Events | 2009.11.18
Stoke-on-Trent: Britain's first 10:10 city
It\'s an employment blackspot, its industrial might a thing of the past. So who\'d have thought Stoke-on-Trent would be the first city to sign up to the 10:10 environmental campaign?
Opposite the old town hall in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent, down the road from the Red Lion (aka "the pub where Robbie Williams was born"), round the corner from the Methodist Mission and next to a now sadly shuttered jewellery shop called What Women Want, is the Leopard Inn. All stained glass, mosaic tiles, decorative mirrors and polished wood, it has in its time served HG Wells, Dirk Bogarde, Ava Gardner and Arnold Bennett. It is probably most famous, though, as the place where Josiah Wedgwood dined with James Brindley one evening in 1765.
Here\'s the problem, the great potter told the renowned engineer (or words to that effect): we\'re making all these pots, but we can\'t get them to market. OK, said Brindley: we\'ll dig a canal. And a decade later, the 93-mile, 70-lock, five-tunnel Trent and Mersey waterway was open.
"That, you see," says Joan Walley, the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, driving past said pub in her (small, non-polluting) car, "is the kind of drive and ingenuity we need. Those men didn\'t doubt; they got on and did. They helped drive the industrial revolution, and they made this place a world leader. Now we need to do it again."
Not, obviously, by doing the same stuff that made Stoke great. The pots and the pits that turned this city into an industrial powerhouse are all but gone now. Sixteen deep-pit mines, 75 potteries, two steel mills have closed. Once-great names such as Wedgwood, Royal Doulton, Minton and Spode are no longer what they were, if they exist at all; vast rows of kilns have disappeared, whole factories are reduced to fields of rubble. Fewer people are in work in Stoke than almost anywhere else in England.
Walley, a former shadow environment minister, has a different ambition: she wants this former industrial hub to become a centre for green technologies and one of Britain\'s green urban pioneers, and is devoting much of her own considerable drive and ingenuity to making it happen. "We have to find ways," she says, stepping determinedly off the train at Stoke station, "of joining up science, policy, politics and people\'s lives. A lot of that has to be done locally."
It\'s all very well, Walley reckons, for the environmental audit select committee (which she helped set up) to be checking government decisions against green criteria. "Local planning and investment have to be green too. And not just local government, but every single local institution has to be involved in this. We all, somehow, have to start singing from a new hymn sheet," she says.
She is off to a fair start. This evening, in St Margaret Ward Roman Catholic high school, Stoke-on-Trent is set to become the first city to sign up to the 10:10 pledge to cut its carbon emissions by 10% during 2010. Walley, a hardworking constituency MP for 22 years who appears to be almost universally appreciated here ("If every MP was like Joan Walley," a dozen Stoke movers and shakers inform me, "we\'d think differently about politicians in this country"), has been calling in some favours. The 10:10 campaign, she reckons, while "obviously not enough", is "a brilliant incentive, a great means of getting people\'s minds focused on the challenge".
So: the city council is on board, as is the police force and the fire brigade union. The local NHS primary care trust is signing, as well as Staffordshire University, Stoke-on-Trent College, the British Ceramics Confederation, the North Staffs Chamber of Commerce, half a dozen schools, a couple of churches, several local companies, the radio station, Port Vale Football Club, the Mothers\' Union, some allotment associations and the Burslem Bible Centre. That\'s a total of 65 organisations, and counting.
Not all, mind you, are fully up to speed quite yet. "I have to say I don\'t really know very much about this," says Eddie Dean in the office of the Fegg Hayes Sports and Social Club, which stands in the lee of the decommissioned Chatterley Whitfield coal mine, the first in England to lift a million tonnes. "But obviously it\'s a good idea, and if Joan\'s backing it, that\'s good enough for me. She saved this club, you know; fought tooth and nail so the members could buy it when the coal industry welfare association wanted to close it."
Dean, the club secretary, and its president Dave Mellor say membership is dwindling these days; they\'ve got 1,500 on the books but only what you might call a hard core of 150 or so. Bingo nights still pull a fair crowd, but "this recession\'s been going for about 20 years round here", says Mellor. "The pits have gone, and Doulton\'s just a hole in the ground. Everyone\'s getting on a bit, and the young people, this isn\'t their kind of place."
The club gets a bit of extra revenue from what Mellor calls "the dying trade" (the bar is popular for funerals), but things haven\'t been helped by the Oxford Road bus being cancelled. Taxis are expensive, and no one fancies walking home at night through the estate.
Nonetheless, the environment is an issue at the Sports & Social. "We\'ve changed things so we can heat each of our three rooms separately now, rather than all together," says Dean. "And we\'ve taken the lights off the timer; we do them manually. The secretary\'s made inquiries about getting solar panels, but he didn\'t get a reply. We can do more. We do take this seriously, you know, even if we are a bit of a relic these days."
Out in the cavernous main hall, waiting for the bingo to start, members Dave Athersmith and Julie Hulme agree: "We car-share to come here. We\'ve all got to do our bit, haven\'t we?" John Clowes, a retired ceramic tilemaker of 76 ("There\'s tiles of mine in the Houses of Parliament") has just had his loft insulated, and turns everything off at the mains at night. "It\'s the young people you need to worry about," he says. "Those electronic games. What happened to a kickaround in the street?" (In two days in Stoke, by the way, I met only three people prepared to dismiss climate change as a notion cooked up by a control-crazed government (or as one local put it, "absolute bollocks"). Most confessed to at least some concern.)
Across town at the Abbey Lane Allotments Association, Nick Anderson, reigning Midland cucumber champion and a former titleholder in runner beans, cabbages and beetroot, is certainly alarmed. "Look at my potatoes," he says. "They\'ll be ready for Christmas: that\'s not right. The geraniums are still flowering. There\'s definitely something happening. And we\'re getting all these terrible wet summers – 2007 was so bad we lost everything: onions, brassifers, the lot. We\'re a barometer for climate change, you know. We\'re seeing it happen."
The 40-odd families who make up the association\'s membership are doing their bit for 10:10, says Anderson. Most now harvest water in butts from their shed and greenhouse roofs, rather than use mains. "And quite a few are looking into using small wind turbines or solar panels, rather than paraffin, to heat and light the greenhouses in winter. Also, we recycle everything here; nothing gets taken off the site in a skip, nothing goes for landfill. We\'ll make our 10% target."
Of course, the more the membership grows, the less friends and family have to shop: Anderson alone supplies his 89-year-old mother and her eight children, 31 grandchildren, 64 great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren. That\'s a lot fewer trips to the supermarket.
Up the road, Bill Bratt MBE could be forgiven for feeling global warming is the least of his concerns. The amiable chairman of Port Vale FC, currently languishing in League Two but still the undisputed love of some 5,000 local supporters\' lives, missed our first meeting, being locked in talks with the club\'s bankers trying to secure its overdraft (he succeeded).
Bratt, a local lad and former miner who helped save the club from bankruptcy, observes drily that at least 10:10 won\'t oblige him to undertake the delicate task of persuading his star players to give up their Lamborghinis – "Ford Escorts, more like." But Port Vale did look seriously at getting a wind turbine installed (it was turned down because of the proximity of two radio masts), and now they\'re getting the Carbon Trust in to "give us a right going-over. We\'ll cut all we can, believe me, and in our case it\'ll have the benefit of saving us money."
One change the club is pursuing is to get fans on their bikes: match-day rides to the stadium along one of two major cycle routes are already a hit. "You can get more or less anywhere you want to in Stoke, off-road and on the flat, by bike," says Stoke\'s cycling city project officer, Phil Chatterley. He has talked 18 companies into encouraging employees to take to the saddle, and got some schools to multiply by 10 the number of pupils who cycle. "They say to me it\'s too hilly. I say, \'Look at it another way: for every uphill, there\'s a downhill.\'"
Some of the keenest of Stoke\'s emissions-cutters, though, are likely to be what\'s left of its manufacturing companies – including, perhaps surprisingly, in traditionally energy-intensive ceramics. "When 30% of your manufacturing costs are energy, you\'ve got every interest in cutting consumption," notes David Beardsworth of the British Ceramic Confederation, which is also among Walley\'s 10:10 recruits.
Some are already a good way down the road. Johnson Tiles, founded in 1901 and now Britain\'s biggest ceramic tiles maker, is on target for a 7% carbon reduction over the coming 12 months, says head of manufacturing Tony Cotton. It uses up to 35% recycled raw materials and consumes 25% less energy to produce more tiles than it was making a decade ago. "We\'ve speeded up the kilns and switched to one firing from two," says Cotton. "We now recover waste heat – that alone has sliced 500 tonnes of CO2 from our emissions to date. In fact, further savings are starting to get more difficult to achieve. But we will. Customers want it too; they demand goods produced to high environmental standards."
Walley has signed up Stoke\'s entire voluntary sector in the shape of Neil Dawson, who chairs Voluntary Action Stoke-on-Trent with its 1,000-plus member bodies. The local Primary Care Trust is also a signatory, chair Chris Dawes pledging his organisation will take action particularly on travel and energy use, which account for 40% of its emissions (the other 60% is in procurement, which will need action at a national – indeed, international – level). "For us, it\'s not just about our own carbon footprint, but also understanding that the state of the environment has a fundamental impact on everyone\'s wellbeing," says Dawes.
Back at St Margaret Ward, a buzzing Catholic comprehensive north of Stoke with 1,000 pupils, head of expressive arts Theresa Patterson is preparing for the big event tonight. "We\'ve got the 10:10 people coming," she says. "And Fairtrade, and Friends of the Earth, and the Carbon Trust and the New Economics Foundation. It\'s all getting quite exciting."
Patterson says she was converted to the green cause at Glastonbury six years ago. "I was waiting for Lily Allen to come on, and Jonathan Porritt changed my life." With headteacher Chris Smith\'s active encouragement, she is now heavily involved in a pioneering year-seven eco-curriculum that integrates the environment into almost every aspect of pupils\' work. Children here grow their own veg and eat the produce, audit the school\'s energy use, assess the effects of its recycling strategy and study the work of international aid agencies. St Margaret Ward holds a bronze Eco School award and is working on silver.
Patterson, plainly, is an inspiring teacher: 10:10, she says, is "great for the kids, because it\'s really achievable. That\'s vital for them: achievability." The school has worked hard to cut its own emissions, she says, and still has some way to go, but "what this is ultimately all about, really, is changing mindsets. It\'s people-power that will make it happen, I\'m convinced. Because whatever\'s important, nothing\'s more important than this."
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/19/stoke-on-trent-1010
