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.

A peep into the long-ago activities of a cricket team known as the Bagatawaians, of which a cache of pictures turned up on eBay in 2020. They were founded in 1893, possibly in Derbyshire. Toured Cheshire (Congleton, Macclesfield?), Derbyshire (High Peak, arriving initially via Alderley Edge station) and Lancashire (Blackpool) between 1893 and 1905. Several of the pictures below are from Hathersage in the Peak in 1905, so possibly they show their final match?

I was going to run them through Nano Banana v2 to ‘restore and colorise’, but with small faces like this it just ruins the facial expressions by ‘normalising’ them towards an average.

My guess would be that the team may have raised money for charity, by enabling local cricket teams to ‘put on a ticketed show’ against a formidable team, perhaps of former county cricketers? Nothing more can be discovered about them online.

Taking the field, Hathersage in the Peak in 1905.

Outside their boarding house, Blackpool, 1904.

Outside a village pub, in the High Peak.

All good fellows. Possibly including non-players along for the trip?

Match spectators, with local lads.

At Congleton. Possibly a mix of local pressmen, cricketing officials, and reporters for specialist cricketing publications?

This cropped picture is (unintentionally) the very image of the three main characters in Arnold Bennett’s masterpiece “The Death of Simon Fuge” (1907), set in Burslem. Loring the visitor is at the rear.

Ooh, nice, sci-fi pottery from Stoke-on-Trent. Made by Alan Clarke Studios, about 20 years ago. The plates came complete with mysterious little black ‘alien’ cones.

There are probably more, but these are just what’s currently on eBay. A set that might look good as a temporary one-case exhibition in the nearby Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope’s foyer, I’d suggest.

A new fiction book set in Stoke-on-Trent, in Sideway to be precise. Waiting for the Moon and the Mole (2025) is a substantial children’s story by poet John Leneghan.

We used to walk from our housing estate in Blurton to this childhood place of adventure. [At Sideway] there were stationary railway wagons, disused railway tracks, a canal, a farm called Whites Farm (but most folk used to call it Whiteys Farm), open fields with brooks with countless blackberry bushes, climbing trees, rope swings, woods and fishing ponds. It was just the perfect children’s playground. A natural playground, should I say. [The book imagines the Sideway canalside] animals of today, trying to survive the many changes in this place.

The author is also the author of a book of poems about the various “ghosts of Stoke-on-Trent”, a book also new to me.

Currently on eBay, Dance With the Ghosts of the Past seems to be a discarded library book. Local libraries really shouldn’t be discarding poetry books like this, they should be sending them to the Local Collection at Keele.

Another local novel, unearthed. Shapes in the Mist (2004), currently on the Internet Archive to borrow. The credits page suggests locations such as the Bridestones and Thor’s Cave. Turns out to have a modern-witchcraft / romance / supernatural theme, and a Staffordshire Moorlands setting.

More on Nano Banana and restoring old pictures. Here’s a particularly tricky old picture. Tricky because of the small face and also the typography involved.

Online the USA’s Nano Banana 2 will distort the face, and offline Germany’s Flux2 Klein 4B model will both distort the face and subtly mess with the typography. Here’s a workflow with appears to work fairly well…

1. The source eBay scan image at 1600px, from a small photographic postcard. Reduce to 1000px, to make it suitable for processing by Texas’s Topaz Gigapixel AI 7.x and its Recovery v1 (beta) module. Recovery v1 (beta) was tuned for 1000px. Tests I’ve seen elsewhere suggest that the later Recover v2 and v3 were faster, but not better.

2. Run Topaz Gigapixel AI 7.x and its Recovery v1 (beta), on a 2x upscale to 2000px. Takes a long time, maybe 12 minutes on a 3060 12Gb card. Note that this is the old offline Windows standalone Topaz, not the new online-only subscription only offering.

Slow, but the result is nice. Save it as a .PNG file. It’s pretty much kept the face, without mangling or odd invention. The rest of the image is intact and in place.

3. Save the .PNG as a .JPG in Photoshop, using max. quality. This is done only to reduce the file-upload time to the Comfy Cloud.

4. Upload to a Nano Banana 2 workflow running in Comfy Cloud. Comfy Cloud offers 400 free credits per month, no rollover. The workflow’s system prompt was left unchanged and my prompt was simply: “Restore and colorize this photograph, as if photographed with a modern Hasselblad camera.” The result…

Not bad, the face remains very similar and also a bit more appealingly human. We’ve lost the “d” in “Ltd” on the van, but that was very indistinct on the source. The livery of the cart/van is an appealing green, but the original was probably in blues and creams. So, by changing the prompt and re-running Nano Banana we can fix both the livery and the ‘Ltd’ problem…

Restore and colorize this photograph, as if photographed with a modern Hasselblad camera. The main livery colours of the cart are a rich dark blue on the lower part, a light blue on the central strip, and a pale cream on the top section, with the roof a rich dark wood color.

By adding specific details to the prompt we’ve got what was wanted on the van, but have unintentionally triggered some ‘invention’ problems. The horse has taken on the colour of the cart’s wood, the uniform has become more of a modern 1960s milkman’s uniform, some background pipes are lost on the right edge, and the ‘Stoke’ bread basket on the roof has totally gone missing. All of which are a result of starting to be specific with ‘prompting for details’. And all of which we can then solve by dropping in the first success in Photoshop, then masking and erasing. Then add a few finishing touches such as adding back his pocket orders-book, toning down the ultra varnish on the wheels, and balancing the contrast on his white garments. The final image…

So the trick seems to be: use Gigapixel first, then Nano Banana in two stages (one very simple prompt, then another prompt for colours). Then edit the results together in Photoshop. More than a one-click process, and taking at least 30 minutes per picture, but the result is good.

It is however, easy to think you’ve finished but miss important details. The horse’s tail has gone from being cropped to uncropped. Had it had the full tail, the tail would have been flicking dried dung onto the bread! So that means another ten minutes of skilled Photoshopping, to fix that grave historical error which some future historian might use to claim ‘unhygienic food’ in the Edwardian period…

Even then, I had still completely overlooked the invention of the new cobbles down in the lower-left! And the new window. I decided to leave those in, as they feel natural.

As you can see, getting it right is far from the ‘one-button click approach’ that some imagine it to be.

After signing up a few weeks ago, I got around to doing a quick test of Google’s Nano Banana 2 AI in the free ComfyUI cloud. Their Cloud now offers an easy-access free-tier with 400 free credits a month (no rollover). Nano Banana 2 is currently one of the free options.

The image shows the frontage of the local Moreton Old Hall, near Stoke-on-Trent. This cost 32 credits for a huge 5300px 30Mb .PNG output (here resized back to a manageable .JPG). So, at 32 credits for a 5K image restore, you’re looking at maybe 10 images a month with some credits left over for other things.

Good enough for an occasional local history blog, with some manual correction of its colourizing mis-fires and inevitable tendency towards neon oranges (a problem which all colorizers seem to share). Plus a careful consideration of what has been invented by the AI. For instance, here on the original we can see the AI has invented the closed door (open and not visible in the original) and also the stone wall on the right (the grass falls down to the water, in the original). Ideally one would also show the original with the restoration, for articles where details are historically important.

Note that Google Gemini can also do this restoration free, and a lot faster than the Comfy Cloud, but i) there’s only basic control over the image ratio, ii) there’s a discreet watermark, and iii) there are also usage limits. Comfy cloud is slower but appears to gives users a 1:1 ratio-match with the original, no watermark, and .PNG output. Users do however, have to be familiar with the ComfyUI interface, which for the Cloud is simply reproduced online.

Note that subtle expressions in smaller faces are often also lost, and thus character insights are lost. Telling it to retain facial proportions and features makes no difference. It can be a fine tool for pictures of landscapes and architecture/vehicles, if you do a second run and prompt it to correct the hallucinations it made in the first run. But it seems historically questionable when dealing with small faces (and also text) in a not-so-great source image. This is the sort of image it will struggle with, small face and lots of typography…

A local tale as a new audiobook. “The Cone” by H.G. Wells is a macabre revenge tale set in Basford, Basford Bank, and Etruria, in Stoke-on-Trent. You can also find an annotated version of “The Cone” at the back of my recent book on H.G. Wells in the Potteries.

The new 28-minute audiobook is read for Gates of Imagination, a YouTube channel which also has an excellent set of free readings of R.E. Howard’s Solomon Kane tales.

If you have problems with ads in YouTube, download your audiobooks as local .MP3 files with MediaHuman’s free Youtube to MP3 downloader.

A bird’s-eye glimpse of the far-off days when Wolverhampton could plausibly be depicted as what we might now think of as ‘a steampunk city’. Popping up on eBay today, a rare postcard of the grand exhibition they staged at the height of Empire…

My annual update of The Folk-lore of North Staffordshire has finally brought the booklet to its 2.0 version and 60 pages of extensively annotated bibliography. Only a handful of additions this year, and I think it’s now in its final form.

Staffordshire_Folklore-v20.pdf

A little more on local Ancient Roman roads in North Staffordshire, following my previous posts on the topic. Below is an extract from the final part of: Rev. T.W. Daltry, “Chesterton” [Roman Camp], Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 1896.

One [final] word as to certain place-names in the neighbourhood of Chesterton. We have, one and a half miles to the north, a small village called Red Street, which is distinctly visible from the [Chesterton] Camp. This Red Street is evidently the Roman Road that went northwards by Windy Harbour and the village of Talk [Talke], and probably on to Condate and Mancunium [Manchester].

To the south-west, about two and a half miles from Chesterton, there is a short length of Roman road called Pepper Street, which now terminates at its junction with the Newcastle and Nantwich road, close to what was Keele Toll Gate. Originally it must have gone straight on. About half a mile further there are two farmhouses, called respectively ‘Honey wall’ and the ‘Highway’, and these names seem to indicate the proximity of a Roman road; and a little further on we have two farmhouses close together, which are called ‘Stonylow’, and this may perhaps be another indication of the same road. Then, still in a straight line, the pavement of an ancient road has been found beneath the soil in a field on Nethersethay Farm, not far from the London and North-Western Railway, about one and a quarter miles south of Madeley Station.

According to Mr. Watkin, in his ‘Roman Cheshire’, another road came from Condate or Kinderton to a little south of Betley, and this must have continued by or near to another Windy Harbour, half a mile to the north of Madeley Village, and to have joined the above-mentioned road from Chesterton somewhere about the spot where the ancient pavement was disturbed by the plough. The united roads must have led to Bury Walls near Hawkstone, which is said to have been the Rutunium of the Second Iter, and thence to Uriconium.

About midway between these two lines, about three miles from Chesterton, and one and a half miles north of Madeley, in a field near to the colliery at Leycett, two earthen jars filled with Roman copper coins were ploughed up in the year 1817. The jars were broken, and I have seen one or two fragments. The coins were about two thousand in number, and were chiefly of the reigns of Constantine the Great, and his son Crispus. Mr. Ward [the local Stoke historian] says there were also “many coins of Licinius and of the associate Emperors Diocletian and Maximian, and some of the usurpers Posthumus, Tetricus and Victorinus.”

I was pleased to hear of a new book by local historian Fred Hughes, Stoke-on-Trent, The Story of a City, 1925 to 2025 (December 2025). No sign of it on Amazon yet, but you can obtain copies from the Barewall shop in Burslem.