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Your editorial beautifully lures your readers into a gentle, entertaining but stark overview of the effect that pit closures and outsourcing had on the warm and caring people of the Potteries (The Guardian view on The Great Pottery Throw Down: eccentric and kind, 15 January).
Built on coal and clay, it is no wonder that our traditions, customs and practice have endured to create such local resilience and a strong sense of place. Yet, as your leader testifies, when we badly needed a just transition there was none.
Safeguarding the Gladstone Museum was only down to staunch civic pride. In the case of Middleport Pottery, without the 11th-hour intervention from Prince Charles, that too would have ended up abandoned like so many other heritage buildings.
The closed Wedgwood Institute and the legendary Leopard pub in Burslem are just two of our many former industrial heritage assets crying out for a coherent sustained investment strategy that puts people and their communities first. It is not too late for those determining policy and investment decisions which combine the Covid recovery with the transformation of our former industrial heartlands to find a way of building back culturally across all of the “five towns” (plus Fenton) in Stoke-on-Trent too.
Joan Walley
MP, Stoke-on-Trent North, 1987-2015
• Stoke-on-Trent was indeed, as your editorial says, “utterly transformed by globalisation”. The deindustrialisation of Britain, begun by the Thatcher government, not only saw the destruction of the pottery industry but also the closure of the Shelton Bar steelworks and the Silverdale colliery, resulting in high unemployment and poverty.
New Labour did not reverse the decline and the consequences included the election of British National party candidates to seats on Stoke-on-Trent council and the election of Tories to the three parliamentary seats in what had until recently been a safe Labour area.
A true indictment of Britain’s 40-year-long obsession with neoliberal economic policies is the fact that the largest private-sector employer in Stoke-on-Trent is a gambling firm, headquartered on the site where Wedgwood pottery was once made.
Richard Ross
London
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