The Guardian newspaper makes a flying visit to Stoke today…

Frontier towns are bypassed, forgotten, often forlorn, occasionally vicious in the old sense of the word: full of vice. Seediness inhabits their edges, and edges are what they mainly are.

Thanks. The visitor from the Guardian comes away dizzied by the place-names and the many-towns -ness of the place…

… to this madness of nomenclature [names] and borough fragmentation, we can add the fact that the five, or six, towns merge into Newcastle-under-Lyme to the west, making the latter’s contours and clamour indistinguishable from Stoke’s. No green belt has curbed this coalescence.

No… the writer has overlooked the steep valley ridge. From the woods behind The Villas, through the Richmond St. allotments and adjacent Park, along the ridge into the very long Hartshill Park above the school, then across the recreation ground and to the woods above PotClays, then into the start of the Bradwell Woods alongside the A500, and then along the woodland ridge toward the north and the cross-over tunnel to Bathpool and Kidsgrove. It’s not official Green Belt, and is occasionally nibbled at by the Council for new housing (e.g. the new fill-in-estate above the south end of Hartshill Park, on the old primary school site), but the valley ridge serves much the same purpose in providing a belt of greenery between Stoke and ‘Castle. All very narrow and fragile (e.g. Newcastle’s mad plan to build on the Bradwell Crematorium recreation grounds) admittedly, but it’s there.

The Guardian, presumably visiting from London, was confused not just by Stoke but the whole of the Midlands…

Arguably, the whole of the Midlands could be construed as a region intended to confuse and defy

Yes, it must be strange to visit a place that most southerners believe doesn’t really exist. For many who rarely venture north of the Watford Gap, England is just ‘the south’ and ‘the north’, with nothing possible in-between. Just the stalwart manufacturing powerhouse of the nation. ‘Nothing to see here, move along now.’

High on disorientation, I drove around like a J.G. Ballard cipher.

Ballard was a 1970s science-fiction writer known for his tales of isolation, disorientation and quiet despair in post-apocalyptic landscapes. Even the Guardian’s uber SatNav has problems…

I plugged Wedgwood into the satnav and was sent to purgatory – a weird semi-private estate

Oh, the horror… ‘unprepared Guardian journo accidentally finds somewhere quite nice in Stoke’. But isn’t it actually rather nice to live in a place which so delightfully bamboozles and confounds so many visitors? And yet which is all perfectly obvious to locals. Especially walkers and cyclists, who know a totally different and far greener city than the grotty ‘main roads city’ that the car-bound know, including all the semi-secret ‘little ways through’ like the old Market Drayton line.

Ye Olde Market Drayton railway line

Apparently we only have two key attractions for Guardian readers. The Potteries Museum, and…

the Stanley Matthews statue at Stoke City stadium

Well, yes… I guess if you’re a football historian. Though it’s in the car-park at the back and then around to the north, which is not open to casual visitors or walk-throughs (the lower walk-up gates are often shut, unless there’s a match or Job Fair etc). Good luck getting permission to visit/photograph when it’s not a match day, and even then you might have trouble with the stewards. A first-time football historian visitor to the city might however want to visit the Stanley Matthews ‘ceramic shrine’, in the Minster churchyard, I’d suggest.

But if the newspaper’s readers do ever visit the Stadium, they should note there’s also a Gordon Banks statue out by the roadside and publicly accessible.