A few pictures from one of my rare walks that go south of Stoke town, on the Trent & Mersey canal towpath. Not a ‘photography walk’, but I made a few snaps on the way.

Going down toward Stoke town, I spotted the rare Imerys “clay train” waiting to go into the sidings. This train brings the clay from Cornwall, to feed the city’s potteries…

And here’s a prime example of one of our “Stoke-on-Trent waterfalls”…

It’s actually one of the many canal-locks from Stoke up to Etruria, which spurt out water when closed. But there’s many a Moorlands village which couldn’t offer better for a ‘waterfall’.

And further down, past Stoke town, not much was found to photograph. It’s frankly a bit of dull stretch for a photographer, from Stoke town down to the football stadium. I hear it’s even duller further south. Though all nicely free of litter, at least at present, apart from the habitual benches of ‘the usual suspects’ and one set of manky side-steps which had been unaccountably overlooked by the otherwise assiduous litter-pickers. I did spot this canal-side sign opposite the boat-yard…

The back of the ‘football stadium bench’ on the canal is still broken, ten months after I was last down there. Only one (lower) slat and not two. An important bench, given it’s the only one on the walk that’s not a ‘dossers bench’ and that you’d want to sit on.

On the way back, a rare visit to Sainsbury’s in Stoke. It’s as unappealing as I remember. It used to be great, circa 2008. But over the years it just kept on getting worse. Now it’s infested with robo-tills as well, with huge slow queues at the couple of tills that still have human checkout staff. For some reason they now hide the biscuits away in a distant corner, have a very poor choice, and there’s such heavy stock-depletion that some lines had run out. An expensive Starbucks now closes off what used to be the northern entrance, meaning the cheap cafe is gone and that shoppers now have to trudge all the way around to get to the southern entrance. They still have “£1 coin for a trolley” chains, too. Even more students than before, too. Not great, compared to other more pleasant places you could grocery-shop in the city.