Athena: Stoke-on-Trent is a bellwether for our cultural and industrial legacy

Last year, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, celebrated its centenary as a city. The original prosperity of this federation of six towns rested on its world-famous potteries and the output of such celebrated companies as Spode, Wedgwood and Minton.

With the decline of ceramics production over the past 50 years or so, however — and despite the vigorous continuing tradition of smaller-scale manufacture in Stoke — its fortunes have sharply declined. With that change has come the wholesale neglect of many buildings that were created by its industry and that define it in an architectural sense.

Happily, the council is now trying to confront this problem. A ‘prospectus’ on the city’s heritage titled A National Heritage Emergency has just been published. This not only characterises and quantifies the issues faced by the neglected heritage of Stoke, but seeks to encourage investment in it as well.

It estimates, for example, that there is the capacity for up to 1,000 new homes in the city’s derelict properties. The prospectus also describes some of the city’s recent restoration successes and identifies 17 important buildings, a park and numerous remaining bottle kilns in urgent need of investment.

To save these things, it estimates the need to raise £325 million from both private and public sources over the next five to 10 years. As context for the challenge faced by Stoke, readers can turn to a sobering report published in recent weeks by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. England’s Cultural Infrastructure: Repair, Maintenance and Renewal was commissioned nearly three years ago to assess the scale of the backlog of repair, maintenance and renewal in cultural assets across England in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Researched by Purcell, it is focused on publicly owned and publicly accessible cultural venues including theatres, performing-arts centres, cathedrals and churches (in their role as visitor destinations), non-accredited museums and historic houses and monuments where publicly accessible. Nearly 70% of the buildings surveyed have ‘needs beyond routine repair and maintenance’, with churches reported as being in the worst condition overall. The report estimates the total value of necessary works at about £7 billion, of which about £3 billion are urgent and need completion within the next five years.

At present, it calculates a funding deficit for this latter work of about £2 billion and suggests the extension of the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme to relieve the costs of VAT more widely. Of course, in the past month, the Government has promised only £1.5 billion funding over the next five years — which Athena would suggest is less generous than it sounds — and cancelled this scheme.

As a final and depressing touch, the report identifies failing roofs as the most common problem with the buildings in its scope. Unhappily, it’s a point that the exceptionally wet start to the year will have highlighted and worsened.