Thousands of people in a small town are demanding a crumbling 500 year old farmhouse is rescued from being knocked down.

More than 6000 residents supported a campaign some time ago to stop the Grade 11 listed building collapsing after decades of neglect.

The campaign, in fact, caused so much interest in Moston, an ancient North Manchester suburb built originally around dye works, tanneries, print works, breweries, and brickworks, that the original story by journalist Leigh G Banks was banned by Facebook for over-sharing.

Despite the interest though, Manchester City Council said at the time there was nothing they could do to protect near-derelict Hough Hall, which stands next to a Victorian primary school.

And, shockingly Historic England, which curates the UK’s history, referred the Leigh back to the council when they were approached for help.

The early 17 century hall is listed because of its wood wall panels, its gables and its wattle and daub construction. Yet it has been left to decay and, at some stage, has been used as a drugs den.

Roger Barnard and Heather Mawhinney took on Hough Hall and had grand plans for it, immersing themselves in the local community and holding open days to show off their ancient home.

Less than two years later though, they put the house up for sale for £200,000 and went on their way.

It has been abandoned more or less ever since.

Also, anybody who wants to be involved in the fight to save the hall please contact Leigh or Andrea at the https://leighgbankspreservationsociety.blog/

This is what a spokesperson for the city council had to say: “As the property is privately owned, it is out of our jurisdiction.”

However, surprisingly, an Historic England spokesperson said: “Close contact with the local authority is vital at all times.”

She went on the add: “Communities can play an active role in saving their cherished heritage by being the eyes and ears on the ground. This might be through Heritage Watch schemes to prevent vandalism, setting up Friends Groups or launching a campaign. In some cases, local people have even established Trusts, taking ownership of vulnerable buildings and implementing solutions. Contact with the owner is vital too.”

Leigh G Banks, a former national newspaper journalist and now a broadcaster, said: “This is the response we’ve come to expect but it is only the opening shot – there are things that can be done to save a building like this and if people are willing to take on the fight our news organisation and the radio station will do all we can to highlight what is happening.

“The man on the street can win in these circumstances!”

A team of urban explorers recently revealed the real tragedy of the ‘Marie-Celeste’ building.

The Urban Collective Group got inside the farmhouse and filmed the shocking condition it has been allowed to fall into.

The house is still filled with clothes, family photographs, painting and hundreds of books. All that appears to have been emptied are filing cabinets.

Movingly, on an old and stained kitchen table there is a poster bearing Roger’s name. Part of the legend appears to say ‘Roger Barnard four different faces and …’

Heather was a member of a group called the Friends of Boggart Hole Clough, a sprawling park ten minutes walk from the farmhouse in Hough Hall Road, next to the local school.

All this indicates Roger and Heather were enthusiastic about the future when they first moved in.

A report in the Manchester Evening News in 2005 said; “Hough Hall in Moston opened its doors to the public on Saturday, welcoming visitors of all ages to see inside its Tudor interior and grounds for themselves.”

Highlights apparently included a local personality, Roy Williams, appearing as King Henry VIII in full Tudor costume.

The Evening News wrote: “Roy read a speech about the Hall’s history, and introduced children from Moston Lane Primary School who performed a traditional Tudor dance, and youngsters from the Whitemoss Fun Club, who acted out a scene from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

“Local archaeology enthusiasts also attended the event, showcasing some of their work in a special display.”

On another occasion the couple curated a celebration of Samuel Bamford’s life at the hall attended by Robert Poole, who edited The Diaries of Samuel Bamford.

Bamford was a famous nineteenth-century radical, born in Middleton, he worked as a weaver, sailor and warehouseman and was part of the great upsurge of working-class radicalism in 1815.

Roger said at the time: “We had lots of lovely comments in the visitors’ book afterwards with one person describing it as a ‘perfect autumn evening’ and another wrote ‘so enjoyable we had to come back’.”

For years now people have been demanding something should be done to rescue the hall.

A retired local builder, Kenny Banks, remembered that in the mid-1950s he worked for Warma Fireplaces which had a shop on Moston Lane.

Warma Fireplaces rented part of the yard at Hough Hall and he went there every day to load the van.

He also remembers John Gobbi who he believes owned the building.  He had a coal business and  lived in nearby Hinde Street.

When  he died Gobbi left the business and the farmhouse to his daughter Joan and here husband, Les Clough. The  coal business became Gobi and Clough.

The house has also been a doctors surgery, used for the manufacture of lipsticks, and a sanitary-ware storehouse.

But its long and chequered history seems damned to vanish in the mists of time even though locals have said they would work on repairing historic wreck for free.

Dory Bridge, who wrote the original article on Hough Hall for this site, called for people to get together and demand something is done to save the oldest building in the suburb: “It needs saving and we need to know why it has been left to rot and neglected by the council and organisations set up to protect it.”

International Women’s Day  #EachForEqual

Gosh… that really got me thinking.

As a woman who has been treated differently because I had a baby, the theme this year has really struck a cord with me.

Even though I tackled issues through the appropriate channels, I am still not allowed to talk about things (so I had better not!).

But how are things going to change if we can’t stand up and talk about it all freely?

I fully endorse the fact that women are equal to men and should be treated as such.

I also acknowledge that there is such a long way to go.

But today is a great day for us to celebrate all the great women we know. And I am on board with that one hundred per cent.

Thank you to all the strong and influential women in my life that have supported me through good and bad.

While I don’ t want to miss the point of today – I wanted to add that there are also men that have equally supported and influenced me throughout my life.

Not all women treat other women equally, and these people (male and female) are also there to teach us all valuable lessons to keep fighting back about inequality.

We do all need to stick together to fight for change.

As a Mummy of a boy it is my mission to raise a young man who treats each and everyone equally and with respect.

Why?

Because his Mummy told him to and he respects that, just as I would if I’d a daughter too, because we are all equal and a product of our environment and experiences.

Discrimination in the workplace, Equal Pay, Family/Domestic violence – each for equal = time for change.

Two old men. A young kid. Columns of time. They ain’t got two good eyes between them but the old guy on the left, the one with the one laughing eye, gets hurt every time the young guy gets into an unexpectedly deep conversation with the old guy in the middle.

And the young guy gets hurt if the old guy in the middle seems to be paying more attention to the old guy on the left.

This set of circumstances has led to an uneasy alliance.

The barroom of the Helsapoppin’ was their trading post and they sold a pile of bullshit to each other. And to anyone else who would listen. These were the good times. Each one of them looking out for the other.

The old guy on the left didn’t trust anybody. He had trusted the old guy in the middle for a long time. But he’d never worshiped him. He’d respected their friendship but that didn’t involve trust. He never asked for anything other than what he was due.

The old guy on the left knew that he had one of the only two eyes in the room and the little, young, guy on his far right was causing that vision to be distracted. And all this one-eyed junkie had left was his vision.

The cruellest thing you can do is distract a man from his vision – although, of course, leaving him to it can be just as bad.

And here are the three men who will play out at least part of this story.

The old man on the left with his seeing eye that is always laughing … or crying. A waterfall of love. A pain that is disguised by a flicker, a cocked eyebrow.

What is that eye saying?

His face is one of those flickering roadside signs. You look one second and the girl is smiling. The next second she is frowning. One message then another.

Then there is his blind eye. Now thereby hangs another tale.

The Helzapoppin’ is the most hate-filled barroom in the world and all the malcontents, hipsters, thieves and thugs, megalomaniacs and liars, cheats, perverts, dog-fighting, ban-dog owning, shit-kicking fuckers gather there to get violently loud and uncoordinated on anything they know will damage their brains …

… Over there against the fruit pastille slot machine is the ape. Ugly man, no class. Shoulders on him like a motorway bridge. Lice speeding up and down them. He’s got no hair but for some tufts that look like horns.

Ugly guy. Thinks he’s tough. Scared shitless when the old guy on the left had threatened him one time with a gumball. But he acts tough whenever he gets into the old guy’s line of vision: Starts shouting and laughing loud. Big mouth and stupid broken-nosed face. Flapping ears and a dribble of spittle on his chin …

… A little skull of a guy balances on the bar. He grins and raises his glass. He’s got big brown teeth and spindly glasses. Hair gone slick across the white bone of his forehead. He chews a cigarette like it’s matchstick. Dangerous as shit. A faded dandy. He’s worn that suit too often. A stain at the crotch like a layer of salt. Scratches at his leg until his strides rise and reveal the suspenders on his calves. Takes an olive from the saucer on the bar, sucks the pepper from it and replaces the skin.

A little dead squirrel of a man. Leigh wouldn’t have pissed on him if he’d been on fire.

The young guy took out a piece of dope like a knuckle and ate it.

“Oh!” Leigh let out an involuntary cry and poked his elbow into Geoff. “He jus’ ate fifty pound’s worth!”

“Naw,” Geoff replied. “‘Bout a tenner’s worth.”

“Fucking hell,” Leigh sighed.

This truly was a baronial hall of helz-a-poppin’. Bowels were hanging from the beams, feeding the birds. Dead colleagues.

Over at another table Naughty Nigel is fidgety. Keeps looking over at Leigh – bad, slitty, tired eyes. Got a down on Leigh and Leigh don’t know why. Dangerous man.

Dangerous man to know. You can’t ignore him. Watch him all the time. Nothing more dangerous than a dangerously intelligent fool.

(Nothing new to report. Been out again today. Took a walk down to the red rec. Saw nobody in particular – and if I had, I couldn’t have thought of anything in particular to say – just a lonely old lady now. Smiled at the other old lady hanging her washing out by the Druids Door. Noticed the old love wasn’t there by the window of her roadside shack. Maybe she’s died. Hair! Dyed my hair. Grew it long. Makes me look younger don’tcha think. Got me up in swively hips and stockings. But my hips are too fat. I’ll go down to the shops next in a tiara. Tiara bum-de-A. Tee-ara bum-de-A. Ha ha ha.

Hmm. I’m not even an eccentric old lady. Tsk! So I went down to the Helzapoppin’ … to see all those lovely boys!)

And there were lovely boys standing around. All too many of them. All of them had half-hards on as they rubbed up against the bar.

Now these guys used to bother Geoff and the young guy. But Leigh, he didn’t mind them. They were kind of rudely exotic. Embarrassingly so, actually, to a man who had to remain ultimately masculine.

Lemming’s Pie

INGREDIENTS:

Take one broken man (it is best if he has been dropped, like a figurine on to linoleum, and he is shattered).

Take the pieces and place them before a beautiful woman. She must then smear all the jaggedy edges with the thick saline solution she dips her fingers into beneath her skirts.

Then he will be whole again.

Cook for however long in a chamber pot. Until the vile bubbles.

When it is candescant with ignominy – cast it aside and let it bake on the window ledge in the sun.

And when it is finally done – intuition will tell you the moment – you must cast it aside without a second glance.

Your meal must become as pigswill.

Like a dog’s vomit on a rocky beach.

****

In a corner of this baronial hall was a place called Montellimare. Theirs was a table full of dreams. A corner that everybody gravitated to, even though they didn’t know it.

That corner of the room was a square, a handkerchief of snow. Tall, leaning and unpredictably unsteady buildings, ladders of lights and curtains surrounded it. These were almost all whorehouses.

In that white square dwelt a Chiquita of a boy. He had the handsomeness of David and he had honed it with abuse. He was a god whose eyes moved all the time seeking approval. His skin was olive … like a Pole. His hair was slicked back … like a Spaniard. His mouth was a ring of fire.

Even his shoulders moved from the hip. He was maybe thirty years old but he could have been fifteen. He was sex at the flick of a switchblade. He had the kind of body anybody would have killed to nuzzle.

And he jus’ kep’ flickin’ those eyes across at the old guy on the left who lived in another world – and they both kep’ sneakin’ a peak into each other’s world. And neither of them knew why. They just knew there was an attraction.

Montellemare La Hombre, a sign said over the door. And all the streets went teeming by outside. Fast traffic in five lanes, swishing lights and honking horns. Rain coming down. Half a tramp on a skateboard whizzing along by the propulsion of his knuckles. He got rain in his eyes as it blowed off the peak of his cap. He is heading for the underground where he can beg in the dry.

The old guy is going in there. La Hombre.

But as that Art Deco door clicks shut behind him, you must remember that this old man, who is now flicking up a cigarette and ordering a glass of beer, is only aware of one thing – he’s lost everything that he ever pretended to own. And that is a profound thing for a man to have to face … that the nothing he ended up with came out of the nothing he owned when he thought he had everything.

So he goes in to La Hombre, step by step.

The boy has a mouth like a salty cavern. It is deep and tastes of garlic, tobacco, beer and cheese. The metal in his teeth glints like diamonds. There are beads of sweat on his top lip. A string of saliva joins their parting kiss like a rope. The old man licked it away with his tongue and swallowed.

He was a simple soul. Two and two made four to him – and nothing else.

And a kiss is just a kiss when there’s no-one there.

His hand slipped into the shadows beneath the gnarled wood of the table and rested like a butterfly on the boy’s egg. It squirmed like a turkey underneath his feather-light touch. It stretched its neck out towards him. The old man recognised that movement immediately from years of having his hand down the front of his own pants.

The Devil makes work for idle hands – no matter how you try to keep your pecker up. It’s the way of the world. The old man’s perversion was eroticism, make no bones about it. He loved to touch.

He felt his own bones go hard. What a beautiful feeling. A hardening from the arteries. Turned to stone by a feeling. The whole geography of your body is changed in a moment. All the mountains of your body are turned to granite. All those fallow fields grow instantly. Sprouting adornments, jewellery, a tinkling voice.

His car was outside and he would’ve liked to have taken the boy to the back seat but he knew that his oil pressure was low and he might have wanted to drive him somewhere.

His car was actually the most important thing he possessed. And if the truth was really known he didn’t want any young boy’s naked arse sliding across his hide.

He had to legislate against all these things because it was all unreal and on the day he came back to reality he would not be allowed to have any tell-tale stains anywhere.

The young man sucked an olive and pointed his lips at the old man.

But the touch had been enough.

Leigh went back into the baronial hall. He put on a brave face but inside he was falling apart with fear.

Too many people knew too many things about his secrets.

When he was drunk he’d always had the knack of admitting things he didn’t want to admit. But he wasn’t special in that particular proclivity. All drunks, drug addicts and perverts had this particular problem – a potent mixture of insecurity and exhibitionism. The only benefit to being this way was that it kept your stomach knotted and flat. So tight with anxiety that you couldn’t eat.

Still, that was okay for the times you had to appear naked before your fellow man.

Head-on-`is-mmmm. Hmmm. Dirty boys.

This was one of his secrets:

In a back room of La Hombre, up a dark passage, he was lying naked on a cold slab like a white fish, his thighs were parted and his thin sinewy calves were over the sharp edge of the stone and his feet were flat on the bare floorboards. His preposterous proboscis stood out above his belly like a frozen eel. It felt as if it was a yard long and sweated as it cried for attention.

Now he feels so naked that the hairs round his nipples are as lively as the tentacles of a jellyfish.

An arm covered with black fuzz reaches up from the darkness between his thighs. It becomes a ribbon of smoke and it buffets along his body until the gentle hand rests, finally, on his breast. It squeezes. His feet do a little involuntary tap dance and he moans suicidely. It is his ideal bedtime story.

A man between his legs. A Gee-man. The hand caresses him. The hand has the touch and he feels so lean with a little, renewed, muscle definition. He is worth touching. On the wall of the room, through his liquid slits of eyes, he half focuses on a doily that belonged on the table of a barroom at the festival of the Day of the Dead.

Sadly, that had some meaning for him too. It was an unfulfilled pleasure. A knowledge. Somewhere he’d meant to go one day, the Day of the Dead. The one and only day when there is no tomorrow. The day of total abandonment. The day of the Blessed Abuser who is handing out rewards like penitences.

Here, at the hands of the Blessed Abuser, we have no satisfaction. An orgasm that the heart finally gave out at the vinegar stroke. Pursed lips forever. Self-satisfied inconclusion. A Devine failure. What a way to go!

Dissatisfied.

He likes this hand. It’s the hand of an unknown friend.

And then there is the kiss in his most secret place.

And how can you kiss a man there when he has no secrets?

His feet dance and he writhes on the cold, smooth, slab. Ready to be skewered and sacrificed on his erotic altar.

There is a fishy smell coming up from the floor and he knows that the guy has a hard on. He realises that the guy between his legs, like him, hasn’t bathed for a while.

That’s when he saw the guy’s red hair in the dim light. It outshone his own pubic hair.

What was about to happen next would be so beautiful.

Oh God, he is hallucinating. His temperature has gone through the roof. He is sweating salt. His bed is a swimming pool. He sees tall people, small fat people. He is burning up. These men are jolly and stylish. Wicked thoughts and so sexy. He needs a doctor, he knows. But, somehow penicillin would kill it all off.

Gosh, his thighs are raised as if he is about to give birth and he feels a tongue licking him into readiness.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes. He’s ready.

He is engulfed in a ritual for the lost and the lonely. Spunk is the ambrosia of heroes. `Show some spunk lad!’ he used to hear the real men cry when they wanted him to carry out some act of bravery on the school football field. `Show some spunk lad!’

Outside this room it is the days before Christmas and everybody is consuming everything to excess. Snow is falling in a grey-white shower. A girl with thin legs wrapped in spangled leggings plays a fast flute. She has a ring through her nose and ten in her ear. Her face and her hands are grimy. She raises a thigh and twirls on one leg as she plays. Her fingers flicker up and down the length of the shaft altering the shape of the air she is expelling.

The redhead rises slowly holding the old man’s legs in place on his shoulders. The boy smells musky, like a skunk. He leans forward to kiss the old man’s chest, deliberately folding him into a position of complete servility.

He was a beautiful youth, tall and Y-shaped with a kicking cock. While he carried out these acts he kept his eyes shut, making it all the more mysterious for the old man to behold.

The youth had a tattoo on his right hand and his torso was sweating. He hadn’t a natural blemish. He was perfect perversion.

The woman who had become an old lady and no longer trusted her swivelly hips slipped through the door into the bar. She’d come looking for her son. (She knew she could find him in the backroom, if she looked. Something made her didn’t look. It wasn’t that she minded what he was doing, it was more that he looked like an old man now and she didn’t want to be associated with him on social occasions. He made her look old. No swivelly hips and a queer old man for a son. Oh Veh, she wished she knew how to swear properly in Yiddish, it sounded so much better than these English curses)

Geoff let onto her and sent the young guy to the bar to supply her with drinks. She liked Geoff. Kep’ n eye out for her queer son.

She hitched herself up onto a stool and coughed phlegm, masking her mouth with a drip-mat: “Ooohoooh, it’s such a vile nighttt… thank Go-efff for me won’t you.”

She slipped the powder from a sleeping pill into her glass of beer and whizzed it around with a flick of her bony wrist.

That was her second sleeping pill powder and her third beer. She felt her mind get mixed up. So, she got serious.

“You see, with my son,” she told the fat man at the bar: “W’en ‘is mind gets mixed up, he just thinks it’s funny … but when my min’ gets mixed up, I thin’ it’s a very serious business.”

The fat guy moved away like a slug.

She laughed vacantly at this vast room of people whom she pretended to see as no threat.

“Len? Len?” She sounded distracted and waved her arm out behind but felt nothing.

The little old lady accepted another beer and realised that the last one had gone down too quickly.

Some thoughts should never be spoken. That’s what Len used to say. Funny man, she often thought what it was she first saw in him, because she never saw anything in him again. He’d looked like the strong silent type on a cold dark night, fists on him like hams, buttoned his big black coat up right though, black unruly hair and vacant eyes.

It’s time to take a holiday from reality. William Seaward Burroughs did, and his holiday lasted 83 years.

Along the way he fantasised about a place called Interzone. Well, we all know why … inter this, inter that – and definitely inter a bit of the other. And here I am, 50 years later, and it’s all here for me too – on a plate. I’m guest of honour in the land of the naked lunch.

Tangiers is a sexy, sultry, slovenly, stab-you-in- the-back, stoned and shameless place. Go down into the Kasbah as soon as you arrive. It’s full of snakes and charmers. Some of the snakes are curled up in baskets. But most of them are serving behind the stalls … and the charmers, they’ll buy anything you’ve got to offer – and sell it right back to you at a profit. Wives and mistresses slide by in the shadows, hidden deep inside their fleshlessly dark dresses. Their eyes are smouldering. Their masks are hidden horizons … you can hear tambourines, gypsy dancers, flutes – and you can smell that heady mixture of garlic, mint and dope … babies with no eyes, beggars on wheels, salesmen with lice in their hair, green and brown slime bubbling up into the streets …

“… lying on the bed naked, dozing and making desultory love, smoking a little kif and eating great sweet grapes.” – WS Burroughs

Tangiers is a place so alive that you forgive all its indiscretions instantly. And you just might ignore your own. Old Bill spent five years sending reports and routines to Alan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac from his new Interzone address. And they thought he was making it all up. He wasn’t.

Tangier is still a scandalously hallowed ground where the Beat Generation has become a clandestine underground industry. Alcohol might be frowned upon in Interzone but, like anything else, you can get it if you really want it. It’s all here for you whether you are a tourist, or just lonely. All you have to do is find the right tour guide. Or let him find you.

I slithered down the gangplank from the hydrofoil feeling queasy. Last night’s excesses didn’t lie well on top of the 20 minutes of choppy sea between Spain and Interzone. I guess I looked as pail as I felt. The customs men, with their Arabian good looks, guns, dark glasses, cigarettes and attitude, think they’re in the movies as they pose under the palms in the blistering sun.

They ignored the lice-ridden lady boy with an exposed breast and mustache like a comb who looked like he was dying as he hustled his bus fare home. But they jostled me as they read journalist on my passport and demanded to know who my editor was. As if they’d have recognised the name.

In a parking lot their colleagues were stripping a VW camper panel by panel while its two young hippie student-owners looked on in despair. I wondered why they would think anybody would bother to smuggled dope inter Interzone?

And all the time, in the background, there is the honk of Mercedes horns, the clatter of cymbals and street music and the constant yabber of bartering. The street vendors are pushing everything from carpets to plastic gods. It is a bedlam. It is said beggars will poke out their own eyes for a day’s takings.

Then this little sweet guy plucked me out of the customs line with hardly a word. All he said was his name. Which was a little disconcerting, like he was using a secret code.

“Kiki”.

He ferreted me away down dim and corroded art- deco streets. Boys on every corner, sharp as switchblades and twice as thin. It was like it had all been prearranged. But I hadn’t needed much persuasion. It was the name, you see, I recognised it right away. Kiki. The code of this clandestine road.

After ten minutes he stopped dead in his tracks and unfurled his arm like a cape to introduce me to the Borsalino. I realised we were on Avenue Prince Moulay-Abdellah. He smiled at me divinely. His teeth were dirty brown, but his lips were like cherries. He was as tall as a twelve-year-old, twenty if he was a day. But I’d been warned, these kids can be tooled up with blades honed in to needles. Kiki locked his eyes into mine and tried to read me like he thought I was ticker tape. He assumed that in the blink of my eye I had revealed more to him than I should have done. He licked his lips and his dirty smile got deeper.

“Mista Bowles get drunk here!” And he laughed hysterically and cupped a hand to his ear like he was trying to make me hear the echoes of Paul Bowles holding his seedy and drunken court at the bar. I laughed back and held out my hand to him in that gentlemanly, bonhomic way we Englishman have. He took it and shook it with the kind of trained ingratiation that could have made him a double-glazing salesman in another world.

But in the here-and-now, he was a little bare-foot guy on the make, wearing a sultry off-the-shoulder blue and green nylon cagoule. I pulled my hand from his and he automatically wiped all traces of me down his tattered and encrusted khaki shorts. His eyes slipped down to his sandals. His smile became thwarted. It stuck to his lips like glue though.

“Whatever you wan’, I kin’ fin’ it for you roun’ here,” he sounded awkward. But I knew he was being coy. He meant it all: sex of all varieties, drugs, alcohol. But mainly sex.

I can, of course, cope with all of these things in their right place, at the right time. But Kiki was telling me, the right place was a back alley and the right time was the here and now.

Well, actually, all I wanted was the alcohol. The seasickness and the sun had started a fermentation inside me, so I took a chance on my memory and asked if we were near The Morocco Palace. It was a short stumble down the road.

The beer is warm and the whiskey is harsh … like it should be in a city where shopkeepers liberally lace your mint tea with dope. Tangier is only a tiny seaport on a small bay in the Strait of Gibraltar – yet it has some tales to tell After all, it was the land of silk and money. Tangier was Africa’s gateway to Europe. Moroccans still sit in the cafes at night, coveting the twinkling lights of Spain only 14km away. They dump dope in the sea overnight for the fishermen to land and during the day they take trips across the mainland to sell cheap watches and hooky CDs.

Spain has always been the real Tangerine Dream ever since it was stolen in 1471 from the Arabs by the Portuguese who gave it to Charles II as the dowry from Catherine of Braganza. The English abandoned it after a couple of centuries to pirates.

And until 1956 it was known as Tangier Inter(national) Zone. Not that original then, Bill huh?

Now, this dramatic little seaport spends most of its time welcoming – in its own way – day-trippers who arrive from Gibraltar and Algeciers, or bidding farewell to container-loads of textiles and oranges. It is a poor city now. The ostentatious wealth has gone. Things have changed. It’d be nice to say that its economy has gone to pot. But it hasn’t, it’s gone to Westernisation and the images its wistful and transient population constantly see on TV. The businessmen dress like Miami Vice and the beggars and guides dress like cheap porn extras. Tourists say it’s lost its identity. And they’re right – it has. But that’s what Tangier is about: losing your identity.

Kiki sat on the step outside the Palace and smoked a little kif while I had a couple of belts to get me in the mood.

When I was ready, I came outside and sat down beside him. He offered me the nub of his joint. Well, Old Bill knew that you couldn’t get dope like this anywhere else in the world, Moroccan Gold. And Kiki knew it too. After a couple of tokes, my smile was becoming a permanently false feature too. Yeh, it was the dope … but it was also the fact that I was here, balancing on the brim of a Burroughsian dream. I

was walking, a little unsteadily, down the streets he’d walked down in his sober suit and his black-rim glasses, with his cadaverous accountant’s demeanour and his pork pie hat.

Ah, he was a writer with a head full of ideas. But secretly he was a three-times married hysterical bi-sexual with a raging drink and drugs problem who had recently filled his wife’s head full of a bullet. He killed her accidentally in a stoned and alcoholically fueled game of William Tell!

But just like Tangier,. I could forgive him anything. My feet were scuffing the very gutters where this addled heir to the Burrough’s adding machine fortune had rolled in his cut-ups of despair and vomit and laughter. And I’d been plucked out of the crowd and spirited down here by a little bi-sexual hustling youth who’d clocked on to the dollar in the code-name of Kiki.

It wasn’t a code that was hard to break, of course. Kiki, was the name of Bill’s enigmatic bi-sexual little hustling boyfriend who, one dark night – with Spain twinkling somewhere in the background – clocked on to Bill who was floundering in one of those dives he regularly slid in to. Kiki offered him a warmth that, even Bill knew, was better than the safety of the gutter.

“I am standing in the doorway as he walks towards me, a strange sad fixed smile on his face …” WS Burroughs

Kiki looks up at me, his cagoule has slipped again. He is sultry. I can smell him. His eyes are white hot. The heat melts his smile into a sensual sneer, like Elvis. He knows he isn’t turning me on. But he also knows he is making me feel vulnerable. There are so many ways that I can see why a man would go for him. He’s young and he’s handsome and he’s on the make. He’s foreign, dark and exotic. He’s willing. And I am a lonely drunken writer looking for drugs and a literary experience.

“No harm done. A few moments of back-alley pleasure, that’s all. No questions asked.”

The voice is as insinuating and as slovenly as an ex-pat writer. English. Wine-sodden, choked by cheap cigars, laughing like a ripped lung. Paul Bowles look-a-like nudging me with a linen-covered elbow and tipping me a wink from beneath a panama. I smiled and made a gesture like I was doffing my cap to romantic dissolution, dramatic devil-may-care alcoholism, the dissembling of the mind through the mysteries of smoke. The meter can tick all night long, don’tchoo worry mista.

I look at Kiki and ask: “What’s your real name?” He shrugs. A stock answer. But I see his eyes dim, like he realised his last deal of the afternoon had gone down.

Writers come here all the time seeking a little piece of history, or a little bit more. And Kiki can spot a writer a mile off, pluck’m out of the line, like the patsies they are, and show them a little romance.

“Which way you wanna go mister?” he asked with a sigh. I smiled and asked him to take me to the French quarter.

He took me the quick way, through the slums that have replaced the shanties. It’s a different cacophony here. Thin concrete streets where people crash in to each other’s

battered cars to get parked. Here, there isn’t even the stain of a policeman or a machine gun. Teenagers curse and laugh and fight and play football, it gives them more hope than going to school. TVs scream out of every open window. Beggar businessmen shunt their Mercedes into BMWs. They mug it up after a lucrative day’s work, eye-patches on top of the head like tiaras, a prosthetic leg slung jauntily over the shoulder. These streets are miraculous – the blind and the lame are instantly cured. Kiki is reserved but business-like, concise, as he shows me the sights. He hurries me through the tour.

Calle Magallanes, for instance, a small whitewashed garden room overlooking the harbour. Bill worked on Lunch in that room. But we were off to the next place, immediately. Kiki showed me the four rooms Bill had rented for $20 in 1955. He told me a Birmingham gangster lives there now. Then he led me down through dark shuttered alleys and in and out of glamorous shopping malls with designer labels where only princes and queens can afford to visit. Finally we stepped back in to the Kasbah. We’d come full circle. The snakes were hissing and the charmers were yaberring. Kiki turned to me and stuck out his hand. I took it and his grip was weak.

“How much do I owe you?” I asked.

“Fifteen dollar.” He let go of my hand, wiped it against his shorts, and adopted a soldier’s stance. I peeled off a couple of notes without taking my hand from my pocket. They came to twenty and I handed them to him without a quibble. He laughed and smiled at me one last time, pocketed the dosh. Then he was gone, like a dog looking for a rabbit. Gone in an instant, swallowed up by the noise and the smoke and the crowd.

In the Kasbah, the streets reek of garlic and sweat. I went looking for dope. Here’s no different than anywhere else really. Pickpockets, thieves and thugs – business people by any other name – making a living on market day. There’s so much jostling and pushing – gangs of teenagers go through you like steam. And that’s when it happened, inside all the steam. A mannish boy in a blue and green cagoule dipped a woman’s handbag in a split second, right next to me. Unzipped it without a sound. There was a splut! as he vanished on the spot.

The woman was hysterical – cash, credit cards, passports, a palm-ful of personal possessions – a mobile phone worth one-and-a-half euros on the black market. All gone. You’ll be insured – people tried to calm her down – nothing to worry about. At least you’re not hurt.

Tangier has got a tourist beach too. You could spend the day there. Despite the railway that cuts through it like a shiv, it can be a sun-drenched haven. But Tangier has got the blistering desert a few kilometres away. The Great Gobi. Everybody knows that if a man walks into the desert, then he has chosen to walk into a mirage. Well, it might be an urbane myth, but I have also heard it said that somewhere, out there, in every desert, there is a telephone box. It is always maintained and in working order. But it has only one call left on it. And you can only see it in the night, glowing and fizzing in the distance. If you reach it, you are in a dilemma. Who do you call? Who is it you want to see in your mirage?

Do you call up your god? Or do you call up the next train station …

The Preservation Society is publishing the book they tried to ban after it remained in the wilderness for more than four years.

Journalist, editor and broadcaster Leigh G Banks was commissioned by a leading publishing house to write a small book on Staffordshire’s Six Towns … then, at the last minute it all fell apart.

The book – described as  offensive, objectionable and  inappropriate by the publishing house – is about to get its first public airing.

Out of the Darkness, takes a road-trip round Staffordshire revealing how it changed from  the ancient grime and smog-ridden home of the world famous pottery industry to become a burgeoning centre for commerce and the arts.

It’s a personal journey round the Six Towns for Leigh G Banks which began in the early 1960s  when as a child he visited Trentham Gardens with his grandmother, Ada. Later,  he became a fan of Burslem’s Northern Soul fame and in the book he talks vividly about his experiences  at the notorious 1970s Hollywood rock festival near Leek.

In the 1990s he upped sticks from Manchester and moved  to Staffordshire but it wasn’t until beginning to research Out of the Darkness in 2011 he discovered that many of his ancestors hailed from Slindon, near Eccleshall.

Leigh said: “It was clear my grandmother was drawn to the Six Towns although she never told me about   our family connections. But every chance we’d get we’d jump on a bus or a train from Manchester and visit for the day.

“I suppose because I came from a dirty old city like Manchester I was never offended by the grime of   Stoke but what I was fascinated by even as a child were the buildings and the architecture. I found it all majestic.

“I would wander the streets for hours just looking up, looking up  … that’s part of the ethos of the book, look up in the Six Towns, much of the history is above your head in the friezes and inscriptions on the buildings.”

Leigh got a call from the international publisher  commissioning him to write a book on the towns.

“I didn’t approach them with the idea, they came to me,” Leigh said: “I liked the thought of taking a look at the towns, their history and how they’d changed against a backdrop of my childhood.”

But a year into the publishing process things started to go wrong. “Out of the Darkness was being advertised on Amazon and on all the major book sites, we’d been given a launch day and had arranged a venue and a couple of lucrative deals with major stores and then, out of the blue, the rug was pulled from under us. It was a real shock.”

Correspondence from the managing director of the publishing house, said ‘our advisers share our view that much of the content of your book may be considered offensive, objectionable or inappropriate by some readers and consequently may harm our reputation and potentially damage our relationship with both our readers and our trade customers’.

`They were objecting to phrases and paragraphs in the book including:

• Pubs reeked on every corner.
• Stoke was becoming a slum while the Victorian super-rich lived in imposing elevated red brick mansions. They were closer to God up there.
• Let’s begin at Trentham’s highly technical new round-about with it’s dozen or so drunken lampposts and its already grimy black and white road sign pointing to all the roads that lead to the heart of this story.

Leigh said: “The objection to the description of the Trentham round-about was the funniest though! Who in their right mind would be offended by the description of  drunken lampposts – what if we’d said they were bent!

“We couldn’t believe it … I’ve made my living as a writer for more than 30 years   and know exactly what I am doing. Why they adopted that attitude to the book I will never really understand.”

He said: “A lot of people were interested and a number of book shops had put in orders – and a major supermarket had wanted to stock it, so we thought we’d better let people know what had gone on. People heard I was going to do the show and started sending in requests – I ended up playing music by Legendary Lonnie, Lemmy, Robbie and even Jackie Trent! It’s a really good show.”

So, here is the full manuscript of Out of the Darkness – do you have pictures of the Six Towns which would go well with the words? Send them to [email protected], we’ll give you a byline and your photos could be used in future publications…

The Long Black Vale

THOMAS DOODY is said to still walk the hills of the long black Vale, a ghost wandering in the raging fires and billowing smoke of Stoke on Trent’s history.  And there is no doubt Doody was the man who cast the die for the city’s first claim to fame – crocks and pots – way back at the beginning of the 17^th century. That was more than 200 years before the scientifically-minded Josiah Wedgwood metamorphosed “pottering about” into a conveyor belt of brittle porcelain art.

Make no bones about it, Doody was in at the beginning, there in Trent Vale with the coarse brown pottery he sold at the old Roman market on the dirt road to Trentham.  It was him and the Romans – and coal of course – that created the alchemy which wrought Stoke on Trent out of the dank and dirty layers of God’s earth all those centuries ago.

Doody stood at the small brown door of his manufactory in what’s now called St Thomas Place atop the long black Vale of Penkhull, and looked down on the writhing rural lands of plenty. Beneath them lay coal and   clay.

More than any other man – Mr Wedgwood, Mr Minton, Mr Spode and Mr Doulton – he started the conjoining of six  stoic, dower and dramatically different towns. And they are Stoke, Longton, Fenton,  Hanley, Burslem, and Tunstall,

Doody looked down on them and he could see fertile dreams, hopes and opportunities. It was a beautiful place, way back then … barbel and bream and grey seals in the River Trent, woodlands and orchards, wild hyacinth, meadows and a tapestries of fields, daffodils and primrose. Stoke-on-Trent was endless country miles.

By the 19^th century Britain was giving birth to industry and there was evolution in the air across the Midlands. The revolution had already started thirty miles to the North in Manchester … you could see chimney stacks belching shapeless tattoos on the horizon. Soon Stoke-on-Trent would join in obliterating the sky as it made its own polluted journey into the future.

This time around it was led by Josiah Wedgwood, the alchemist, the scientist, the industrialist, the potter and the visionary.

He built his mansion on top the hill next to the golden angel of Burslem. He too looked down on the industrial world he and his compatriots, Minton, Burleigh and Doulton had made incendiary.  Stoke-on-Trent glowered back as if purgatory itself was bursting from the bowels of the earth. Potteries, pot banks, paint works, print works, breweries, brickworks, they all sucked on the blood of the earth and blotted out the landscape, poor houses, two-ups-two-downs, they replicated like warts.

And pubs. Pubs to keep the workers under control. Beer and gin. Pubs reeked on every corner.

The workers lived cheek by jowl in windowless cellars, detritus dripping in from the disgusting streets above.  But still farmers became potters and labourers became brick setters.   The choice was simple, the poor house or a job in a factory. The latter meant you could at least afford a dirty dank corner of a cellar with the “missus and kids”.

Stoke was becoming a bricked-up slum while the Victorian super-rich lived in imposing elevated red brick mansions. They were closer to God up there.

By the time the 20^th century flickered into view, buoyed up by new machines, Stoke was bustling, grimy, unhealthy and unrecognisable as a place of beauty hope and creativity.

Then in 1910 the six towns became one in an act of political bigamy which created the new county borough of The Potteries.

So, let’s begin our journey through bull’s blood and bone china at the crossroads, the place where souls were sold and reputations were hanged.

Let’s begin at Trentham’s highly technical new round-about with it’s dozen or so  drunken lampposts and its already grimy black and white road sign pointing to all the roads that lead to the heart of this story. The first stop has to be off the roundabout itself:

Trentham Gardens has many claims to fame including the fact it houses the only copy of Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa from 1553. It was made for Cosimo I, the Duke of Tuscany, and the second Duke of Sutherland was allowed to take a cast. The sculpture was erected at his home, Trentham, in 1840 as Sir Charles Barry meticulously sculpted the gardens.

But only 60 years later the Sutherlands were driven out of their once palatial home by the stench and disease of the River Trent as it began to pollute their estate. They fled to Sutton Place, Surrey, with Perseus and Medusa underneath their arms.

Despite this abandonment, Trentham held on to its title as the playground of the Potteries and even in the austere 1950s its swimming pool and Hollywood-style art deco lido and gardens were pulling in 10,000 people a day. By the time Perseus and Medusa returned in the psychedelic Sixties it had become a venue for concerts by the Beatles and Brian Ferry and other such brittle lumanaries.

Then this grand old lady of more elegant times suffered another blow. It was far worse than a river-ful of pollution. The swimming pool and the lake became drained because of mining subsidence. For decades Trentham and its gardens decayed. It was as if Stoke had finally dragged its once Baroque and very stately home into its own dirty industrial doldrums.  Trentham became a trailer park and venue for tacky car boot sales.

Nowadays, the grand old lady has had a bit of a return to dignity, sadly though as shop girl. They’ve built a garden centre where the grand hall once stood and there’s a wooden shopping village on its doorstep alongside a Premier Inn and a Frankie and Benny’s.

But over to the left, you can step back in time into a 1,000-year-old woods. There’s the imposing statue of the 1^st Duke of Sutherland, you can see it from the busy A34 Stone Road. The statue, commissioned in 1833, is on top of Monument Hill, a grand and evocative ‘folly’. Amazingly, some parts of the woodland including the statue are open to the public at no charge.

By the way, Trentham has branched out into a bit of monkey business, by opening a monkey sanctuary but you have to pay to get in there.

Stoke, the fires of memory

I remember Stoke itself as if it were yesterday.  The first time I visited was with my grandmother  Ada when I was five or six. We were big city people from sophisticated Manchester. Ada would save up from her job as a purveyor of penny policies for little treats for us both, sometimes a visit to the local cinema and sometimes a day trip to Blackpool.

For some reason Ada fancied a trip this time on one of the last steam trains to travel the defunct Loop Line in Staffordshire.   This was in the industrial 1960s and the closest the Potteries had got to psychedelia was acid rain. 

It did seem to be a bit of a busman’s holiday though – Manchester was a big dark gloomy Victorian warehouse of a city, it’s blackness given an oily shine by the constant rain. And Stoke was viewed as mini version of it.

I was wearing my tightly belted Gabardine raincoat, school cap and Wellington boots and at that age I could hardly be expected to be excited by Stoke Station as we alighted… but looking back now, what an impressive edifice it was, and still is today. Long, clear, functional elegance, deep platforms and a grand concertina of glass above which gathered up the steam like clouds and muffled the squeal of steel wheels. 

Stoke station was a small town by itself, cafes and offices, store rooms and arcades, carts and trolleys, baggage piled high, the fat station master bewhiskered and bewhistled and passengers bustling and keeping an eye on the big platform clocks.

Stoke Station was built in the 1840s in what was described way back then as a robust Jacobean manor house style. It still has a robust appearance and so does the 88-roomed red glazed hotel North Staffordshire Hotel across the almost forgotten opulence of Winton Square.

But I do remember as my gran and I stepped through the station’s giant verandahed gateway that it was like stepping into a world that no longer existed … it was row up on row of dirty red houses marching up and down hill after hill, tall chimneys, pit heads, round kilns, tiny shops, a market, rickety stalls by the roadside and the people, small, wiry, stick people with their heads down contemplating the paving flags.

Even at that age I recognised them all, good working-class folk, factory girls, mums in headscarves, dads chain-smoking Park Drive and Woodbines.

The Sixties was an important decade for Stoke and the other five towns, finally the  smoke was being blown away by  the Clean Air Act, Stoke City was being kicked back into the First Division by  Stanley Matthews and a nightlife was developing, The Place, the Golden Torch and many others.  The Victoria Theatre arrived too and so did BBC Radio Stoke with its completely non-BBC ‘mi duck’ accents. And a massive urban reclamation   was beginning.

The second time I visited Stoke was in the Mid-70s as a young hippy type. My hairy, beaded, slightly stoned friends and I poured off the slick electric train at Stoke station … it hadn’t changed and I still didn’t notice it.We hitched and hiked and marauded in a good-natured hippy way across town jumping Potteries Motor Traction company double-deckers and flatback coal wagons over the hills and far away to a little place dubbed Hollywood just outside Madeley. It was Whit Week and we were living in a field watching the Grateful Dead, Colosseum, Free, Mungo Jerry, Jose Feliciano and Ginger Baker’s Airforce.

It was on my way back to the station three days later, a little bit disorientated and lost perhaps, that I stumbled upon Lonnie’s record shop, Rubber Soul, Hide Street,  road at the very heart of Stoke. ‘Legendary Lonnie’ still is one of the great characters of the Potteries, a Lemmy lookalike with the voice of Jerry Lee Lewis, he’s still a real rock ‘n roller who once had a cult record show on Radio Stoke.

He also stood along side Screaming Lord Sutch for the Monster Raving Loony Party.

In the Seventies his shop was a paradise of rare records and rock and pop memorabilia.

All those years ago I realised that Stoke, this little bronchitic mini-city, was actually super-cool, music in the air at night and cafes and rock bars. It’s still a place to visit with its plethora of music emporiums, antique shops, second-hand shops and its young café society.

Now the Kings Hall hosts Northern Soul All-Nighters and was a central location for the film ‘Soulboy’.

Of course it’s worth taking in the regular tourist attraction of this fabulous town and its surrounding areas, like Portmeirion, or the Dudson Museum and Stoke Minster where Josiah Wedgwood and Josiah Spode are buried. Take in too the Staffordshire Hoard, a display of Anglo-Saxon treasures housed at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery – but don’t forget to check out its arty hedonistic eccentric rock’n’roll heritage too.

Another Long Thing …

And so, after Doody’s long black Vale, to another long thing – Longton, the Long Town. Some people say there isn’t much more you can say about this district which is also, quite disingenuously I might say, called the Neck End of Town (because of it’s ‘long’ shape). But it’s been around a long time and long is its history, its heritage. It makes it stand out in the madding crowd of towns around.

Even Potteries writer Arnold Bennett renamed it Longshaw in his novels.

It has another claim to fame too. It was right there at the beginning of the Workers’ Education Association. Richard Henry Tawney, the Edwardian Christian Socialist educationalist, brought education to the masses of the Potteries. He taught in Longton for three years.

Longton definitely has a charm beneath its plethora of 1930s semis and Victorian terraces. It’s worth visiting the centre just to take a stroll down The Strand in to Times Square and take in the rather impressive railway bridge that stands at the bottom …

… it must have been beautiful here at the turn of the century, gas lamps in wisps of fog, shops with steamy bullseye windows, horse-drawn carriages cracking the cobbles. And of course the rattle of the trams and the steam of the trains…

I remember less than a decade ago Banks’s Emporium suddenly appeared on the high street  and started doing a roaring trade in what can only be described as  cartoon consumerism –   cheap stuff made to look like something it isn’t, the way perhaps Capodimonte purports to be classical art, except Capodimonte can have a bit of class. Banksy is a distant relative of mine – we’re not quite sure how or why – but even I have to say his emporium, which I think may have been in the Art Nouveau  Focus cinema building, was not a classy place. Evocative? Yes. But stylish? No. He sold white porcelain horses, battery-operated grandfather clocks, plastic musical fairground rides, and bright brocade covered armchairs already shrink-rapped for posterity in cellophane.

Banksy turned his emporium into a bit of Potteries social history – he captured the world of tacky fairings, flawed seconds, throw-away trinkets, things that hinted at opulence but rarely had any value. His shop became a Mecca in the moronic world of Mammon.

It’d be nice to say Longton has taken on the air of shabby chic over the decades, but it hasn’t. Sadly it’s taken on more the air of dowdy duck with the endless traffic jams outside its grotesque 1960s-style glass monument of futuristic tastelessness, its shopping centre.

Yet like most battered things it has a lot of bottle – and you can visit them! Its twenty bottle kilns are Grade II listed, and are perfect examples of the hundreds which used to be dotted across the town. There were so many of them that on a good day, it’s said, you could actually see to the to the other side of the street. But most of the time the kilns were fired-up and Longton choked in flames and smoke.

Longton has a long history in the pottery industry – Paragon China and Aynsley – the Gladstone Pottery Museum near the famous Roslyn Works where modern potters and ceramic artists now work.

It’s also worth a visit to Longton Park, or Queen’s Park as it is also known. What a beautiful place this is, famous for its horticulture, lakes, clock tower and three bowling pavilions. Quintessentially working-class English.

The secret of Longton’s appeal is there to be shared with everybody, and like in the rest of the Six Towns you need to take to the streets and keep looking up, looking up. Look up at the buildings. The stories are all there on a never-ending reel, captured inside each red breathing brick, every hand-carved frieze … these are the things that tell the real tales and, like good old-fashioned books, never let you down.

Long Highway …

When you actually reach the traffic lights in Times Square turn left underneath the low-slung skeletal railway bridge onto Uttoxeter Road. It’s a long straight downhill road, an almost endless highway flanked by old warehouses and work yards, some are derelict and abandoned, some have been restored and are working, others are derelict yet still working; they house carpets sellers, wrought iron dealers, potters, tinkerers and auction house after auction house.

You can get anything here from a Desperate Dan teapot to an exclusive bit of Clarice Cliff. But be careful, the fakers are about …

Only a few years ago, it was worth setting off down the back streets round here, worn pavements, looming mills housing small nameless factories and work-a-day potteries, dark as a row of Methodist chapels. If you got over the threshold of one of these studios the potters were like mediaeval alchemists, living in the white dust of porcelain and bisque, poking the embers of ancient kilns. They turned out anything that looked like anything that was worth money. Reproductions they called them.

Those days and those people are relics of the back streets now – but take a walk, you never know what you’ll find just around the next corner.

After you’ve visited these charming cash-in-hand pockets of commerce, industry, opportunity and history you’ll find that the endless highway has descended into the bowels of Fenton.

Fenton is a greasy spoon by the side of the road.  It’s a tragedy really, Fenton’s land looks like a ravaged pock-marked face, a vast yawning toothless bad-tempered area of incomplete redevelopment. It’s a place of abandonment, of car valeters, tyre fitters, battery shops, even an inelegant Kentucky Fried Chicken fizzes like a sanitised wart against a background of flattened and neglected industrial sites.

I don’t think Fenton has ever been a healthy place to live, or visit – as a potters and miners community it used to have a preponderance of cemeteries, people died young there way back when. But mining and industry didn’t only kill people, it killed the land too, pockets of subsidence and pollution have slowed the town’s slovenly march into the brave new world of the 21^st century.

Fenton started life as an area of wasteland tacked onto the apron strings of Audlem and it’s never really progressed although people have made some effort. Lloyds bank is now an art gallery, for instance. And there are a number of plaques commemorating the William Baker dynasty which built much of Fenton’s hidden architectural beauty and opened one of its best-known potteries, Bakers. The ‘salt, pepper and vinegar’ kilns stand near the gates of their old factory in Fountain Street. The red brick fire station, functional, austere and serious is also down there.

It has a plethora of churches too, in the past they just helped to point out the class system which was so obvious in places like Fenton. The wealthy were Anglicans and took their horse-drawn carriages to the massive and opulent Christchurch. The workers took Shanks’s Pony to the tiny converted Methodist chapel at the end of a terrace.

Fenton has a bit of strange, unwholesome history too – world-shaping in its own way, I suppose. But is the fact that Hitler-esque firebrand Oswald Moseley married local MP Cynthia Curzon and then used the box-shaped Angel Inn on Vivian Road to hold his fascist rallies something you want to brag about?

The Town with No Name …

Here we are in Hanley, the nearly town. Sorry, but that’s what Hanley is, a nearly town – the town that is nearly a city centre, that’s nearly famous. It nearly made it to the top you see, which should have been easy considering it sits on a hill and its name means High Meadow …

Do you know people until recently described going shopping or for a night out as ‘Going up ‘Anley mi duck’. Hanley should be important and certainly it has heritage, it’s the birthplace of Arnold Bennett after all, and of Sir Stanley Matthews and Captain Edward Smith, the man who gave the Titanic that final sinking feeling. (Note: Tunstall claims them all too)

In the early 1800s Hanley was described as a ‘town and chapelry’ ranking in ‘size, extent and opulence’ with Burslem. And it was up there with Burslem, at the top of the hill.

 Hanley should have been called Mr Hanley, it should have been the brooding mill owner but instead it lost its way and became Hanley, the bad tempered mill manager, a rather beery, tobacco-stained pompous working-class man in a shabby suit with an array of dangerously sharp pencils in his breast pocket. You know the sort, seedy, one eye on the flibbertigibbet girls and the other on the clock as it edges towards opening time. Hanley nearly made it to be Mr Hanley but when push came to shove he couldn’t be bothered. It was less trouble to continue being the nearly man.

The manager never bothered to look down as the fields became arterial roads with rattling new trucks and lorries and the canal became less slickly populated by coal boats and delivery barges. No, he stayed there in the pub, pencils bristling, drinking draught Bass and regaling all who would listen with the stories of what might have been.

    Hanley could have been the centre of the Six Towns’ universe and, if it had tried harder, it could have been the pottery capital of the world. But our manager believed he could see the writing of the belching smoke of industry fading on the horizon. So he jumped mill and became a shopkeeper instead.

And that’s what Hanley has ended up as today, the corner shop for all the other towns and districts that once looked up to it. Check out Hanley on the internet and what’s the first thing you learn about? The Potteries Shopping Centre, that’s what – a vast unattractive market place where you can get anything from a shell suit to an anorak, a pair of trainers with flashing soles or a singing trout wriggling on  a plastic shield.

I really despair of Hanley, it should have been so good we could have named it twice … but what sort of place brags a one-way system which takes you through the heart of its bus station?

The bus drivers don’t like you being on their territory and have turned it into a bit of sport baiting us, honking their horns and tapping their temples with a finger, just because we’ve been  phased by arriving unexpectedly in this bustling terminus with its Lower-case passengers shifting from one flashing trainer to the other.

The bus driver sits there glowering, his pencils like tiny missiles about to go off, waiting for the station clock to tick-tock inexorably round to the point when the rules say he can open the double doors to the waiting crowds.

Hanley, so good they should have named it twice… but now the powers-that-be don’t even want it to be named once. The final ignominy is looming, Hanley could soon become The Town with No Name.

Fewer people use the name Hanley now, and the phrase is becoming ‘Going up town mi duck’. The decline in the use of the name is because all the jobsworths in the council officers, the bus stations and even the Government want it to be known very simply as the city centre. Road signs refer to it as the city centre. Two years ago the City Centre Partnership proposed officially renaming Hanley as Stoke-on-Trent City Centre and it is said to be actively encouraging businesses to remove the name of Hanley from their addresses. They have also asked the local council to instruct Ordnance Survey to call it city centre.

Would Hanley truly be such a wilted rose if it was known by any other name or would it simply no longer exist?

Queen of the Hill

Burslem should be known for its intrinsic masculinity, it looks like a man’s town. As you drive up   from the hell of Hanley, things seem  gruff and tough and intimidating; it’s a long way up that hill and in the dark days it would have been such a hard slog, black houses, factories, bottle kilns and warehouses and all the time the ribbons of the polluted sky growing wider and longer overhead.

When you arrive in The Square you could be in the shadows of Masonic giants … the town hall, Wedgwood’s imposingly functional house and factory, manufactories and the homes – these buildings are like dusty fat old mill owners looking down their grubby noses at you.

Despite its masculinity Burslem is known as the Mother Town; I suppose it’s because it all began here, the kiln-dried birth of a nation’s pride, from china town to The Potteries. It was here in 1870 that Josiah Wedgwood cut the first clod of the Trent and Mersey canal and that really opened the flood gates to it all.

Burslem grew from a small patch of agricultural land above the sprawling Golden dale valley and when the Century of the Matriarch arrived, it was ready to make it to the top. So, yes I accept  Burslem’s feminine side too – this town reflects  the androgyny of  Queen Victoria high on the hill of her throne, face full of thunder, engulfed in uninviting robes of black Coalfields silk.

In Burslem though, more than anywhere else on this strange journey over hill and down dale, the colours start to come through, little pockets of crimson and scarlet and brown, a different aspect of Potteries history told over and over in the hand-made bricks of the town’s historic school of art, the seasons of the year told in the girdle of  a frieze round the Wedgwood Institute.

Arnold Bennett put it this way, in Burslem ‘beauty was achieved and none saw it”.  He wrote of the scarlet market, the grey tower of the old church, crimson chapels and amber chimney pots. Today the beauty that was achieved can now be seen by all.

And the famous golden angel of the town hall makes you feel welcome and safe … Robbie Williams was inspired to write Angels about this little shining icon: “When I’m feeling weak/ And my pain walks down a one way street/ I look above/ And I know I’ll always be blessed with love.”

Burslem is blessed with many things, including ghosts and secrets. Check out the 18^th century Leopard Inn… it is reputedly haunted and has suffered real tragedy only recently.  Neil Crisp who bought the hotel at the beginning of the new century discovered a walled-up fifty room hotel at the rear of his historic coaching house. It hadn’t changed since the day it was boarded up in the 1950s. Sadly Mr Crisp died in 2009 after being scratched by a mysterious cat he met in the old hotel. Now it is the venue for ghost hunts and séances.

This vibrant old queen sitting on the throne of The Potteries has so much going for it, Bare wall, an independent gallery gathering and disseminating local art, Wedgwood’s school teaching the intricacies of pottery decoration, Six Towns Radio broadcasting from the new artisan multi-purpose studios renovated in a crumbling part of town, the gay pride, home of the Titanic Brewery. This is Burslem continuing to survive and prosper, just as it was built to.

Why it can be a Bit Messy in ‘Messy Town’

So, here we are, we’ve arrived. Tunstall, the last town on our potter around the Potteries.

What’s fascinating about Tunstall is that sometimes it’s there and sometimes it isn’t.  Sorry you Tunstall-ians, but it’s true and you can’t even claim smoke and mirrors  – I’ve driven to your town and completely missed it many times  – I’ve ended up pottering through the Staffordshire Moorlands instead.

The last time I went to Tunstall however, it was different; I made a point of looking and it was definitely there, so I drove round it and dutifully took in its sites …

And what a sight it is.

When you visit Tunstall, this is how to spot it: keep your eyes open for a big green plastic-looking Loch Ness monster swimming in a lake of goose-pimply terraces, cottages and council houses.  The monster is actually Church of the Sacred Heart with its grand green domes and it’s neck-like tower.

It might not be a bundle of laughs but Tunstall is a funny place  …  a modicum of charm of course, some boarded-up shops in its impressive town square, some bizarre 1980s wedding cake-style houses and vast tranches of wasteland, the sight of sites.

Like the rest of the towns it has its own attractions like the Churchill china factory shop or the  Harecastle tunnel which takes the Trent and Mersey Canal underneath Goldenhill or the famous clock tower in the town centre.

In some ways it should have been the king of the hills, after all it stands on the edge of the moorlands like a sentinel. But it never made it. It got missed out.

The powers-that-be have made some kind of effort, on it’s massive traffic island for instance. They’ve put a frieze of a Spitfire by the side of the road. I wasn’t really sure if this emblem to Britain’s war games was supposed to be made out of flowers but on the chilly January day I saw it, it was nothing more than a grey stain by the side of the road, like a homage to Fenton.

And, apart from Robbie Williams who spent part of his childhood in the town, it has a bit of musical history too – The Torch, sometimes called the Holy Grail of Northern Soul, certainly it at the very heart of the movement in the early 1970s and gave Manchester’s legendary Twisted Wheel a run for its money.  The Drifters, the Stylistics, The Chilterns and Edwin Starr all appeared there.

Well, that’s it! We’re done, it’s been a bit of a whistle-stop tour but worthwhile. The Potteries are not Middle England, they are rough, gritty, honest document to the industrialisation of Great Britain. It’s not a handsome and foppish place, it’s battered and scarred, the grime of history has eaten into it, it’s desolate abandoned sites, beautiful parkland, it’s thundering roads and peaceful canal systems, it’s greasy spoons and café society, it’s tacky and exquisite, it’s people are blunt yet caring.

It’s a place where the working-class worked hard to perpetuate the upper-classes and between them they created industry, art and history. I will keep on coming back to the Potteries  and continue this mammoth task of uncovering the truth about this fabulous place.

What is life really like when they knock on your door? Here one man reveals his own traumatic story and how having the CSA in his life for almost two decades destroyed his health, left him in debt and drove him to the brink of suicide. Names have been changed to protect the identity of the child.

Stoke Station, Sunday 3pm, jet-lagged in the rain. A bad day to have to go into the office, particularly when the car’s broken down…

I’d just got back from a business trip and my executive stress was about as sharp as my suit.

A slow train coming around the bend and it was already twenty minutes late, I can remember thinking, surely Richard Branson would have more fun with a Hornby Double “0”   in his loft.

It seemed unbelievable that less than 24 hours had passed since I’d climbed into the Business Class section of a 707 in a heatwave that had Raleigh-Durham airport in meltdown.  And now here I was …

The train crawled up to me with a kind of insolence and I embarked on a journey that was to change my life.

This creaking example of Mr Branson’s finest – rickety-crap, rickety-crap – suddenly decided to make good time and we rocked and rolled in the direction of Birmingham. So, I decided to use the journey to sift through the week’s-worth of mail that had gathered behind my door while I was away.

That first one was enough … I hadn’t expected anything like this…

After all, Tallulah and I had an arrangement – and I’d stuck to it rigidly since before our daughter was born. I know we no longer saw eye-to-eye, but I didn’t deserve this.

If it was true, then I realised, on that rickety train – and she realised in her little dormer bungalow in The Midlands – that life as I knew it was over.  A typical male reaction, I know. Emotional. Beer and wine money gone. What’m I going to do? You can hear the wail of a man supposedly getting his just desserts, even though he’d been paying for his child way before she was born.

This letter arrived in a large buff envelope, like bills used to. But the clue was there, in the deadly black stamp on the flap, the ultra modern Department of Works and Pensions in Dudley, West Midlands – millions to operate and failing to meet its targets by millions too.

I slipped the rest of my mail back into my briefcase and read the impersonal computer-generated missive over and over again. And the same question kept going through my mind:

Why had she done this?

One thing was clear though, the CSA didn’t care why she’d done it … all they wanted was my money and by the bucket load.  I’d filled in the forms months ago, but I thought it was merely a formality. I was paying for my child, once the good burgers of the CSA understood that, they would simply tell me to carry on as I had been doing. A bit naive I know.

But surely, they had made some horrendous mistake. Foolish is the man who believes in fair play, however. No, it was there in bold black Helvetica letters on white paper – they had almost trebled my maintenance payments overnight and in doing so had put me more than £3,000 in arrears.

But what hurt most at that moment on the swaying, hissing train was the reason for it happening. My ‘exotic’ life-style. That’s how Tallulah had described it –  my ‘exotic’ life-style. Namely, my all-expenses-paid business trips abroad. I’d made four in the eighteen months we’d been apart. Somehow she’d known about them all.

But what she had never understood was that I was a very provincial morning newspaperman – not a media baron – and these trips were simply a perk of the job.

We split up two years after our child was born.  In an attempt to treat our separation, at least, with a semblance of dignity we had worked out what I could afford to pay, taking into consideration the repayments on my £70,000 mortgage, bills and, not least, the £120 a week it cost me to travel to work.

The money we agreed worked out a little less than her ex-husband was paying for her first child, but he earned approximately £10,000 a year more than me. We also took into consideration her own income from her beauty products business and the fact that she was still able to – legally – claim substantial childcare and other benefits.

Midnight. Stoke Station in the rain. I finally found a taxi and made it home where I proceeded to do what men do. I got drunker than I’d been for months.

Welcome to my breakdown. I think it began the very next morning but took a few weeks to get a proper hold. That morning I woke up jet-lagged and with a hangover from hell. But what was worse was this feeling of floundering in a sea of anger and fear, this definitely wasn’t alcoholic remorse, it went deeper, right down inside of me like my emotions had been poisoned.

Oh, I carried on for a while, repaired my car out of my almost depleted savings and started paying the CSA’s demand. After that was paid along with my mortgage, my Council Tax, my water rates, a small loan, one credit card bill and my travel-to-work, I had less than £30 a week to live on. And there were obviously no benefits I could claim, it is decreed that single men must fend for themselves.

I also began a fruitless battle to get the CSA to see sense. But as far as they were concerned, they’d already seen it. As Helen at the CSA’s headquarters told me:

“All we do is take away your pleasure money sir.”

That particularly incensed me as I had heard through the same grapevine as Tallulah that she had just booked an all-inclusive break in Mexico. She had also bought a new car on the strength of her newfound wealth.

It’s worth noting here that if I had had a child living with me, (Note: This part of the story was written in 2002) the CSA would have allowed me £26 a week for that child’s upkeep before making their assessment. Why then did it cost so much a week for my share in the upkeep of our child?

I telephoned Dudley again and they told me to ‘stop moaning and get on with my responsibilities’.

Oh, I carried on for a while, four months or so but my circumstances were dire. And as my bills became more and more foreboding, so did my mind.  I was literally losing it. My doctor said it was understandable, losing my daughter, my partner and not knowing from month to month if I could pay all my bills.

On the surface, in the office, everything seemed to be the same well-oiled engine but I knew the timing had slipped. Everything was working – but firing in all the wrong places. I knew my job was suffering and to make matters worse we’d just got a new editor. How things seem to conspire.

The broom the new editor was sweeping with was certainly bigger than my by-now battered ego. In morning newspaper terms, it was the nights of the long knives. Like with a car that is going wrong, all I knew to do was switch off. Shut down, cut off the power.

I know now that I’d fallen into a panic that was to last for two years. Day in. Day out.

A year into this state of mind I was diagnosed with reactive depression, which didn’t make me feel better at all. It started more warning bells sounding.  I realised, at the moment of diagnosis, that I had been officially written off as suffering mental health problems and, as my doctor warned me, this would make it difficult for me to find work in the future. Nobody wants to employ the nutter, simple as that.

I began to see these problems as endless precipices yawning before me and it was so easy to step off any of them at any time. There is no doubt about it, there is an indefinable security in the bleakness at the bottom of any one of them. But long before this diagnosis, I’d given up on going to work and gone on the sick.  You see, even though – before diagnosis – you don’t know what you are suffering from but you do know you can’t actually get up and go to work. There’s somebody else in the office in your driver’s seat.  He looks like you, he might even still act a little like you. But you don’t trust him.

And the new editor is sweeping cleaner and cleaner in ever decreasing circles around you. You know that this other person, the one in the driver’s seat, won’t open letters and refuses to answer the telephone.  You are floundering in this cold, dank, dirty fog that has become your mind and this fool who is pretending to be you is sitting there blotting out the only chink of light.

After the diagnosis things took a turn for the worse.   The company, understandably, saw it as a chance to get rid of me. Who can blame them? I hadn’t been in for more than a year. So, I got a small pay-off and, because I’d just turned fifty, a paltry pension.

However, my income was deemed to be too great to qualify for housing benefit, council tax allowance or, indeed, free prescriptions for my anti-depressants. More rules you see.

I felt too poor by now to   even self-medicate. To all intents and purposes, I was ruined. I was mentally ill and I couldn’t afford to live.

That’s when I started to take a look at my life and what it was actually worth. Not a great deal. I had become a bad debtor and, because of my illness, I could hardly think any more. But, with what little logic I did have left, I saw I could be far better off dead. I had insurances and an endowment that might pay off my mortgage. At least I could leave my children from my first marriage provided for – and I could set up a trust fund for my new daughter.

Welcome to my death wish…

It is documented that at least 100 men have taken their own lives as a direct result of the CSA getting their assessments wrong. NACSA, a small, but national, organisation fighting the CSA, publishes what it calls the Book of the Dead and says that the list will still grow despite the Government’s claim to have introduced new and fairer assessments.

The dead road I chose was a slow one, maybe because I was secretly hoping for some kind of redemption along the way.  I found the money to drink a lot more by stopping eating and other measures like not paying my bills. Funny thing, isn’t it, that poor people can always find money for drink. Then, the irony of it, I discovered I couldn’t drink myself to death – the hangovers hurt too much.

So I tried to become positive and look for help by researching men’s groups. That’s when I encountered the Achilles Heel of man-dom.  Men themselves. There is no help for men, there is no support system, no real benefits, no sympathy. And it is our own fault. A clear case of man’s inhumanity to man.

But we shouldn’t complain, men normally simply accept it as the law of nature.  Men accept that they are the hunters who gather and then are eventually gathered from. It’s the way of the world.

Self-medication is very often all we have left and I had abortively been overdosing every day. In a haze of booze and insecurity I contacted the UK Men’s Movement, a volatile organisation that is proud of its macho anger.

Because of my professional credentials I was put straight through to its chairman, a real Rambo of men’s rights.  His zealousness was admirable but he swamped my problems as he demanded that I put my talents to good use and co-ordinate a press campaign with him.

His parting growl of ‘shit or get off the pot’ summed him up.

Finally, I found NACSA and its little Book of the Dead. Forgive me if this brands me a male chauvinist pig but I was more than a little surprised to be contacted by a woman.

Now here is the First Lady of men’s rights, a charming middle-aged mother   who began campaigning after her new husband was almost ruined by the CSA.

She discovered immediately that the CSA had got my case wrong – and that they actually owed me money. There had been an horrendous mistake, like I’d told them two years ago. But they had denied it, threatened me, in my incapable state, with endless paperwork and adjudicators. They had almost killed me.

Now they were going to pay.

But there was a brick wall between me and the faceless operatives of the CSA. My head was no longer strong enough to batter it down.  I wrote letter after letter, I made phone call after phone call, I demanded, I threatened and I sulked.

And months later I got a letter of apology from the CSA saying they would compensate me ‘for inconvenience and error by the agency’. The cheque they enclosed   for my reconstituted life was just £75.  It didn’t even take the top off my credit card bill.

Well, perhaps that should have been the end of my story. But it isn’t.

I met a woman and just like in true romance, we had a lot in common, including the CSA.

She was about to loose her £250,000 home on the borders of Shropshire because her husband, a self-employed salesman who had run-off with his business partner, refused to contribute towards the upkeep of their two sons and their home.

Angelina was forlornly trying to meet the bills on her four-bed detached village property from the money she earned in a tiny stationery store.  It  was an uphill battle and eventually the bank decided to foreclose over   debts from her husband’s business which were secured against the home.

In despair, Angelina finally went back to the CSA, believing that they would get money from him so that she could service the debts until the house was sold.

Within a month the CSA unapologetically came back to her explaining that they had dropped the case because her husband was self-employed. It was too difficult, they said, for them to discover how much he earned.

The house was sold at a knockdown price and Angelina received state benefits of £85 a week to support herself and her sons who were in full-time education. Her ex has never contributed a penny and has never been approached again by the CSA.

Meanwhile, I was subject to regular investigations by social services and the CSA who have accused me of working as a part-time fireman, of buying and selling cars and of working markets with a friend of mine who suffers from diabetes and circulation problems and has rarely left his house in the last two years.

Well, am I just a whinging bloke who has shirked his responsibilities? Or am I, my ex, my daughter, my new partner, her sons – and ultimately the taxpayer – all victims of  a bureaucratic steamroller which has for decades been allowed to rampage through the wasteland of broken relationships and flatten what little is left?

There is no stopping it when it starts rolling at you – you can fling everything it demands in its path, you can fill in the forms, show them your wage slips, reveal your bank account, details of your past and your future, the state of your health, the state of your mind, details of your new partner’s earnings, her wage slips, bank accounts.  But it won’t stop them.  Every move I make, every change in my circumstances, every penny I earn, I have to report to them so they can re-assess me. This could happen month-by-month.

Somebody who works for an employer dare not earn overtime – or get a second job – it cooks the books too much and takes too long to sort out. A week’s overtime can have you paying at a new higher rate for months. And it is the devil’s own job to get a refund.

The men’s movement put it this way: “The practical effect of CSA harassment of fathers is that they eventually acquire an entirely new set of values that are utterly detrimental to the well-being of society.  They go into the black economy, they fiddle the Social.

“Fathers who fight hardest for their kids often suffer the most psychologically, especially middle-class ‘believers’, the type who bought into the whole bourgeois ideal – they believe the system is there to help them. They soon finds out it isn’t.  Businessmen hide earnings. They lose the incentive.

“The working-class guy goes on the Social and works in the black economy. Wife, CSA and kid get nothing. This is what happens and it’s to no one’s benefit, not the State, the ex, the man, and definitely not the kids.”

In fact it is now a far more dangerous organisation to become involved with. In the past one of the few ways to get the CSA off your back was to wait until your ex-partner came off benefits, then there was a chance that you and she would make a private agreement.

But because tax credits – the most predominantly claimed benefit – is not actually considered to be a benefit at all under the rules, most are now considered private clients and there is no escape.

NACSA said: “Nowadays, most parents with care want to involve the CSA because they know what damage they can do to their ex partner. It’s not just a case of getting the ex off benefit – its getting her to agree to come out of the system.

“Under the old rules the mother’s income would be included assuming she had sufficient to contribute. Under new rules, the mother’s income is disregarded.

“See that’s how it works – and fails. Women who are greedy and   want to punish their ex have the weapon and ex-partners who are fighting tooth and nail to keep contact with their children, and would never dream of not paying towards them find it difficult. But just looking to be treated fairly.  This is a Government-organised battle of the sexes.”