There is a place in the Potteries known as Etruria Valley, a vast swathe of industrial wasteland, its name an invention, the marketing tool of a property developer looking to make gold from what has been left behind almost twenty years after it fell silent.
That place was better known as Shelton Bar, that enormous steelworks that was once massively important to both North Staffordshire and the nation during a time when we used to make things. A place where thousands of people earned their crust. A place of fear and loathing, fascination and inspiration. A moonscape of craters and lagoons, with a volcanic environment that lit up the sky like the end of the world or a permanent Guy Fawkes night, and that bent those that grafted there into strange shapes.
The steel production processes changed the landscape of the valley forever. Shelton Bar covered over 400 acres, and at its peak, employed around 10,000 people, and as well as it’s steelworks, rolling mills and blast furnaces, had its own railway system, five coal mines, and a by-products processing plant. Shelton Bar opened in 1841, closing its doors for the last time on 27th April 2000, by which time, it’s workforce had been reduced to just 300. It was a place of high productivity, but also efficient and innovative, and in 1964 became the world’s first steel plant using 100% continuously cast production. It was by far the biggest industrial complex in Stoke-on-Trent, and it continues to haunt and inspire the city to this day.
Shelton Bar’s relationship with the human race was mainly an economic one. But for some, it was also a creative relationship, and it has fired the imagination of many throughout the ages.
The Bard of the Potteries Arnold Bennett was transfixed by Shelton Bar, or ‘Cauldon Bar’, as he christened it in his Five Towns epics…
“…long fields of ironstone glowed with all the colours of decadence. The entire landscape illuminated and transformed by these unique pyrotechnics of labour atoning for its grime…”
Artists such as Arthur Berry, Reginald Haggar, Alf Wakefield and Sid Kirkham were fascinated with industrial processes and their effect on people and place, and Shelton Bar hung heavy over much of their work.
During the 1970s, as the nationalised steel industry was undergoing a programme of rationalisation, the future of Shelton Bar was at risk, and the local New Victoria Theatre – at the time, Britain’s only professional theatre in the round – led by their legendary artistic director Peter Cheeseman produced Fight for Shelton Bar, a musical documentary designed to highlight the plight of the thousands of steelworkers whose livelihoods were at risk.
The struggle to preserve the site for the good of the city was also commemorated by a beautiful sculpture by Colin Melbourne which stands proud alongside the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery and bears the inscription:
“I believe in the dignity of labour. Whether with head or hand. That the world owes no man a living, but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living”
The rationalisation of the Shelton Bar site continued into the 1980s, rendering large parts of the site redundant and creating much blight. The Government intervened by selecting the redundant land – alongside Wedgwood’s former Etruria Works – as the location of the second National Garden Festival in 1986, the newly greened and rejuvenated site opened by the Queen. The reclamation works cost £5million, the delivery of the festival £18million, and included some exceptional landscape design – including the planting of 300,000 trees – and great public art, including the sculpture A View, A Place by Antony Gormley which adorns the highest point of the site.
In more recent times, local writer Paul Smith memorably described Shelton Bar in his memoir Tales from the Boothen End – the View from My Window…
“…if you watched long enough…a door would open in the mountain side and fire belched out just below the ridge where Shelton Bar nestles between the pitheads. This was the best train of all, wandering into the great black pit with neat little heaps of fire in the trucks along its length. When it got to the blackest of the ridge, all tipped together and the hot slag poured like a bleeding wound…”
But perhaps the most notable of those affected by this fiery world was a man who hailed from Kent, who began his career as a teacher before becoming one of the world’s most influential writers. That man was H.G. Wells.
Although Wells’ work spanned numerous genres, he became most famous for works such as The War of the Worlds, and The Time Machine. Indeed, Wells was the greatest science fiction panjandrum of the 19th Century.
In 1888, Wells came to the Six Towns to stay with an old college friend at his home in Basford, 18 Victoria Street. While in the Potteries, Wells also spent some time at the Leopard in Burslem, the scene of a deal that enabled the building of the Trent and Mersey Canal, and thus opening-up the valley in which Shelton Bar stood.
The view over urban Stoke-on-Trent from Basford would have been characterised by the filth, fire and smoke from Shelton Bar, and it’s thought that some of the descriptive text in ‘The War of the Worlds’ was inspired by the skies above Shelton Bar’s furnaces.
But Wells went even further. In 1895 he published the short story The Cone, that was directly influenced by Shelton Bar. Described as a tale of “love, unfaithfulness and terrible revenge”, The Cone tells the story of an artist that visits the ironworks to capture the industrial landscape when its manager discovers the artists’ affair with his wife. The Cone depicts both the drama and horror of Shelton Bar, it’s opening line gives a taste of things to come…
“The night was hot and overcast, the sky red, rimmed with the lingering sunset of mid-summer…”
Wells went on to describe…
“…pot-banks and chimneys belching fire and dust into the face of heaven…”
…which captured perfectly the creation of the hideous urban smog that dominated the atmosphere, blackened the fine buildings of the Six Towns, and overcame the locals.
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Fast forward to 2018, and although Shelton Bar is long gone, it still continues to inspire creative people. Local artist Ian Pearsall’s latest exhibition Fire and Light, is based on his work, Steel, and is hosted by the Art and Craft Collective of Edinburgh.
This new work sees Ian explore familiar themes, but his prodigious use of colour takes him in a slightly new direction, and although I never experienced Shelton Bar, Ian’s work captures perfectly how it appears in my mind’s eye; that lively, volcanic landscape once again firing the imagination of a great and unique talent.
Ian’s passion for the Potteries runs deep, and at the heart of this is his interest in the stories of the people who have populated its industrial landscapes and townscapes over many, many years, and this comes out in Fire and Light.
Central to the exhibition is a haunting piece, ‘John Walks Away’ in which an almost ghost-like human figure stands beside the silhouette of the remaining furnaces of Shelton Bar, and beneath a murky, smoggy sky, knowing that the end was upon him.
And John is a real person, one of the remaining 300 steel workers in the last days of Shelton Bar. John walked away the day before the site closed forever, declining to take his redundancy pay because he had an unshakeable belief that he was going to become a successful professional snooker player.
But John’s dream died in much the way his former workplace did, and he eventually succumbed to an addiction, mirroring the demise of many other former workers in post-industrial towns and cities.
‘John Walks Away’ is classic Pearsall. Through his work, Ian captures the story of a people, and how their environment made and shaped them. He captures the memory and loss associated with deindustrialisation, but in a very real and authentic way. And in the current political climate, dominated by Trump and Brexit, this is incredibly important. Although Fire and Light is a love song to people and place, it is also a major political statement.
Modern Stoke-on-Trent is not the place it was. The pits have gone, the making of pots is now done differently, and Shelton Bar has also disappeared. But it is now one of the greenest cities in the country, and its creative DNA is being put to use in a million other ways; Ian Pearsall is a living, breathing example.
We now have a generation who have little or no idea what life was like before such places fell silent. But thanks to Ian Pearsall other fellow creative minds, we can all get a taste.
Although Shelton Bar is gone, in many ways, it will always be with us.
DP
Sep-18
