This week marks the 40th anniversary of the opening of the Stoke-on-Trent National Garden Festival 1986. The event was opened by the Queen and was open to the public for six months on a transformed site that is now Festival Park, Stoke-on-Trent. Its associated improvement works also stretched south along the Trent & Mersey canal through Etruria, and north through Grange Park and Rogerson’s Meadow and to within a stone’s throw of the gates of Burslem churchyard. Despite that summer’s atrocious weather, which saw near-constant rain and high winds, the festival was a visitor success and also a huge environmental success. It showed the world that even one of Europe’s most scarred and polluted heavy-industrial sites could be scoured, cleansed and restored. Rapidly, imaginatively, and at relatively little cost. The Festival’s wet weather may well have helped the long-term ‘bed in’ of the new tentative new environment, which had (in some cases, as in an imported peat-bog that was otherwise destined for destruction) been quite literally ‘laid over’ the old industrial landscape. The site, in May of 2026, now amply rewards the efforts of those who worked on restoring it all those decades ago. Both in terms of the richly maturing garden landscape and the wealth of jobs.

BBC Radio Stoke has the new short radio documentary “The Story of Stoke-on-Trent 1986”, apparently “available now” but I see no download button. Possibly it’s only available via the BBC’s player.

Several books give the story of the site’s reclamation and the Festival itself, including Etruria: Jaspers, Joists and Jillivers: The History of the 1986 Garden Festival Site Stoke-on-Trent (2002), and in brief in the official Festival handbook (1986). There’s also the Sculpture at Stoke – 1986 Garden Festival booklet and catalogue which is online as a rough scan at the Internet Archive, as well as Up The Garden Path which was a Dungeons & Dragons RPG adventure set at the site.

The Staffordshire Film Archive also has a DVD documentary, which appears to be still available.