would be so much easier if men spoke about their feelings” she says, adding, “maybe the people here tonight will start that process”.

She has a point, author Mark Green writes about the ‘man box’, the tight space cultural expectations require men to pack their emotions into allowing them a drastically limited range of expression

This has serious consequences for our physical and mental health, leading to addiction, depression, violence and social isolation. The impact of these can be seen on a societal level too, with men transferring the emotional pain they cannot express into crime, domestic violence and suicide.

Men Unite is still in its salad days, when attracting members is easy and anything seems possible. Being viable in the long-term is a more difficult road paved with bureaucracy and potential disappointment as the pace of growth inevitably slows down to something more manageable.

Their aims are honest, even noble, ones and they are seeking to attain them with a cheerful irreverence that is manly in the best possible way. For the good of half the population in need of a voice to speak about its pain it is to be hoped they succeed.

*Some names used in this article have been changed in the interests of confidentiality.

The gamble made by the council in becoming a property developer might not be a game worth the candle.

Two events over resent weeks have demonstrated the disconnect between the ambitions of those holding power inside the Civic Centre and the experience of ordinary citizens.

Stoke-on-Trent City Council recently announced plans to demolish Gordon House on Kingsway in Stoke town centre. The land it occupies will then be turned into a courtyard enhancing the entrance to the nearby Spode site.

Earlier this week Pochin, the company building the Clayworks apartment block and the Hilton Garden Inn in Hanley went into administration. Work on both sites has been halted, Richard Ingram a partner at developers Genr8 told the Sentinel on Tuesday the company was ‘implementing a plan to ensure the successful delivery of both sites’

How long it might be before work resumes is up there with the length of a piece of string as one of life’s great imponderables.

The decades immediately after the war were not glorious ones for the design of British cities. Grand statements of civic pride built by industrialists during the Victorian era were swept away by a tide of modernism, along with whole neighbourhoods built to house their workers.

In their place came a townscape of concrete blocks, some reaching for the sky, others squatting close to the ground under flat roofs. The results were seldom happy with shoddy workmanship and a lack of consideration for the people who would live in them causing problems almost from day one.

Tower blocks weren’t the ‘streets in the sky’ their architects imagined, instead they became breeding grounds for alienation and social division. Shopping centres built from concrete crumbled into dereliction becoming eyesores avoided by all but the dispossessed.

It is hardly surprising that Ian Fleming named the villain in one of his James Bond novels after Arno Goldfinger, a leading advocate of high rise living. Locally it doesn’t cause you to do a double take to find out that the former Hanley bus station opened in 1967 ended its days as the set for a zombie film.

It is ironic then that the fate of Gordon House, an undistinguished bit of sixties architecture, should be so significant. In other circumstances its demise would be if not something to celebrate, then certainly no cause to mourn.

As it happens though Gordon House is home to several successful businesses, the council has offered to help them relocate to other sites in Stoke town, but the owners fear they won’t survive the move. They have good reason to be apprehensive, Kingsway is one of the few parts of Stoke where there is a guarantee of passing trade.

The ongoing tribulations up at Smithfield are a reminder of the risk the council took when it decided to dip not so much a toe as a whole leg into the murky waters of property development.

The council put down £6.9 million of its, meaning our, money down in the form of a loan to developers Gener8 to build the Hilton Garden Inn. Ever ebullient council leader Abi Brown told the Sentinel that despite the current difficulties the council ‘expect the final works to be completed and for the two sites to be fully delivered’.

Optimism can be a dangerous thing when it is applied without thought. Anyone who knows about the travails of the nearby bus station site, or who has seen the half-built student flats next to the Jubilee Baths in Newcastle will be aware that when property developments go wrong; the tend to go massively wrong.

By investing so much public money in a single project the council have behaved with worrying naivety. Their actions are like those of a novice player with a large bag of money sitting down at a table of card sharps hoping to learn about poker.

Two things are worryingly likely to happen. The council will force the businesses trading from Gordon House to move and probably bring about their closure in the process. A cash funnel will be set up to get things moving again up at Smithfield with we the public promised that short term financial pain will bring long term gains, with the payment date set for the twelfth of never.

If so, the council will be acting rather like those sixties believers in a ‘brave new world’ who covered so much of the real one with concrete. Their vision, be it of building utopia or making a killing on the property market, has blinded them to harsh reality.

Stoke-on-Trent is a city with serious social problems that it is struggling to overcome, as I wrote last week, we need to do so by fixing problems like the lack of a decent public transport network first. This isn’t glamorous and it certainly won’t be quick; but if we don’t success will always be just out of reach.

Only when they have finally done so should the council be thinking about building luxury hotels. Even then they should still go into the process with their eyes open and a firm grip on the purse strings.

Stoke needs to put all the pieces in place to complete the regeneration jigsaw.

Hanley park is set to benefit from a multi-million-pound makeover with improvements to the pavilion and boathouse and the conversion of a former bowls pavilion into a cafe.

Louise Hodgeson of Caterleisure Group, the company behind the project, told the Sentinel " we are delighted to be coming to Hanley Park, which is a fantastic venue with enormous potential".

As someone who has known and enjoyed Hanley Park since childhood, I'm quite pleased to see them pitch up myself.

Like many people born in the surrounding area I have fond childhood memories of what we always called 'the big park'. Sunny seventies afternoons spent splashing about in the paddling poor or riding in a cart pulled by a friendly shire horse called Samson. An adventure that is, sadly denied children growing up in our health and safety conscious world.

I also have less happy memories of the thirty years of neglect that turned the park into a place you sometimes wouldn't want to visit in daylight. Things have improved over the past decade, but this is the extra push the park needed to get back to its best.

I feel a little less certain about the new hotel and apartments being built just up the road on the Smithfield site. While it is an undeniably positive sight to see cranes on the city's skyline, property speculation is a dangerous game for a local authority to be playing.

Things are looking more hopeful than they did a few years ago, although I can't share the Tigger style enthusiasm of council leader Abi Brown as she repeatedly claims that 'Stoke is on the up'. We are moving in the right direction, but there are still some important pieces missing from the regeneration jigsaw.

The largest and most important of these is the absence of a decent public transport system. Without one the newly refurbished Hanley Park could end up being an island in a sea of congestion; building a luxury hotel is all very well, but the people the council want to stay there will not welcome being stuck in a big-standard traffic jam whenever they step outside.

The message that without a decent transport system Stoke will stay forever on the edge of the prosperity party never quite makes it through to the incumbents of the Civic Centre.

They are massively proud of having secured millions of pounds in government funding to refurbish the area around Stoke station, but this does nothing to improve bus and train services that don't play nicely together. During the recent local elections, a prominent Tory councillor told me that it would be nice to have an integrated transport system like Nottingham, but Stoke is a poor city and businesses couldn't, meaning wouldn't, stump up the cash.

I'd say that's exactly why we need one, the current outdated shambles actively discourages investment. As for businesses stumping up their share of the cost. There will be complaints at first, as there were in Nottingham and other cities, until they realized what a good job it does of attracting investors and customers.

Logistically building an integrated public transport system in Stoke-on-Trent is entirely possible. In fact, as a linear city you could say we have the ideal conditions for building one. The vital element missing is a little imagination on the part of the council.

Building an integrated public transport system would also help to slot into place another piece of the regeneration jigsaw, giving all six towns a slice of the prosperity pie. At present the rising tide lifts only the good ship Hanley, leaving the rest of the fleet pretty much beached.

Better busses and trains and the eventual return of trams to the city’s streets wouldn’t just bring in visitors and investment, it would make it easier and cheaper for local people to get around too. This would leave them with more money in their pockets that could be spent with local businesses.

Sprucing up a much-loved local landmark is a good thing for the council to be doing, particularly one that allows people to enjoy nature in the heart of the city. Building hotels and fancy apartment blocks is a brave statement of optimism about the future.

Any jigsaw though is the sum of all of its pieces, not just the shiny ones that most easily catch the eye. The dull grey-blue ones making up the sky or the sea are just as vital, because without them the full image can never be realized.

The same is true when it comes to regeneration. Until we have a public transport system fit for the twenty-first century Stoke-on-Trent will only ever be halfway towards really being ‘on the up’.