The curtain has come down on plans for an arena in Hanley.

 

Storm Babet may have had all the pyrotechnics, but those in the Stoke-on-Trent with ears to hear it may have caught another and quieter note in the cacophony. It would have sounded like a choir of frustrated voices saying in unison “really, again?”.

They would have been responding to the announcement by the city council late last week that plans for a 3,600-seat arena on the site formerly occupied by Hanley bus station.

This would have been the centre piece of plans to transform the 10-acre site by building housing, a hotel, and the arena. Developers promised the latter would be a ‘striking and contemporary’ building in which big name acts would be queuing up to perform.

The whole package would have been named Etruscan Square and, again in the words of the developers, would help to ‘stimulate sustainable growth of jobs and employment, bringing people into the city’.

Economic realities have led to the masterplan being downgraded with more of a focus on housing and a cautious exploration being made into the possibility of building a ‘multi-purpose sport, leisure and entertainment facility’ on the site. Which sounds a lot like Smithfield speak for a slightly larger than average community centre.

Speaking to the Sentinel last Saturday council leader Jane Ashworth said that the existing planning permission for the former bus station site puts the council in “a good position to work with developers to build the new homes that our city centre is in real need of”.

Adding “building new houses here is a fantastic signal to developers that this is a key site to invest in”, this will “support further phases of work to bring new leisure and entertainment facilities to the site”.

Plans to build a multi-storey car park on nearby Meigh Street have also been shelved.

Anyone with a memory going back some twenty or so years will recognize this as a route the city has been down more often than a holidaymaker who has missed the turning that always foxes them on the way to Llandudno. The former bus station site has been the graveyard of several grand plans for regeneration, including building a £170million shopping centre and the misspelt and misbegotten City Sentral leisure complex.

I have a very clear memory of visiting the civic centre on one occasion and happening to come across the scale model of one of these plans gathering dust in the corner of an office. The Stoke equivalent of Ozymandias’s face lying half buried in the sand.

The tone of Councillor Ashworth’s comments suggests that the penny has dropped a little sooner than it has with previous administrations. Pipe dreams are all very well, but they make a poor basis for practical plans to regenerate the city centre, something that anyone who has visited it recently will agree has to be a priority.

That won’t happen on the back of a hare-brained plan cooked up by council leaders egged on by ‘consultants’ with a wagon full of snake oil to sell. It won’t happen in isolation either.

To bring about the regeneration of Hanley a rising tide must lift the other five towns too, and a tidal wave of investment must lift the whole region up at the same time. We all either rise together or sink together, there is no middle option.

Currently it is every city for itself with the larger ones rich enough to employ staff to work solely on spotting and winning funding opportunities having a distinct advantage. Smaller cities, like Stoke, end up fighting it out over crumbs and in the long term everybody loses out.

This is no way to regenerate a region, to do that what is needed is a plan to improve public transport links, build decent affordable housing and address deep seated social and economic inequalities. One that has been created by people who understand the different challenges faced by each town and city in the region, and that prioritizes pragmatism and cooperation over self-interest and competition.

Otherwise, Stoke-on-Trent and every other town and city in the West Midlands will be trapped in an endless cycle of being sold plans like Etruscan Square and its predecessors as a shining city on a hill. Only to discover when they get closer that they are just a false front propped up on scantlings.

 

 

 

The Working Class Are Back And They're Mad As Hell

 

The Revival of Resistance

The 2022-23 strikes and the battles still to come.

Mark L Thomas, Jessica Walsh, and Charlie Kimber

(Bookmarks, 2023)

 

The past year has seen British workers take industrial action more often than at any time since 1989 with teachers, nurses, rail workers and even barristers downing tools and taking to the barricades.

For the first time in decades union leaders like Jo Grady of the UCU and Mick Lynch of the RMT are national figures. Lynch even provided a line misquoted by hacks of all stripes when he said the ‘working class are back’.

It is unquestionable that after years of managing decline the trades union movement has regained something like relevance. Thanks in large part to the shock therapy unwillingly inflicted on the body politic by the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and a cost-of-living crisis all landing in the space of three years.

As Thomas et al argue this presents an opportunity to bring about economic, social, and political change the like of which only comes around once a century. Unfortunately, if it follows its past form in similar circumstances the union movement will let the chance slip through its collective fingers.

To blame is a mixture of learnt helplessness stemming from four decades of neo-liberalism being the dominant force in economics and politics, and the inherent bureaucracy of the trades union movement. Resulting in timid national leadership reining in grassroots action, something the recent crop of strikes have frequently circumvented.

Thomas et al make a case for bypassing a moribund leadership in favour of grassroots organizing that looks back to the origins of the union movement, whilst making full use of the opportunities provided by social media to bring members together to coordinate local action.

This call for rank-and-file union members to follow the courage of their convictions rather than the compromises of the leadership and paid officials is made more powerful as the Labour Party looks set to form the next government.

Already striking unions are urging members to moderate their demands for fear of spooking floating voters and snatching disappointment from the jaws of victory. Experience suggests that if, as looks all but inevitable, Labour win the next general election union members will then be promised ‘jam tomorrow’ endlessly in return for being quiet and compliant today.

Although marked by compromises and failures of courage the strikes of the past year and a bit show the unions still have a viable role to play in the struggle for workers’ rights. The authors of this pamphlet make a cogent and compelling case for how much more could be achieved were that struggle to be led by grassroots members instead of paid officials with positions and pensions to protect.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Art to sound out an environmental crisis.

 

Environmental concerns are centre stage at the British Ceramic Biennial this year, both in the work of the artists being presented and a minor public relations faux pas over the use of clay from HS2 in the public engagement area.

 

The main exhibition is taking place in the chilly, not just in aesthetic terms, surroundings of the former All Saints Church in Stoke-on-Trent. An arts and crafts place of worship built with potter’s money when the city was the world centre of ceramic manufacturing, now reinvented as an arts space.

 

The environment, specifically the harm done to sea life by the overuse of marine sonar is the subject of Sounding Line by Mella Shaw. She combines sculptures representing whales ear bones, the clay used to make which has been infused with material taken from the carcasses of whales washed up on the shore of South Uist in the Outer Hebrides with a video of one of these sculptures being returned to the see and ropes that vibrate at different frequencies. This makes for a powerful representation of the impact human activity has on some of the oldest inhabitants of our planet.

 

Outage by Rebecca Griffiths continues the environmental theme by imagining a future landscape where remnants of the nuclear power industry have been dredged up from the sea. The piece was developed during her residency at The Red House in Aldeburgh near to the site of the Sizewell B power station. Griffiths has created a series of enigmatic shapes that could be pieces of some vast machine that has either decayed or been destroyed in an accident that are being reclaimed and eroded by the sea and the creatures living there. A timely reminder, perhaps, that for all the damage blundering humans do nature will always hold the whip hand by playing the longest game of all.

 

Also of note are Sequenced Ceramics by the Copper Sounds collective, a collection of pots, beaters and scaffolding poles hooked up to some clever technology that looks like it was made by Heath Robinson’s cool great grandkids and produces sounds reminiscent of Brian Eno in his pomp. Boundary by Nichola Tassie (pictured) which examines ideas around physical and social boundaries and Looking North by Dan Kelly informed by his intimate relationship with London and the tall buildings dominating its skyline.