The Lost City of Stoke-on-Trent

This is a song for Stoke: a fanfare for one of the great cities of the world’s first industrial revolution; a lament for the bottle kilns and pot banks, the terraces and mansions that were thrown up or carefully planned to house a global industry and then torn down in the 1960s; and the ballad of a remarkable city – how she was born, how she grew and behaved as a big, bold grown up and how she crumbled as she grew old but, surprisingly, never died. This is not a guide book but an invitation to explore and discover a (deeply flawed) treasure trove