Slow Ways aims to map the best ways to walk from place to place across the UK. Their Stoke to Newcastle-under-Lyme suggestions are awful and don’t inspire any confidence. One would have you trudging alongside traffic and buses all the way on the Hartshill Road. The other is a strange steep dog’s leg to get through to… the Hartshill Road again.

I’ve marked in blue the actual good walker’s route from Stoke Station to the Ironmarket, alongside their two suggestions (purple and green). Almost no main roads required for my route, only one steep short climb, and you also avoid landing up in the grotty end of Newcastle-under-Lyme town centre…

Admittedly in weather like this there will be just a few patches of mud to negotiate on one path, and in extremely wet weather the route would best be varied by going via Lock 38. But better that, than breathing traffic fumes all the way through Hartshill and being puddle-splashed by passing cars and buses.

Not suitable for cyclists, who might do better to continue on the canal near Stoke Station (rather than forking off along the old Market Drayton Line) past Hanley Cemetery, then cut through Lock 38 and thus get onto the dedicated traffic-separated bike lane on the Shelton New Road. The latter road has recently had quite a bit of taxpayer cash spent on making it better for cyclists.

This shows why Needless Alley was needed in the centre of Birmingham. By using this pedestrian Alley someone in the upper part of New Street (and heading for upper Corporation St.) could avoid having to battle through the very busy ‘foot’ of Corporation St. (seen left) at its junction with New St.

“According to the WMCA [West Midlands Combined Authority], approximately 22% of the population of the West Midlands is offline completely” (Public Sector Executive magazine, report on the WMCA, September 2023). It gets worse. The WM Digital Roadmap states that in total… “46% of the population are non or limited users of the Internet”.

And the supposed ‘West Midlands Combined Authority’ actually only covers the central urban parts, not the proper West Midlands…

Thus it’s not as if rural stick-in-the-muds are skewing the figures. “Offline completely” presumably means no mobile phone, either. Something to remember when your marketing guru tells you that Instagram and TikTok are everything you need to aim for.

The further problem is that many people who are minimally online also have no passport or driving licence, and thus can’t log on to many online government systems.

Morrisons supermarket appear to have removed North Staffordshire oatcakes from their Stoke store. I found no trace of them in-store, on my last three visits, either in their usual forlorn standalone basket, on the bread aisle, or in or near the bakery. And nothing via a search on the Morrisons websites.

My guess is that the cost of making them has killed the product? I think they were a hefty £1.30 for six, at my last sight of them. ‘Luxury pricing’, for many in Stoke. I vaguely recall they used to be about 45p per pack, at one time, and were a healthy staple of poverty. Then they went to 85p, then £1.20 and on upwards and out of reach of daily eating.

Nor can Morrison’s new link-up with Amazon deliver three packs to an Amazon locker, to be picked up with the shopping. All Amazon can offer is the dry Scottish type of oatcakes.

There are recipes, of course, but they’re a lot more palaver than just opening a packet and flinging two in a sizzling pan.

Solution for Morrisons: For now, B&M, just across the road from Morrisons, has them at £1 a pack, and they’re the proper type and brand. Still no oatcakes in Morrisons at January 2024. Update: August 2025: B&M tend not to have them on Mondays for some reason, ‘still baking’ I guess!

Update, April 2026. Oatcakes are now back in Morrisons, albeit at £1.30 a pack, when B&M across the road have them for £1.

It looks like we might finally have a decent comet hanging in the skies, in the spring of next year. The last naked-eye one I can recall is way back in boyhood. I vaguely recall that it failed to impress.

Currently hurtling toward the inner Solar System is a comet at least twice the size of the earth’s prehistoric ‘dinosaur killer’ comet. “Will Fly by the Earth and Will Be Visible in the Night Sky” in April 2024, and perhaps into June. It will appear low in the sky (but still above treetops and buildings), if observers look in a East-North-East direction. Which means it won’t be hanging in front of my windows, regrettably, and will be masked by the glow of Hanley.

The Comet (’12P Pons-Brooks’) will not impact the Earth, and calculations show that at the exact orbit-passing time… “the Earth will be safely tucked away on the other side of the Sun”. Good to know.

Tolkien Gleanings #133.

* Freely available on YouTube, “Sixty Years of J.R.R. Tolkien: A Lecture by Professor Thomas Alan Shippey”. Given on 27th September 2023. The 90 minute recording is listenable, with Shippey in his home study on Zoom and with a reasonably good headset — rather than in an echoing lecture hall in Manila. It was a familiar personal talk, with nothing new for those familiar with his previous talks and interviews. Questions begin at 53:20, and regrettably they go straight into asking about the TV series. It really should be a given at events such as this that the presenters make it clear: “NO movie or TV questions, please”. Requiring the audience to write their questions succinctly on cards, which are then passed to the front, also saves a lot of time and prevents grand-standing.

* The latest issue of the Spanish language journal Peonza: Revista de literatura infantil y juvenil (‘Peonza: journal of literature for children and juveniles’) is themed ‘Fantastic Stories’. There’s an article on ‘Tolkien’s Infinite Stories’ along with articles on Alice, Pinnochio, Jules Verne, Peter and Wendy, and others. The ongoing Peonza appears to be a paper-only journal, which inhibits automatic translation, although the first 132 issues are freely online.

* Now freely available on Archive.org, Christian History magazine #121 (2017) was themed “Faith in the Foxholes”. The issue highlighted faith during front-line military combat.

* Apparently now under Creative Commons Attribution, the book The Sacred Tree: Ancient And Medieval Manifestations (2011) has appeared on Archive.org. The author is suitably wary of neo-pagan writing on the topic.

* “Showcasing lesser-known scholarship on Lewis”, the forthcoming inaugural Undiscovered C.S. Lewis Conference. To be held at George Fox University in Oregon, USA, from 5th-8th September 2024.

* And finally, 2024 seems to offer the possibility of weaving a series of ‘telling stories to small children’ events or publications around that fact that…

“According to Douglas Anderson’s introduction to ‘The Annotated Hobbit’, Tolkien began telling stories to his children around 1924”

2024 could thus be reasonably claimed as the 100th anniversary of Tolkien’s first oral tales.

Good news today. The scrapping of HS2 North has had the effect of releasing the approval and funds to restore the Stoke to Leek line, at last. The grinding bus journey will be cut to just 20 minutes on the train, and will be far more pleasant both in terms of comfort (no swaying around and consequent bus-sickness) and off-road scenery. The re-opened line will also enable local tourism and commuting to/from the intermediate stations (Cheddleton, Consall, Froghall, Oakamoor, and possibly Fenton), as well as boosting the town of Leek as a gateway to the Peak and the Moorlands.

Now it’s just a question of time-scale I guess. It’s already well underway at the Leek end. But now… can what might have eventually been done in 20 years be done in five or six? And without a ‘too many cooks spoilt the broth’ effect, as the consultants and big contractors parachute into Leek?

The station at Meir, on the Stoke-Derby-Nottingham-Sleaford-Skegness route to the east coast, is also to be built. Also mentioned is “funding the refurbishment of Kidsgrove and Longport stations”. Meanwhile… “the popular £2 bus-fare will also be extended until the end of December 2024”.

Good to hear that Newcastle-under-Lyme made the “top 12 places to retire”. This was run by the UK’s trusted Which? magazine, rather than some headline-grabbing estate agency. North Staffordshire can rival the Outer Hebrides, Exeter, and the High Peak as a retirement spot. While being far more central and with better long-distance transport connections (e.g. direct train from Stoke to Birmingham International airport).

I image the presence of the massive university hospital at Hartshill gave the town a boost? But perhaps not, since Which? were scoring at the local Council data level…

Which? gave each local authority a score out of 10 for healthcare, happiness, green space – specifically parks and playing fields – and also considered house price affordability.

Since the hospital is actually in Stoke-on-Trent, it presumably wouldn’t have counted towards the Which? score…

No mention of one of the biggest and best hospitals in the UK and Europe, in the press-release…

Newcastle-under-Lyme was one of the highest-scoring English local authorities for green space, scoring 9.6 out of 10. The area is home to 7.4 parks and playing fields within [a 15 minute walk] on average. It was also rated the joint-happiest English local authority based on data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), tying with the High Peak. The ONS also reported it has an overall score of 7.9 for health and well-being.

And, as I found a few weeks ago in my photo-report, Newcastle-under-Lyme town centre is looking distinctly better than it was a decade ago. Though the lockdowns did cause the closure of the town’s second-hand bookshop.

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.