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.
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