I recently had the opportunity to take a look around the naff wasteland that is Google Play’s mobile phone app store for Android, while specifically looking for local apps. There’s not much available, but here are the results: a quick 2015/16 North Staffordshire / Stoke-on-Trent ‘App Survival Kit’ for visitors.

Free wi-fi access:

I assume that all UK based visitors will arrive in the area already having installed at least one of the UK’s main “free wi-fi access” apps. Of these, O2 seems the best choice for short-stay and overseas visitors…

* O2 Wifi (in Stoke: McDonalds, Subway, Argos, Homebase, B&Q etc) which is open to all after a simple registration. 10Gb download limit per month.

* BT Wi-fi (in Stoke: larger Tesco supermarkets, HSBCs, Starbucks, GAME shops, Job Centres etc) is for BT broadband subscribers only (note that the app’s maps don’t show BT home routers that share, so for detecting those use the excellent Wifi Tracker app. Note that Tesco limits BT Wi-fi users to 15 minutes every 24 hours.

* FastConnect (The Cloud free wi-fi, mostly offered in bars and pubs). Showed a nasty initial “you have a virus” spoof advert, during our test.

Note that our local public libraries and buses are laggards in offering free wi-fi, though some of the privately run libraries such as the Burslem School of Art do offer it and there’s apparently also a Stoke Train Station — Keele University bus that offers it. But in terms of free wi-fi Stoke-on-Trent is certainly not yet one of the coming wave of ‘SuperConnected cities’ that exist elsewhere the UK.

Stoke does have excellent UK-leading mobile network connections and speeds, though, so long as you can pay for the data. That speed may well decrease as you go into the adjacent Moorlands and the Peak District National Park.

Local news:

There’s no local app for BBC Radio Stoke news and traffic, though their web page will give you ad-free local headlines and they have an excellent BBC Radio Stoke daily coverage timeline. The latter would make a great app. Sadly neither page has an RSS feed.

The Sentinel newspaper has a pleasantly slick app but it only gives you the paper’s main evening news story, and the app doesn’t include the Saturday edition. The best option for a visitor is thus an RSS reader app, the paper’s RSS feed, and (to view the news stories) a mobile Web browser running a good ad-blocker.

The community radio station 6 Towns Radio has an app.

BBC Weather is excellent for reliable(ish) hourly and five-day local weather. Note that “Sideway” (alongside the main A500 road) is a good central valley-bottom weather station, and may be a better option than more elevated weather stations such as Hanley (the city centre).

I assume that any football / sports related visitors will already have their phones crammed to the rim with specialist sports news and team fanzine apps.

Transport:

All the UK train apps seems to use the same live information and timetable feeds, and they’re all fairly similar. You probably have one already, but if you’re an overseas visitor just arrived at Birmingham International or Manchester Airport then you might try installing the Virgin Trains app, which is robust and well designed. Virgin Trains also offer cycle hire from Stoke train station, although I seem to remember it’s a service confined to first class ticket holders only. Sadly the basic app doesn’t allow one to book a bike from the station, though I guess it might if you were fully logged in with them and you had a ticket number. Update: Virgin lost the franchise to a (rather shoddy) low-bidder, Avanti.

First Bus is likely to be your choice of bus travel app in Stoke, the Potteries, and north Staffordshire. The app is useful, offering geo-located bus stops and related timetables. It’s not perfect, though: routes should have direction-of-travel arrows; the ‘final destination’ place-names are shoddily labelled; and there is no geo-filter on route numbers (if the app knows the user is in the Potteries, then it shouldn’t even offer namesake bus routes from other cities).

With more than 100 miles of off-road cycle network in the city, and a new cycle-path connecting Stoke to the Peak District, cycling maps may be useful. The older SUSTRANS app has long since given way to their recommended commercial app, CycleStreets. Note there are two app downloads for this, the route finder and the maps pack.

Google Navigation is an alternative that many will have preloaded, but in tests it proved to “know nuurthing” of our city’s green cyclepaths and towpaths, and sent us down an ugly main road despite being switched through to the Cycling / Walking tabs. Seeing Stoke via the main grotty roads is certainly not ideal when there are so many back-paths, greenways and canals to walk and cycle on.

Canals / wildlife / litter:

Tens of thousands of canal boat holiday makers pass through Stoke on the Trent & Mersey canal each year, and also go up to the Moorlands town of Leek on the Cauldon Canal. Those visitors have a couple of useful official apps from the Canal & River Trust, as well as their more general UK canal apps. Canal & River Places to Visit and Canal & River eNatureWatch. The eNatureWatch is rather nicely made and will be fun for kids and young teens, and it also allows spotter photo-reports to be sent, but it is not meant for real naturalists.

Sadly there is no spotter/report app from the Staffordshire Wildlife Trust. There are wildlife apps for the Moorlands and Peak District National Park, and even a Peak MoorPLANTS and MoorMOSS app for spotting the moss and plant types found there.

There’s a total lack of litter / dumping reporting apps, even from Stoke-on-Trent City Council (which doesn’t seem to ‘do’ apps at all), though you might get the FixMyStreet reporting app to install — it refused to install on our slightly-old android smartphone.

Arts and visitor attractions:

There is a surprising lack of apps from the city’s now-thriving pottery firms, ranging from the industrial giant Steelite through to must-see heritage potteries such as Middleport Pottery. All we could find was an app for Moorland Pottery. Nothing from big tourist draws such as the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery or the new Wedgwood Museum, either.

No app from Trentham Gardens, which was a surprise, since it’s one of Europe’s biggest outdoor upmarket attractions. Nor Uttoxeter Racecourse, another surprise. But the huge theme park Alton Towers has an official app for the whole resort and also a Halloween Alton Towers Scarefest app.

To hook into where the local creatives are going, simply install the Facebook Groups app and point it at the Creative Stoke Facebook group. Over 2,000 members and tight curation/moderation ensures a usefully informative news group aimed at local creatives. Update: Creative Stoke is now at The Potteries Post.

Keele University has a campus guide app n’ map, something Staffordshire University appears to lack.

That’s it!

A few of my still life pictures from inside the old Spode factory, Stoke-on-Trent, 26th September 2015.

49 great unseen images of Burslem and Smallthorne. They’re from the Burt Bentley collection, recently found in dusty 35mm slide boxes at the City Archives in Hanley.

Picture: "1964 Brickhouse Street. Old building, probably old inn. Top of Street." A familiar sight to those who know Burslem, and one of the settings of my novel The Spyders of Burslem. Aka Brickhouse Street, Cock’s Yard, Cox’s Entry (a corruption of Cock’s, it seems).

This week’s The Spectator briefly reviews the major new book The Land of the Green Man: a journey through the supernatural landscapes of the British Isles, and notes that it is soon “due to be serialised on Radio Four”.

Interesting musings on the north east edgelands just above Stoke-on-Trent in The Sentinel today. Dave Proudlove seems to hint that there may be vague plans to basically infill housing by using the marginal agricultural land between Biddulph and Kidsgrove, which I’m guessing would effectively create a new ‘Bidd-grove’ or ‘Kids-ulph’ conurbation? I’m familiar with the southern part of the section, around Goldenhill, and I could imagine quite a lot of nice new estates fitted in on the relatively flat top-land up there, and more down toward the golf course.

“The push to build more homes across North Staffordshire will see inevitable pressures emerge. Biddulph needs to cater for more than 1,000 new homes in the coming years. The emerging relationship between Cheshire East and Stoke-on-Trent will see talk of big numbers when it comes to housing. The edgelands could be a land of opportunity for some. The biggest changes could be yet to come.”

There’s an excellent local blog called Lichfield Lore which unearths and tells the “untold stories” of the city and the area, with a focus on history, architecture, folklore etc. Some of the author’s best discoveries are set to appear in book format in The Little Book of Staffordshire (History Press) in September 2015.

The British Library has this week uploaded over a million images to Flickr at a medium resolution (usually about 1800px to 2000px on the longest side) and a few such as fold-out plates are at up to 4000px. All are marked as public domain, being the sort of engraved plates, figures and maps that one sees in old books. Some suffer a little from scanning that was optimised for text rather than images…

“These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitised by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images to us, allowing us to release them back into the Public Domain.”

Here are some of the choice items from a search for “Staffordshire”. The image set is barely tagged yet, and the British Library is hoping the tagging will be crowdsourced over the coming months and years. This will make searching inside the corpus much more useful, over time.

I’ve also quickly colorised the one showing Etruria undergoing industrialisation…

A new free book, Undying Voices: the poetry of Roman Britain, drawn from stone and other inscriptions…

May the wayfarer who
sees sixteen years-old
Hermes of Commagene,
hurled into this tomb by fate,
say: ‘Greetings, you, boy, from me:
though you crept not far ahead
in your mortal life, you hasted
as quickly as possible to
the land of the Cimmerian people.’
Neither will you lie [down here], for the boy was good,
and you will do him a good service [by walking on].

To the god who conceived
roads and paths:
Titus Irdas, guard of the governor
fulfilled his promise happily, gladly, deservedly.

Trent Art is a very elegant new website from Stoke-on-Trent, selling “a wide range of Modern British Artists, including many Northern School Artists, both established and up and coming.” They have a private viewing room at the Potters Club in Stoke-on-Trent. http://trent-art.co.uk/ They also have a fabulously illustrated Facebook presence.

Pictures: Jack Simcock, Mow Cop Landscape and Figures, 1960, and White House Mow Cop, 1960s. From Trent Art.

I’ve discovered a fascinating and lavishly illustrated quarterly, published from rural Derbyshire by a Derbyshire antiquarian named Llewellynn Jewitt. Full of articles on barrow openings, local folklore and sayings, songs, old signs, and the like — mostly from Derbyshire and the Peak, and even a few items from North Staffordshire. As time goes on it seems to get sidetracked into tedious ecclesiastical and worthy-family histories, but generally it’s marvellously eclectic and local.

The Reliquary, 1860-1861 (Vol.1, No.1)
The Reliquary, 1861-1862
The Reliquary, 1862-1863
The Reliquary, 1863-1864
The Reliquary, 1865-1866
The Reliquary, 1866-1867
The Reliquary, 1867-1868
The Reliquary, 1868-1869
The Reliquary, 1869-1870
The Reliquary, 1870-1871
The Reliquary, 1871-1872
The Reliquary, 1872-1873
The Reliquary, 1873-1874
The Reliquary, 1874-1875
The Reliquary, 1875-1876
The Reliquary, 1876-1877
The Reliquary, 1877-1878
The Reliquary, 1878-1879
The Reliquary, 1879-1880
The Reliquary, 1880-1881
The Reliquary and illustrated archæologist, 1881-1882
The Reliquary and illustrated archæologist, 1882-1883
The Reliquary and illustrated archæologist, 1883-1884
The Reliquary and illustrated archæologist, 1884-1885
The Reliquary and illustrated archæologist, 1885-86

Then, after the death of the editor, a second series ran from 1887-1908. The new series appears to have ranged much more widely than the first, and had more ecclesiastical material since it was then edited by the Rev. J. Charles Cox.

The Reliquary and illustrated archæologist, 1887
The reliquary and illustrated archæologist, 1888
The Reliquary and illustrated archæologist, 1889
The Reliquary and illustrated archæologist, 1890
The reliquary and illustrated archæologist, 1891
The reliquary and illustrated archæologist, 1892
The Reliquary and illustrated archæologist, 1893
The reliquary and illustrated archæologist, 1894
The Reliquary and illustrated archæologist, 1895
The Reliquary and illustrated archæologist, 1896
The Reliquary and illustrated archæologist, 1897
The Reliquary and illustrated archæologist, 1898
The Reliquary and illustrated archæologist, 1899
The Reliquary and illustrated archæologist, 1900
The Reliquary and illustrated archæologist, 1901
The Reliquary and illustrated archæologist, 1902
The Reliquary and illustrated archæologist, 1903
The Reliquary & illustrated archæologist, 1904
The Reliquary and illustrated archæologist, 1905
The Reliquary and illustrated archæologist, 1906
The Reliquary and illustrated archæologist, 1907
The Reliquary and illustrated archæologist, 1908

An Index to The Reliquary, First Series, Volumes 1-26, 1860-86

Photograph of a bust made by William Henry Goss. A full account of his life and many interests is to be found in Goss’s The Life and Death of Llewellynn Jewitt.

I’ve unearthed a new addition to the folklore bibliography of North Staffordshire…

* W. Beresford, “Notes on a Portion of the Northern Borders of Staffordshire: Superstitions”, The Reliquary, 1866-67.

Summary: Collected from the Moorlands. Farm superstitions. “The belief in fairies, by the way, still lingers with some here, and in witches with many”. Candle and dream omens, and petty superstitions. Methods of foretelling future husbands. There was then still a “popular belief in Moorland “ghosts”” — sometimes called a skug, a boggart, or a tuggin.