ABSTRACT

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