Abstract

If you wander down the small high street of one of the districts of the city of Stoke-on-Trent where I live and where that mug was made, you see promises of escape in shop windows and on billboards. Stoke is a poor city, and has not recovered from the industrial collapse of the 1970s. ¹ About half the shops are boarded up or empty. Even the Subway sandwich shop has closed, ² but there are drinkers in some of the pubs from mid-morning onwards. It is shit. A city that has been let down and left behind, and in which the factories have no roofs, the pits are closed and the steelworks grows grass and brambles.