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.