Where Clay Foot Never Trod

In the English West Midlands lies the famous city of Stoke-on-Trent. We all know this is the capital of The Potteries. Therefore if you had never seen the place you would expect its buildings to bear some reference to that industry.

Go and look at Stoke. Too right they do. Its centre is so packed with factories, statues and shops connected with ceramic companies that there is room for little else. It is as if every person in the town thinks of nothing but pots. It remains a surprise that inhabitants do not have given names like Toiletbowl, Sideplate, Cupansaucer or Noveltysheepdog. Everything in Stoke was built by and for potters and somewhere there must be a Plastic City where its younger generation went to work when pottery was not so popular. Or at least there would have been before it was flooded by the damming of a virtual river to create Silicone Valley.

If you were born in Stoke you would be conditioned to live in a monomathic town. If pottery was not your thing you would go and live in another town where the industry you liked was the dominant force and develop the whole town in the image of that industry. It would be very difficult to trace all the places where people born in Stoke have gone to live. But it is obvious where they have never lived. There are several other one industry towns in England. These would now look very different if people from Stoke had gone to live there.

Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire is famous for its connection with the food industry. Pork pies were first produced there and most Stilton cheese is made in the town. Many of its major buildings do indeed reflect the local industry. The parish church is a large cheese-coloured building and a pie shaped traffic island sits proudly in the middle of town. But there are other things there too. Egerton Park in the centre does not resemble either a pie or a cheese and neither does the pub which used to be the residence of the unfortunate Queen of England Anne of Cleves. Clearly therefore no native of Stoke has settled in Melton Mowbray. If they had the inside of Anne of Cleves' house would be full of meat and its windows would have been bricked in. Egerton Park would be covered in roundabouts for children to play on and the streets would be pathways of yellow circles. The few shops which did not sell either pie or cheese related products would be growing pies and cheeses in window boxes outside their upstairs rooms. Melton is many things but it is not Stoke and history will judge whether it should be glad of that.

Canary Wharf in London was supposed to be the centre of the world financial community. It never became that but it is still populated largely by big companies in flashy industries. All that glitz and glamour have inevitably affected building design as the new Docklands Light Railway stations seem disturbingly futuristic. But it is clear no one from Stoke lives or works in that area. When a building needs renovation workmen use ordinary ladders and scaffolding rather than a collection of interlinked pound signs climbed by placing the hands and feet on the horizontal strokes. The corporate offices are glass and steel but not in the colours of banknotes. Nor do they have a lintel at the bottom where the totals of floors, desks, money earned and people working in the building above can be added up. They do not bear signs saying "I promise to be a building for the bearer" and those who work there do not wear signs saying "I promise to be a person for the bearer". It is another Stoke-free environment which is maybe why it has never become what it was originally intended to be.

In Devon there is the village of Topsham. This lies just south of Exeter and is a seaside village. Just that. Everything there is connected with sea and frolics. But it is clearly too far away for a Stokeian to have lived there. Firstly there are still a few streets where you cannot actually see the sea. Secondly there are actually streets in the village. It is not one continuous beach. People are allowed to walk around without trying to sell you pointless novelties and sickly food and are allowed to wear common or garden English clothes. They are not obliged to dress in clowns' outfits and laugh hysterically for no reason. You do not have to buy tokens to go into houses and you do not win a prize every time you knock something over with a ball. The lack of Stoke influence is plain to see and we still await the emergence of Stoke on Sea as the final flowering of the English seaside experience.

A century ago the world was divided into two halves. There was the pink bit where the British had been and the uncertain colours of the rest. Even then however this was a false distinction. The only true boundary is between places where the natives of Stoke have been and those where they have not. Why is this the real distinction? Because it is easy to tell them apart. But those who do not wish to be invaded by people from Stoke should be comforted by asking one question. What do you call a person from Stoke? Stokeian? Potterieite? Stoker? No one knows because they have blended with the local populations. Apparently every other gene is stronger than a Stoke one. When you understand this their monomathic desire to turn everything into a reflection of their local industry just begins to make sense.