It does look like HS2 from Birmingham to Manchester is set to be either cancelled or heavily delayed for a decade or more, regrettably. Or just ‘not high speed’ north of Birmingham and running on the regular West Coast lines from Birmingham to Manchester (which may even give Stoke a look-in, once a day?).

If there’s to be a decade long delay then, in the meantime, how about using the purchased route for a superb (if temporary) Birmingham – Stafford – Stone – Crewe bicycle ‘motorway’? That shouldn’t cost too much, I’d imagine. Just six strips of tarmac, all the way, presumably. Three going north, three south. Boy-racers and electric-bikes in the ‘fast’ lane, slow ‘trundlers and tots’ in the slow lane.

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.

What To Look For In Autumn (Ladybird Nature Series No. 536, 1960), at Archive.org. Not the best scan, being too dark, but free.

Also What To Look For In Winter (poor scan), Spring (poor scan) and Summer (scan is good, but too light). Long out of print, but these editions seem very common on eBay if you want the real thing. The content hasn’t dated, other than a few farm scenes (‘axes rather than chainsaws’, ‘hop-picking by hand’, and some ‘fancy hay-stacks’). Possibly a nice Christmas present for someone, all four in mint condition?

The Champion Bakery, Trent Vale, Stoke-on-Trent.

A bird’s eye view of the new factory in Trent Vale…

Flour and dough…

And sugar, don’t forget the sugar…

Un-clogging…

It’s rolling again, “20,000 fairy-cakes please”…

Checking the customer gets the weight they paid for…

Box packing for the cakes…

Creme toppings and fancy icing…

The canteen lady…

Deliveries and dispatches…

Delivering into the village shops of the rural Welsh Marches…

A few more from a different set at Postcards from Stoke and another.

I took a walk from Stoke to Newcastle-under-Lyme today. I went the back way via the Stoke Old Road. The route is documented in my The Two Universities Way walk guide.

Not having been to the Staffordshire town of Newcastle for a while, I’d expected the route to be rancid with litter (as per previous visits), and the town centre horrid with yobs and druggies (as per The Sentinel). I was very pleasantly surprised on both counts. Admittedly I went on what was perhaps the nicest day of the year, and there was some litter on the way. Especially between the Citizens Advice Bureau – Garden Street – and the bus-station crossing on the immediate approach to the town centre. But both the (done) litter picking and the presentation of the town-centre was impressive.

On the route, the Stoke Old Road looks good. The top end-point of Hartshill Park, where the old road starts, is fairly good in terms of litter.

A little further on the huge willow is still there, incongruously on the top o’ the hill rather than by some sylvan mere. I guess it’s tapped into a local spring or two. There’s no view at the top of the rise in summer, but there is in winter.

The old brickyard workshop at the top of the slope was regrettably demolished before it could be listed. But it has been replaced by a very sympathetically-done new house on the corner, replacing what was for a long time an eyesore demolition site. A little further along…

All looking much better than it used to.

Further on, the vital through-way section of the path from Stoke to Newcastle was open, alongside the grammar school playing fields. This is a vital pedestrian / cycling connector between Stoke and Newcastle / Keele, and there’s been some argy-bargy in the past about keeping the gates open. But they’re fine at 10am.

Then down to the town itself, and into the town-centre past what I take to be the new library. This has cycle locking. The surrounding revamped Queens Gardens has been very sympathetically and pleasingly done. The statue of Queen Victoria still has pride of place, looking imperiously across at the local MP’s surgery as if to remind him of his duties.

I see there are still loads of banks in the town, though the one I use has annoying done away with all its counter-staff.

Nice to hear “11am” ringing from not one but two bell-towers in the town.

Plenty of places to sit including proper benches, and no dossers apart from one beggar outside Rymans.

Boots had not one but two real till-staff, at a proper payments counter.

Round the back, I was pleased to see that the formerly decrepit and weed-grown Conservative & Unionist Offices have been refurbished and have found a new use.

The cheap charity shops on that same stretch are gone, turned into several ‘giftee shoppes’ of no use to me. No more cheap £1 t-shirts and belts, oh well. The old Council offices and police station are gone and the site is being redeveloped and has men-at-work hoardings up.

The Millennium cycle-locking bars and post-box are both still there though, by the traditional butchers. “Wild Boar sausages”… mmmm.

The big second-hand bookshop just along from the butchers has gone, sadly. But next door, the little coffee shop is still there and now under new management…

I could have gone back home on the price-capped 101 bus. But feeling the need to support local business as well as mega-corps, I spent the money on a coffee in the town instead and walked back. The place is Two Forks Coffee and also has lunchtime food…

Two Forks was a touch too noisy for me, with a bit too much plate-clatter and radio. Both might have been turned down a notch. But it’s very friendly. The lady who runs it spent many years running a British cafe-bar in the Alps, but now she’s back home in the UK. Thus the place has a certain ‘ski-lodge feel’ in places, as she’s re-used the old Alpine tables and chairs…

But there are a variety of seating options including a comfy cushioned bench. Two Forks is definitely a ‘round-the-back place’ to try out. A coffee is currently £2.80. You get there from the lower Ironmarket by going down the alley on the right just before the Cancer Research shop, thus…

Or if you’re already down by the church, then it’s a short walk up.

The hot-desking site on the corner near the church is still open, but has no list of businesses displayed outside. They’re missing a trick there I’d suggest — advertise your users to passers by, as an added free service.

At the opposite and rougher end of the town, I noticed that both the mobility shop and ‘olde pipes and tobacco’ pipe shop are still there. Poundland’s still there on the corner. And Rymans, if you brave the beggar out front (UK police say that beggars on such prime sites are nearly all pros — they scare away any real beggars from prime begging sites). I saw there was also a Wednesday market stall, which had a small but reasonable selection of self-published and small-publisher local history books.

I didn’t go near the bus station but I was otherwise very impressed with the town, after all the ‘crime and grime’ talk-down of the town centre that I’d glanced at in The Sentinel over the last couple of years. It’s definitely better than it was before the lockdowns, and by several notches upwards. All it needs now is to get rid of the beggar(s) and add a big second-hand bookshop. And maybe strim the weeds on the easterly pedestrian approach (grammar schools – citizen’s advice bureau – the aptly named and rather weedy Garden Street – Hassall Street – bus-station crossing) before they get all depressingly wet and soggy in the autumn rains.

Currently on eBay (not from me) is a simple but pleasing lively watercolour of the summit of Mow Cop. Seemingly unique, vintage, and by “Lawton”.

Regrettably laid on grass for the eBay picture. Which probably means the back of it has now been seeded with millions of potential mould spores.

It sometimes pays to be looking downwards, which I do when litter-picking. On a walk to M&S, along the canal and via the new valley-spanning Wolstanton link-road, I spotted an oak sprig fallen on the path. “Now where’s that come from?” I wondered. There had once been a little oak sapling on the path, which circa 2005 I had occasionally protected. I had several times cut back the lesser shrubs that were attempting to swamp it, letting sunlight into its nook in the hedge. But in recent years I had been unable to re-discover it as I passed by. “Swamped and died”, I thought.

But there was an oak sprig, fallen on the path in front of me. I looked up. Spreading high above me was a fine healthy young oak tree. In the same place as before, but the shrubs had thickened and grown outward onto the path, while the oak had grown upward to the light. That was why I couldn’t find it again. I was looking for a struggling and scrawny sapling on the edge of the path, but it’s now a proper tree growing up from the centre of the hedge.

One also finds other things. The M&S walk was to get new ‘maximum’ Merino-wool thermals, before the cold damp weather arrives and they suddenly sell out. I had wanted Amazon’s Damart, but Amazon seemingly couldn’t deliver to any of the many Amazon lockers in Stoke (always “full”, which one can prove is a complete lie by ordering other items). Thus an early morning walk to M&S was called for instead. M&S’s Damart equivalent is HeatGen (£56 for a top and bottom combo). I’d also idly looked at the M&S sunglasses online, needing a new pair. But I couldn’t afford them at £20-£30. The HeatGen thermals are being paid for by a kind benefactor who doesn’t want me shivering again this winter, but sunglasses are not on offer.

So… what did I also find while litter-picking the route to M&S? You guessed it. A nice and perfectly good pair of men’s sunglasses. Free. And also the M&S brand. Strange, when that sort of thing happens. But it does, and surprisingly often. Not long ago I went to litter-pick and snip back the greening-up of an old disused railway-line path. With secateurs. On the way there I found a perfectly good pair of wooden-handled hedge shears, discarded with some other ‘builder and decorator’ fly-tipping and with a bit of dried paint on the handles… but un-rusted, still nice and sharp. What are the odds?

Every single Amazon locker in central Stoke-on-Trent is full and accepting no new orders…

“This location is temporarily unavailable because it’s full.”

All of them. Even the big one at the main Post Office and the city’s main shopping centre. How can this be? It’s the same for a tiny cheap item or a larger expensive item, so size or price are not the problems. Nor can it be that it’s an item that’s somehow ‘hazardous’ or ‘fragile’.

All lockers have been full for about five days now. Did a chunk of the population just win the Lottery, or something? Or perhaps students are returning, flush with new loan cash?

How are Amazon going to cope at Christmas, if they can’t cope at the start of September?

Update: Still all “full”. Easier to go to M&S at Wolstanton, and cheaper too!

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.

Good to hear that local radio presenter Den Siegertsz is back, with a weekly Sunday lunchtime show on the non-profit Churnet Sound, sponsored by the local maker of Staffordshire oatcakes.

“Den’s new show will be on DAB in north Staffordshire and South Cheshire every Sunday from noon.”

No debut date yet, but coming soon. Churnet Sound broadcast from Biddulph Town Hall. It seems they also stream online, which is good for those for whom the DAB signal is ‘bubbling mud’.

Always good to find a supernatural tale about Stoke-on-Trent. New to me is The Haunting of Stoke-on-Trent (2017) by Julian Middleton. 58 pages in paper (says eBay), 89 pages in paper (says Amazon UK) or 33 pages (says the Kindle ebook store). The back cover of the paperback on Amazon suggests the reason for the expanded page count… an added “special bonus story”. So my guess is it’s perhaps 15,000 words for the main tale.

The blurb suggests a children’s book…

When an earth tremor creates a gaping fissure in the middle of his street, Tom Hughes is horrified to witness a group of ghostly miners emerge from it. As a terrifying apparition looms over the distant hill of Mow Cop, and the miners create a path of destruction on their way to join it, it’s up to Tom and his sister Jen to save Stoke-On-Trent from certain doom…

And an Amazon reviews confirms. It’s a short children’s book, and is apparently written for easy comprehension by those in early middle childhood (Amazon suggests ages 7-9) who may not be regular book readers yet.

New on eBay (not from me), Goose going shopping. Via Getty, so you’re not also buying further usage-rights with the print. Unless you can find Getty’s source and establish that it’s now public domain.

“3rd April 1937: Mrs Lockyer from Stoke-on-Trent takes her pet goose out shopping. The bird has been taught to accept pennies, and has collected a large sum for charity.”

Here newly colorised. Another for a hypothetical “Surreal Stoke” exhibition.