The Walking of the City (Part One)

  I’ve always walked across this City. That's always been my viewpoint; I mean, I’ve had lifts in cars or taken taxis, and of course I’ve used the bus - especially when there was a reputable public transport system to speak of, but largely I am a walker. I remember being walked to places across the City by my granddad Lloyd, but more later. 

   The first walk starts at the mid-point in my story, and even here I don't remember it like it was yesterday, it was a long time ago. I lived on Waterloo Street, right opposite The Lord John Russell. My old flat is still there but the pub is gone, remaining only in name and identifying as a block of flats. Out of my bathroom window I could see over the community scout hut to the Rising Sun Pub on Well Street. It's still a proud building and I remember great times. Fraught and lean times, but adventurous times nonetheless. Myriad characters whose names  live on in my mind frequented said establishment. Mad Brian. Babes. Karaoke Ken and more besides. Who knows where they are now and whether they'd be alive, but why wouldn't they be? I am. I never knew where any of them lived specifically, but they’d really have to have clung on as most of the original houses in the neighbourhood have now long gone. 

  At the geographical peak of the neighbourhood, the high rises are still there, face-lifted but solid in their dependable presence overlooking the town. Mad Brian lived in Wellington Court and I know that he jumped to his death from the third floor bathroom window high on a cocktail of methadone and cider, and things I likely don't know about too. 

 When Brian was sitting at the bar of the Rising Sun shouting his speeches to nobody in particular he consistently referred to the formula for the calculation of the speed of gravity. Perhaps we should have seen it coming.

 This area is for another time, a different set of stories. But this neighbourhood is where the walks begin. 

  

 Out my bedroom window was a straight look down Nelson Place with the wreck of Johnson's Hanley Works at the bottom. Frequent were my movements down this street, cutting along the cobbles of Stubbs Lane to Eastman Street; flanked by the terraced streets of Berkeley, Talbot and Pelham, and the western wall of the Hanley Works ruin if I was headed down to my folks house on Franklyn. If I was just going to the 24hr garage on Lichfield Street for fags; skins, milk, munchies or all , I’d cut along Berkeley Street. 

  On the way to my folks I’d cross the single lane bridge over the canal and follow the full length of Eastman flanked by the dual wreckages of Johnson's Trent Works and Johnson's Imperial Works. Walking in the dark shadows of former industrial glories .. In recent years I'd walked this stretch of the canal to get to work at Meakins,  but again, that's another story! 

On occasion I’d join the canal at the bridge and follow it to Lichfield Street, for no particular reason other than a change of landscape, as I remember it. 

  I remember on many an occasion face pressed up to and peering through the window grills to check out what the interiors held. Ghosts and shadows mostly. An overwhelming silence where millions of conversations over hundreds of years took place. Local stories. 

  Three floor high derelict factories of purple black bricks and baby blue window frames and gates. Beyond the gates, the empty works receptions and the dead clock card machines - and adorning the walls, the signs of company orders, directives and and directions to myriad departments across the brick empire. Unforgettable and yet hard pushed to remembrance in the new order of streets and missing streets; bland brick new build and cosmetically planted avenues and closes. User friendly looking and devoid of community and spirit. Ideal for the new non-society. I’ve never seen anybody enter or leave these houses down here. These are the empty streets. 

   Built over the old communities are the new places designed for communities that don't seem to interact or speak to each other. Maybe it's just me but I see it like that now.. or rather, I just don't see it. When these new places are prepared for the construction to then happen, they are invariably boarded off. I remember it well because the large plot of land that lay derelict for many years waiting for a plan invited all manner of speculation as the rats grew bigger and the grass grew taller amidst the strewn bricks. The roads remained mostly still visible which compounded the loss of the terraced houses.  On those boards that keep the development zones shrouded, there is boldy advertised for all to see, the Architects new vision! In the Architect's vision there is always the projection of ‘community’, a crowd walking up a planned thoroughfare, interactive, like they're growing together in this new vision. It's friendly looking, easygoing and of course safe. A new housing utopia ‘like the old days’ .. no conversations taking place over doorsteps being scrubbed though.. the space simply being used, shared and being passed through without any visible worries. 

Then comes another reality. The builders disappear, and the boards with the Architects vision come down and the concept also leaves along with the waste. No such vision will exist here. The plots, it seems, are simply sold on the vision.. and why, when society is known to no longer live that way? Is what we've lost still aspired to, full in the knowledge that we don't think that way anymore? That modern life isn't structured that way any more. The rows of terraced streets that created that life were built by factory owners initially, and then councils for vast communities that all more or less worked in the same place, or factories nearby. The work moved on; communities were fragmented, but we still aspire to what was. Aspiration to a past that cannot be replicated.

  You know all this. 

   In contradiction, these are the spaces where fear is created through the television and the newspapers! 

   You, the new faceless communities-  keep off the streets, get straight into your oversized cars that you've parked on the overbig pavements; don't go out where the imaginary ‘junkies’ and ‘paedo’s’ lurk and scrounge around… don't hang around the places that died before they left the Architects drawing board but which the same Architect used to draw you the utopia of community.

  Feral youths come here to hang and smoke.. people walk their dejected pets to offload wholly domesticated bowels without consideration to others they don't care about of equal apathy.

   I know these places. I know them because I have never owned a car and they are essential knowledge for a pedestrian way from A to a destination of need. I know them because I look for them, they're interesting by their very nature of being the details that were never attended to in the great plan. A hotchpotch of aspiration and ruin. The fringes of the town that folk don't look at. The leftovers from the great plan. The unplanned part of the plan where there was no money for. The underneath.  The life ‘underneath’ is what these places are;  this search for the underneath entered my creative vocabulary long ago when I was on the verge of creating but still looking for the story. The story emerged in this hinterland.  That's the description.. 'the hinterland.'  In a City like Stoke-On-Trent, ceramic manufactories lined the canals because it was the superhighway of it’s day.. and they died here too, still snaking through the urban sprawl; smartened up in places, but, in essence, the new feral places only known to the few. It was those old factories and warehouses stood in their afterlife dereliction that pulled me in .. literally, through the sadly boarded window; under the bent out of shape security gate that invited me to crawl under. The place around the back away from sight that allowed me to climb the fence and get inside. 

  More soon ..

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