by Nick Corble
More hopeful was something else the two cities had in common: an attempt to regenerate a rundown area by offering houses for sale for £1. Like the Webster Triangle in Liverpool, Stoke is offering houses in its Portland Street Estate for that sum on the condition that new residents stay for a minimum of ten years. Instead of expecting incomers to raise their own £40,000, Stoke offers loans of £33,000 per house. Although, as with Liverpool, it is too early to tell whether this scheme will work, the early signs are encouraging. Although those incomers taking up the scheme were initially viewed with suspicion, they have since started to take the initiative to turn the community around, including turning an abandoned pub into a community centre, and creating a Social Enterprise based on ceramics, once again using raw clay to fashion something Stoke could be proud of.
I didn’t actively dislike Stoke, it’s more a case of there wasn’t much to like. At one point it was fashionable amongst politicians to talk about JAMs – people who were ‘Just About Managing’. I wondered if Stoke was an example of a GUM – ‘Given Up Managing’? I hoped not. A recent documentary made by The Guardian newspaper3 for their website had been castigated locally for taking too negative a view of the place, forcing the filmmakers to re-visit the city to present a more positive message. It was hard to say they’d succeeded.
Another way of looking at Stoke’s predicament was to see it as suffering from post-PMT – a reference to its local bus company, the quaintly named Potteries Motor Traction, which provided most of our transport during our time at university. It is now known by the more prosaic name of First Potteries.
It was time to move on. The volume of traffic on A-roads in the heart of Stoke mean that this wasn’t a walker’s city, and I was keen to get going. But before then I had a couple of excursions lined up, and I met up again with Annette. The first shared yet another Liverpool connection, but this was one where Stoke fared rather better.
Liverpool hosted the first of the National Garden Festivals in 1984. Two years later Stoke was the venue for the second. As in Liverpool, I was keen to see what had happened to the site. This is located just north of the city – between Hanley and Burslem if that helps – where the Shelton Bar British Steel works used to stand until 1978, when steel joined the list of industries deserting Stoke. Known as Festival Park, it is now mostly devoted to retail. When I asked Julie from Stoke a couple of days later what people did now in the city she remarked how it was all distribution and retail, and this temple to consumerism supported her thesis. It wasn’t just shops and warehouses. There was also a cinema, a ski slope, a toboggan run and a waterpark, as well as a marina attached to the nearby Trent and Mersey Canal. There were also some offices, including those of the betting firm bet365, in premises that once belonged to the local newspaper.
As for evidence of the Festival itself, we found this round the back of the Morrisons car park. You can still wander around a substantial portion of the site, which includes a slight climb up to a trig point, which no doubt helped save it from the developers’ machines. In a nice piece of symmetry, a statue by Anthony Gormley, our friend from Crosby, had once stood at the top of this hill, but wisely perhaps, it had been removed. Called A View, A Place it consisted of one of Gormley’s trademark single figures looking out over the Fowlea Valley.
What had once been a suspension bridge over one of the main walkways of the site was now closed due to rotting timbers. Scattered elsewhere were the remains of sculptures and flower beds and, with a bit of imagination, it was possible to make out some of the park’s layout. In one corner, we found a ring of old palm trees, somewhat the worse for wear. Still, the Festival had been more than thirty years ago, and that there was anything at all left to see was something of a miracle. The site originally had its own railway, but this was sold off lock, stock and sleepers to a Bygones Museum in Norfolk, while two of the four locos used on the track were sold to a safari park in Spain. The site was well maintained, but not developed. You could say it was just about managed.
As we needed to stock up on provisions before moving on to our cottage for the weekend, we took advantage of the Morrisons. Disappointingly, this too was devoid of oatcakes, although what it did have was a lot of (how shall I put this?) generously proportioned people. It can be a fun exercise to look in other people’s shopping trolleys, but I do not recommend doing so in the Morrisons on Festival Park in Stoke. At a time when obesity is a very live topic, we were shocked by how little heed many of the good people of Stoke were paying to what they put in their mouths. It’s easy to be judgemental I know, and I too could do with losing a few pounds, but there’s a difference between carrying a bit extra and being positively suicidal. It was their ages that troubled me the most – people still in their thirties who were clearly obese, if not morbidly so. It was probably unlikely that many would ever shift that sort of weight. Like their city perhaps, they had given up and accepted that they were what they were.
Having loaded our car with our relatively meagre purchases, we had one more stop before we could put our feet up. This was to visit the campus of our shared old university of Keele, just outside Newcastle-under-Lyme. We’d both failed to recognise any of Newcastle when we’d passed through and were hoping for better luck there.
Our immediate reaction was of shock. Not only had the main entrance been moved, but we felt as if we were back in the commercial area next to the Festival Park. Large sparkling new concrete and glass buildings, including a whole new Medical School, occupied the side of a hill where, during our time there forty years before, there’d been a lone observatory used by a few equally lonely Astronomy students. Yes, there were Astronomy students. There was a rumour during our time that the hill remained undeveloped because it housed a secret nuclear bunker, one of many supposedly dotted alongside the motorway system (the M6 used to be visible from my room), designated for Very Important People. Or possibly not that important if they were destined to eke out the last days of their lives underground in Newcastle-under-Lyme. It was a fun theory, but if it was a secret bunker, how come everyone knew of it?
We started by revisiting our old Halls of Residence. The one I used to gaze out of onto the M6 had been condemned as it started to slide closer to the service station that shared the university’s name. The one I’d lived in during the second year had already gone. Vamoosed, demolished, a victim of mining subsidence. Annette, meanwhile, was having better luck. All of her old homes were still intact, although there were signs of impending redevelopment. It was sobering to think that the buildings – well most of them – had been around for longer after we’d left them than they had been before we’d lived in them. Maybe, like parts of us, they were due for renewal. In fact, there was building going on everywhere, almost as if the university offered a Construction degree, with an emphasis on the practical.
Also noticeable was the sheer diversity of the student body. In our day, there were foreign students (as they were called) but broadly the university was the preserve of the children of the white middle classes. The student body now constituted a regular United Nations, with a spectrum of different tongues spoken, skin colours and ethnicities. As a campus university, Keele offers a comforting community feel for those coming to the country for the first time, but this offered only a partial explanation. This mix isn’t unique, in fact, around one in five of university places in the UK are now taken by non-nationals.4 It was sobering to wonder what might happen if this flow of students, and money, dried up in a post-Brexit Britain. Combined with demographic trends impacting upon the sheer number of home-grown eighteen-year-olds, institutions like Keele could be in for a hard time.
One of the most significant changes that has taken place in recent years has been the expansion of higher education. When we went up to Keele around one in seven eighteen-year olds went to university.5 By 2000, when I’d last passed through the area on our canal boat, it had risen to 35 per cent and now it was closer to 50 per cent. Whilst this has undoubte
dly had its benefits, it has also brought problems, not least the issue of how to pay for it all.
Tuition fees were first introduced under a Labour government in 1998 in the teeth of much opposition. Fees then were up to (a point often forgotten) £1,000 a year. At the time of writing they are up to £9,250, having been capped. In our day, there used to be a queue to collect your student cheque (remember those?) from a desk in an old Nissen hut. We then trotted down to the on-site bank branch (remember them?) to pay the cheque in. Each Friday we’d return to take out a ‘Five and five ones’, or ten pounds, which was supposed to see us through the week. If we were feeling particularly adventurous, we might even use the new-fangled Cashpoint to get the money, but there was no guarantee of getting the ‘five ones’ that way.
The rapid rise in tuition fees has undoubtedly contributed to a growing sense of inter-generational friction, expressed both financially, and in terms of fairness. And who can blame today’s students? Whereas their parents (if they went to university, which, remember, most didn’t) had everything paid for them, the young adults we were seeing on the campus would leave with a degree that might or might not get them a job and be encumbered with a massive debt, in some cases rising to as much as £50,000.
In a country where so much value and status is invested in home ownership this is a major problem. Just when they should be accumulating cash to get on the housing ladder, first-time buyers find themselves fighting to raise a deposit. I recalled the conversation I had outside Hale with the man who said he couldn’t see how his children could ever afford their own home. In theory, getting a good education and increasing your life chances should be making you happier. So why is it that research by the charity, The Princes Trust,6 has showed that the happiness of young people (defined as sixteen- to twenty-five-year-olds) is currently at its lowest point across every area since the annual survey was first conducted in 2009?
Whether or not getting an expensive degree will enhance their job prospects is another issue which receives insufficient attention. In the rush to ‘get big or become irrelevant’, universities have been selling to a naïve and loaded market. Not only have schools been incentivised to increase the numbers of their students going to higher education (it is another measure against which they are assessed), but the buyers, the students themselves make decisions on the basis of poor information. In a double whammy, they are influenced by parents who are simply proud that their child is going to university when they didn’t, even if this means they have very little real knowledge with which to guide them.
As a result, for many choosing both the best course and the best institution is often a case of pot luck, and even if you get both right, the job market is precarious and changing in the face of technology. Concern about future prospects was one of the areas highlighted in the Prince’s Trust report, with over half those surveyed saying they were worried about jobs and their finances. This didn’t come across as progress.
Equally, there is evidence to suggest that reaching the fabled target of 50 per cent of eighteen year olds going to university has created its own divisions, which in turn may be contributing towards the fault lines emerging in English society. In some parts of the country, such as Barnsley, east of Liverpool in Lancashire, only 10 per cent of disadvantaged young people make it to university.7 This isn’t to do with their being disadvantaged, it’s to do with where they live – 50 per cent of similarly disadvantaged young people in Kensington and Chelsea do make it to university. It felt like a case of pot luck again.
Going back to the Brexit referendum, this imbalance came through in the results. I’m not saying that only stupid people voted to leave. That would be to deride those with deep-seated and well-argued objections to the EU, and ignore the fact that intelligent people are just as capable as anyone else of making poor decisions (the financial crisis anyone?). But I will point out what the Social Mobility Commission8 has reported: of the 65 areas of the country identified as ‘social mobility cold spots’ – that is those with the worst education and employment prospects – 62 voted for Leave.
This lack of social mobility, of being able to spread wealth and opportunity, which back in 2016 led many to kick in the teeth the elite that governed them, has to be worrying. Perhaps those lacking prospects and social mobility settle for what they’ve got and grab another cider and slice of pizza? Or perhaps they are attracted to the comforts of popularism or take to the streets, much like they had in the 1980s. Never mind, perhaps another kindly government minister will come up with a scheme like the Garden Festivals to take the sting out of the situation?9
Keele was, and still is, unusual in being a campus university, indeed it boasts of being the largest campus university in the UK. It was, and remains, unusual also in offering a wide breadth of education, including its fabled Foundation Year and an insistence on dual-subject degrees. When Annette and I attended, half the students studied the history of Western civilisation, sampling everything under the sun before making their final choice for three years of study. That’s right: these were four-year courses. These days the university offers half a dozen more streamlined Foundation Years and most degrees are single subject. The essence of the old philosophy is still there, but it has been diluted. It is also unusual in having an old Victorian hall and a park complete with its own lake and an arboretum.
Given these differentiators, perhaps Keele is not a good example for extrapolating wider trends. For one thing, its campus status means that the local town of Newcastle has largely escaped the blight of low-grade student accommodation, which mops up cheap housing that might otherwise offer a route to young people looking to buy their first home. It also means that the students there have time to regard the campus as their neighbourhood, rather than an area they occasionally visit.
The closer we looked, the more we were convinced that the essence of the old Keele, the one we remembered, was still there. The Students’ Union was relatively intact, and still acted as a focal point for the student community. This isn’t automatically the case nowadays as we’d learned during Open Days at other universities when looking with our sons. Where once we’d played Space Invaders was now a Starbucks, and where we’d once clustered round pigeonholes organised by surname (and where I often used to bump into my future wife) was now a reception area. I doubted these students got much in the way of ‘snail mail’ anymore, although presumably there was some way of collecting Amazon parcels.
Being a long-distance walker, I naturally took advantage of the facilities while I was there (grab ’em when you can), and was delighted to find that my feet no longer stuck to the floor due to spilled beer. Mission accomplished, it was time to remove ourselves from nostalgia and back into the real world. But first there was time for one more reflection.
Shortly after we left Keele, in the mid and late 1980s, the university was used as the set for a slightly surreal television comedy series set in a medical practice within a modern university. Called A Very Peculiar Practice, the plotline of the series was about some Americans coming in and attempting to run the university like a business.
It ended in anarchy.
5
Ambulatories Non Gratae
‘Tear that bit of cardboard off. It’s rotten anyway.’
A couple of minutes before, I’d recklessly walked right through a pool of cow cack wide enough to require four stretching strides and deep enough to go over the tops of my boots. I’d made it to the gate, but that was only a staging post to our ultimate destination of the field beyond. An equally wide expanse of bubbling manure still lay before us, and I was reconnoitring the scene before me to see if there was a drier route out.
Meanwhile, my companions for the day, my cousin Simon and his wife Judy, were yet to even reach the gate, and Simon was stranded halfway. He’d found a wide strip of cardboard by the side of the pool and placed it, like a giant snow shoe, one pace out in an effort to provide a temporary stepping stone. H
e was stranded, and needed more material. All I had in front of me was a railway sleeper, and as well as not really relishing picking it up, the thought of the collateral damage it could do if I tossed it in his direction wasn’t worth contemplating.
Meanwhile, Judy was casting around for anything her side of the poo she might be able to use, watched by a gathering herd of young brown and white heifers, the source of the problem, if you discounted the farmer who hadn’t kept the footpath clear. No gate or fence separated Judy from the cows, and any sudden decision by them to nudge forward a bit would prove disastrous. Stoic and defiant, Judy tore more cardboard off the old hoarding by the side of the hedge and handed it gently towards the outstretched hand of her husband. He, in turn, plopped it in front of him and took another dainty step, the green and brown sludge oozing out around the edges. Like someone in a corporate team-building exercise, he had shown his initiative. I stayed stuck on the gate, oblivious to Simon’s suggestion that I could swing out and collect him. I didn’t trust the gate’s hinges, and besides, I didn’t want to freak out the cows. Eventually, Simon made it, and Judy was able to follow on using his stepping stones.
With the three of us now committed to further progress, islands in a sea of crap, Judy explored the option of going up the side of the hedge to our right, while Simon and I contemplated a more complicated, but manly, route via some farm machinery. The railway sleeper was not mentioned again. Just then, the steady chug-chug of a tractor in the nearby farmyard stopped, and an angry farmer started yelling at us that the footpath was via the hedge. Simon’s diplomatic responses, thanking him for the advice, were admirable in the circumstances, and I wondered how I might have responded if I’d been on my own.