Read Online Everyman's England by Victor Canning - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Victor Canning
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essential to mankindâs happiness should depend upon so curious a district is a fit subject for reflection.
Judged from any standard the Potteries district is ugly. Yet it is not an ugliness which repels. It challenges deliberate attention with its frankness and seems to cry aloud from every pot-bank and street: âWe may be ugly and dirty, but that is because we work, because we have a task that makes us what we are.â
The honesty of this cry may be judged from the fact that the Potteries does not, as so many other industrial areas do, overrun into the surrounding countryside in sprawling, shapeless islands and peninsulas of ugliness, but gathers itself into one compact district. It restrains its red-bricked horror within rigid bounds, as though it sensed the contamination which it bears and were reluctant to touch more than it need. There is no intermediate sordidness of patchy settlements, half residential and half industrial, between the Potteries and the countryside. Where the Potteries cease the real country begins.
On a day when most farmers were thinking of the lambing that was to come, I stood upon a hillside, surrounded by sheep and shivering in a wind that swept across from the barren Peak district. In a few months, I thought, there would be thyme and bugle in the bare grass, and stonecrop and toadflax rioting over the stone walls. Now there was only the yellow grass and the dark stems of dead nettles. High above me a hawk hovered and across a neighbouring field a horse and cart moved slowly as a farm-hand pitched out swedes for cattle fodder. I might have been on some moorland farm, miles from the nearest town. I was not. When I turned round, across the valley behind me, I could see the Potteries.
Instead of sheep, long rows of houses covered the hillside and mixed with them were the lines of kilns, chimneys and the occasional spire of a church. No hawk moved in the wind; there were instead the plumes of smoke from the chimneys and the slow journey of a conveyor carrying refuse to a mountainous slag heap along an overhead wire.
No matter where you go in the County Borough of Stoke-onTrent, which embraces all the Potteries and includes more than just the five towns of Arnold Bennett, this is the typical outlook. It is a landscape, painted in red and grey, of âpot-banks,â as the potteries are called, coal pit and steelwork. Everywhere are chimneys and the narrow-necked kilns, like huge, dirty milk jars, and thrusting up here and there are heaps of slag and refuse.
The streets are not narrow. They are dismal and uninspired, and their lighting, to anyone accustomed to the glare of London, seems worse than niggardly. In Hanley and Burslem there are fine modern shops, filled with a wealth of bright clothes and polished furniture. The red brick admits no rival, and the concrete purity of the modern shops and buildings is quickly discounted by the weight of red-bricked houses and the steep roads paved with dingy brown sets. It was with surprise that I noticed the modern buildings after I had been in the district for some time, for my eyes were occupied with the kilns, those emblems of the Potteriesâ real life, where earthenware is glossed and baked, and the flints which are used in the manufacture of pottery are calcined.
The district is hilly and no space is left uncovered. Coalmine, steel-work, pot-bank and tile factory crouch in the valleys and along the hillsides, streets and shops take what they can.
Nowhere did I see a childrenâs playground and, even if there are any, as I have no doubt there must be, the children seem to prefer playing at street corners under the light of the lamps, but that is a perversity of child nature which is found even in the greenest towns.
I was shown over one of the pot-banks. I stood for a while in the porterâs room at the main entrance, talking with the porter and warming myself at his fire. As we stood there a policeman came in, nodded to the
Judged from any standard the Potteries district is ugly. Yet it is not an ugliness which repels. It challenges deliberate attention with its frankness and seems to cry aloud from every pot-bank and street: âWe may be ugly and dirty, but that is because we work, because we have a task that makes us what we are.â
The honesty of this cry may be judged from the fact that the Potteries does not, as so many other industrial areas do, overrun into the surrounding countryside in sprawling, shapeless islands and peninsulas of ugliness, but gathers itself into one compact district. It restrains its red-bricked horror within rigid bounds, as though it sensed the contamination which it bears and were reluctant to touch more than it need. There is no intermediate sordidness of patchy settlements, half residential and half industrial, between the Potteries and the countryside. Where the Potteries cease the real country begins.
On a day when most farmers were thinking of the lambing that was to come, I stood upon a hillside, surrounded by sheep and shivering in a wind that swept across from the barren Peak district. In a few months, I thought, there would be thyme and bugle in the bare grass, and stonecrop and toadflax rioting over the stone walls. Now there was only the yellow grass and the dark stems of dead nettles. High above me a hawk hovered and across a neighbouring field a horse and cart moved slowly as a farm-hand pitched out swedes for cattle fodder. I might have been on some moorland farm, miles from the nearest town. I was not. When I turned round, across the valley behind me, I could see the Potteries.
Instead of sheep, long rows of houses covered the hillside and mixed with them were the lines of kilns, chimneys and the occasional spire of a church. No hawk moved in the wind; there were instead the plumes of smoke from the chimneys and the slow journey of a conveyor carrying refuse to a mountainous slag heap along an overhead wire.
No matter where you go in the County Borough of Stoke-onTrent, which embraces all the Potteries and includes more than just the five towns of Arnold Bennett, this is the typical outlook. It is a landscape, painted in red and grey, of âpot-banks,â as the potteries are called, coal pit and steelwork. Everywhere are chimneys and the narrow-necked kilns, like huge, dirty milk jars, and thrusting up here and there are heaps of slag and refuse.
The streets are not narrow. They are dismal and uninspired, and their lighting, to anyone accustomed to the glare of London, seems worse than niggardly. In Hanley and Burslem there are fine modern shops, filled with a wealth of bright clothes and polished furniture. The red brick admits no rival, and the concrete purity of the modern shops and buildings is quickly discounted by the weight of red-bricked houses and the steep roads paved with dingy brown sets. It was with surprise that I noticed the modern buildings after I had been in the district for some time, for my eyes were occupied with the kilns, those emblems of the Potteriesâ real life, where earthenware is glossed and baked, and the flints which are used in the manufacture of pottery are calcined.
The district is hilly and no space is left uncovered. Coalmine, steel-work, pot-bank and tile factory crouch in the valleys and along the hillsides, streets and shops take what they can.
Nowhere did I see a childrenâs playground and, even if there are any, as I have no doubt there must be, the children seem to prefer playing at street corners under the light of the lamps, but that is a perversity of child nature which is found even in the greenest towns.
I was shown over one of the pot-banks. I stood for a while in the porterâs room at the main entrance, talking with the porter and warming myself at his fire. As we stood there a policeman came in, nodded to the
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