On the edge of Hanley, one of Stoke-on-Trent’s six towns, sits a little patch of five streets of Victorian terraces that were once marked for demolition. But that plan foundered, and instead, in 2013, the council decided to sell the homes – bought under the compulsory purchase scheme – for £1 each. One of those who bought a house was the artist Anna Francis. A few years later, fellow artist Rebecca Davies moved there too. Now they are running one of the most remarkable community arts projects I have ever seen.
Francis, Davies and their neighbours are turning an old pub into a creative centre for the people of this place – people who have been through a tough time as, in the long wake of the decline of Stoke-on-Trent’s ceramics, steel and mining industries, their area was condemned to oblivion and its amenities stripped away. But that hardly begins to describe the energy and optimism of the Portland Inn Project. It is an urban regeneration scheme that actually asks the people who live here what they want, rather than chasing them out, building more expensive homes, and replacing them with shinier, better-off people.
The temporary space the project is using while the inn is rebuilt is a cargo container surrounded by a small patch of lush meadow, shaded by trees. There’s a lovely brick bench designed and built by the community; there are herbs growing, kids playing football, and an air of activity. The place hosts a gardening club, a youth club and a social enterprise that at the moment is making cheery moulded ceramic roof tiles in the shape of pigeons. (The next pigeon drop will be at the ceramics fair at the Hepworth Wakefield this month.) Nana Layamgohn turns up with a basket of ingredients including a yam – she’s going to fry that tonight in the kitchen, part of a supper with local women that is also a planning session for a cookery book to represent the food cultures – Polish, Kurdish, Romanian, among others – of the area.
The Portland Inn Project became part of Arts Council England’s “national portfolio” of funded organisations last year. Stoke was a major beneficiary of a highly contentious “rebalancing” of ACE’s small pot of money. It was a zero-sum game, in which – instead of bringing cities such as Stoke up to something approaching the level of investment seen in parts of the south of England – money was removed or squeezed from organisations in the south and east of England, such as the Britten Sinfonia, English National Opera and Camden Arts Centre, with dire consequences for the livelihoods of musicians, artists, technicians and other skilled creative workers. Levelling down, rather than levelling up.
Here in the Potteries, though, the new funding is making a real difference for the better. Portland Inn Project is still a tiny organisation (it gets £94,000 a year from ACE), but now has a degree of stability, and can plan for the future. The same goes for Claybody, a small theatre company deeply rooted in the local community, which was also taken into ACE’s national portfolio last year.
The latter’s artistic directors, Deborah McAndrew and Conrad Nelson, have recently been able to move into what they hope will be a long-term home in the disused Spode pottery works in Stoke itself – the Dipping House, where once pots were dunked into glaze. With its rough brick walls, it is a gloriously atmospheric space in which to perform. They are working on their next production. Like all McAndrew’s recent plays, it will draw deeply on the stories of this place – the next will be set at the time of UFO sightings in Bentilee, in the east of the city, in 1967.
Claybody and the Portland Inn Project are adding to a sense that there is now a critical mass of arts organisations knitted into the texture of the city, informed by its needs, singing its stories. The old Spode potbank, abandoned when the company went bust in 2008, is gradually, if haltingly, being filled with creative businesses and art studios. The city has tapped into a range of funding streams that broadly align with the Tories’ levelling up agenda – funds for improving high streets, funds for investing in built heritage.
The British Ceramics Biennial (BCB) has just opened a huge, bright studio on the Spode site that faces on to Stoke’s depleted main street. Here, for a small fee, amateur ceramicists can rent studio hours. BCB – which runs a year-round programme, including a project sharing clay skills with those recovering from alcohol or substance abuse – also had a major ACE uplift last year, from £178,000 to £310,000. Arts in Stoke are still poorly funded compared with other cities its size, said BCB’s artistic director and chief executive, Clare Wood. But there is unusual optimism here.
These small shifts of the dial, though, are unlikely to be enough save the Tories in Stoke’s “red wall” seats. The council has been back in Labour hands since last year – and those running arts organisations say that the leader and chief executive get the importance of culture in rewriting Stoke’s script. It’s likely that Labour’s Gareth Snell will return to Stoke-on-Trent Central, and Labour’s David Williams will be elected to Stoke-on-Trent North – even if turnout is low, which it almost certainly will be. Sheer disgust at the Tories will probably be enough to prove decisive, say politics watchers in the city.
It feels as if politicians could learn a lot from the work in the arts here. Sceptics might call Portland Inn Project more social justice than arts project. That, though, would miss the point. What artists do is dream up narratives, stories – they imagine different futures. That is the power of what is happening here. Plus, the project is a small, exquisite exercise in engaged, radical democracy. As Francis said: “We vote on everything, all the time.”
Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer
