Dispatches from the Potteries #2: A Letter to the City I Love

Regeneration for the people, not the elites

The other day, as I was cat-sitting for two of my best friends in East London, I had a thought. I wondered how bizarre it is, particularly if you had known me just a few years ago, that I no longer live in the capital. I was a London loyalist. The North was a foreign concept to me, so much so that it was a running joke among friends, many of whom came from outside the big smoke. I loved London, despite never being able to afford it, often being denied its artistic fruits, and feeling depressed between the pace of city life and the complete unattainability of financial security. London gave me everyday multiculturalism, music, cheap public transport, wonderful parks, limitless crevices of surprise, the endless movement of the city, friends in abundance, and so much else.

I went to primary school on the Stonebridge estate when you could enter the concrete blocks at one end of a 70-acre stretch and exit at the other, barely going outside but for the bridge and the precinct. Those blocks no longer exist, and many of the people who grew up on the estate live elsewhere now. I came of age in Arnos Grove before Friern Hospital, one of the country’s most oppressive asylums, became Princes Park Manor, the home of Cheryl Tweedy and Ashley Cole. It was always a bit strange living right across the road from your favourite left-back, especially because he lived in a mansion and we were in a housing association flat, but he made it a tad easier when he went blue. I lived on the Whitton Walk in Bow when residents down the road were still fighting to keep Robin Hood Gardens alive, sandwiched as they were between the oppressive shine of Canary Wharf and the rocket-propelled bluster of the Olympic Games.

I say all this to demonstrate a simple point: my exit from the city I called home was a generational process. It may even have been overdetermined. But it wasn’t inevitable, and despite falling head over heels for the city of Stoke and the people who live in it, it’s neither nice nor desirable getting gradually squeezed out of the place you call home. The intrusion of real estate and private capital into so many facets of how we reproduce ourselves cheapens the value of life, whilst inflating the price of everything you need to get by. This hotly contested term, “gentrification”, can only ever be understood as the total sum of its various parts. The raising of housing costs; the creation of Business Improvement Districts determined to transform city centres into playgrounds for large corporate retail chains; the appropriation of local artist cultures into sterile product placement; the eradication of small, often family businesses; the commodification of public space and the increasing securitisation of the city against the homeless and poor – all combine to enable one simple goal on the part of local city elites: Change the people.

When I left London, following my wife to her new job in Leeds, it wasn’t just that I felt materially obliged to escape the city, unable to afford it unless I lived with my parents in their housing association flat right into my early thirties. It was also that gentrification as a historical process shrunk the room I had to breathe, it turned the city I loved against me, making it uninhabitable for me to realise a Good Life, transforming the space I felt was my home into a labyrinthine complex of alienation and unaffordability. Gentrification confirms everything capitalism tells you about how inadequate you are, confirming your inability to thrive, with the added luxury of making it clear that there are better people than you ready to take over your city, your estate, your park and eventually, your gaff.

There is a developing alliance between property developer firm Capital & Centric and Stoke-on-Trent’s Labour-led city council that is attempting to embark upon this same process in my new home town, and it concerns me deeply. Whilst the council’s 2024-2028 Economic Development Strategy makes some decent noises about rejuvenating the city’s public space, experimenting with community asset transfers and increasing social wealth, the overwhelming focus of city regeneration has been private-led development. If we take the Goods Yard site behind the station as a demonstrative example: the renovation of the surrounding area is welcome (and the grand opening taking place when the station was on a three-week hiatus from actually running trains is probably best forgotten), but the council celebrating the erection of 174 rental apartments, well over £200 above the average rental price for single occupancy tenures, is gross. Rather than chart an independent developmental course for the city that will improve the quality of life for its citizens, the city municipality is turning Stoke into a satellite town for neighbouring cities that have undergone severe processes of real estate-led regeneration, with emboldened property developers now on the prowl for adjacent cities and towns where expensive housing can be built for better-off cohorts of the population employed in places like Manchester and Birmingham. Of the nearly 5,000 homes being built in plans approved by Stoke-on-Trent city council (putting to one side the negligible proportion of social housing), many are oriented around the city’s connection to elsewhere. The Goods Yard, the Spode site, the former Olympus Engineering site on College Road, Booth Street in Stoke town, and the former Royal Stoke Hospital car park site just up the road are all examples of a city strategy geared towards making Stoke-on-Trent into a commodified tourist hub on the one hand, and a satellite for rapidly changing and increasingly unaffordable cities like Manchester on the other.

This brings me to a thought I have been unable to escape as of late. In recent months, I have found myself returning to a line from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto, “All that is solid melts into air”. Describing the capacity of elites to constantly revolutionise the means of profit-making, this German radical was keenly alert to how capitalism’s constant lurch towards accumulation is also accompanied by the transformation of the spaces in which we live our everyday lives. Since the demise of manufacturing employment and the erosion of lifeworlds built around industry, constrained municipalities whose priorities were reinscribed by Thatcher’s antidemocratic money-raising reforms, have struggled to establish a path forward for cities, towns and counties, and more often than not, have sought to solve their fiscal crises by opening the city up to private firms and property developers.

Over time, this has acculturated city planners of all political stripes into the sense that private development is the only game in town. Cities are no longer places for the poor and undesirable. They are places for economic growth, sanitisation, and money-making instead. What is clear from the direction that cities and towns have been headed in under the rule of real estate and private firms, is that all you value about your city - the existing channels of community life, the local restaurant you enjoy a family meal in, the people you walk past down the street everyday and give a nod, the wonderful old heritage architecture, the venue you got married in or had your child’s first birthday, your local boozer - is now under threat from being melted into thin air if we do not stand up, organise for ourselves and develop community-first plans for popular, participatory regeneration.

Engrained with this sense that the private sphere is the only way forward, local state managers resist any and all efforts to construct a flourishing public sphere. They ignore requests for repairs, they leave the roads riddled with potholes, they abandon vast spaces of brownfield wasteland, and then they build a story that the problem with our communities isn’t the way we are governed, but by the specific, regrettable character of the people who live in our communities. They manage the decline of the places we build lives in, they blame us for the ruin, and then they open up our spaces to property developers and private landlords.

The other day, I saw what a challenge to this story and this ambition looked like in practice. Two representatives of Capital & Centric and their unelected friend in the Labour-led city council put forward a plan for the real estate-led development of the Spode ex-factory site in Stoke town to a closed consultation meeting. Trying to gloss over their plans for expensive flats and sterilised private spaces for pricey food, sanitised culture and tech firms, these apparatchiks of corporate and state power were challenged by ordinary people, determined to halt efforts to jeopardise the future of artist studios, long-running family businesses, and valuable community and cultural spaces. Local residents, small business people and artists joined together to oppose the plans laid out in this consultation meeting and reassert the right to open, democratic community consultation, social housing, small business support and permanent council maintenance over publicly rented properties.

The resilience of the people in this room was an example of everything that is truly precious about the city: all these spirited contributors had fed people in Stoke, came of age and loved the people of Stoke, built upon and reworked Stoke’s artistic history, built communities of people from all over the world in Stoke, fought for the people of Stoke, and even freshened up the hair of the people of Stoke. This inchoate but growing community coalition said sharply that the city of Stoke, the Spode site itself in particular, is a reality we have made and will continue to fight for, in opposition to the abandonment, impoverishment and disempowerment imposed upon us by city councils, landlords and developers. Against the city elites who want to melt everything good about our city into air, these people embrace Stoke as a place worth fighting for. A melting pot that we are deeply committed to keep stirring, improving upon, and enjoying, but never interested in chucking away.

The people of this city need and must craft for themselves a political project that can fight for their city to be affordable, accessible and genuinely conducive to its citizens living The Good Life. We want a movement for the people, and not the elites. There is a different vision of regeneration out there. Come and build it with us.

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