For days before Stoke-on-Trent’s big byelection, the pedestrianised space next to its Potteries shopping centre crawled with activists. They spanned the entire political spectrum, from the Greens to the BNP. Many had come a very long way: there were Labour disciples from London and Manchester, Lib Dems from Gloucester and Merseyside, and Ukip believers from as far afield as Kent and northern Scotland.

One of the Ukippers, who was from Essex, had dyed her hair purple especially for the occasion. Outside a shop front plastered with posters featuring the party’s leader and doomed candidate Paul Nuttall, I asked her what she was doing here. “The ordinary people want change,” she said.

And what kind of change was that? “For us,” she shot back, passion making up for a certain lack of nuance in her politics. “For ordinary people.”

But separating the ordinary people of Stoke from the apparatchiks who had arrived in their midst was a glaring chasm. No end of leafleting was taking place in Hanley, Stoke’s city centre. However, five minutes away, on the bustling Bucknall New Road, there was only the merest smattering of election posters – all Labour – and just about everyone I met talked about the byelection as a matter of indifference.

A group of Kurdish men were loading wholesale boxes of food into a newly opened shop, and told me that politics didn’t concern them. One twentysomething woman thought the rosettes and leaflets were somehow to do with last year’s EU referendum. Two miles down the road, in the suburb of Bentilee, I met several people who said they had no interest in the contest at all. “I don’t vote,” said one man. “It’s just not something I’d do.”





At the last election, Stoke-on-Trent Central registered the lowest turnout of any constituency in the UK: indeed, it had the dubious distinction of being the only British seat where a majority of people didn’t vote. This week, a mere 38% of local voters made it to the polling station, as compared with 52% who voted in the Cumbrian seat of Copeland.

In media coverage of Stoke over the past three weeks, this disconnection has repeatedly been included in bleak portraits of a place said to be in a threadbare state, lacking what makes other cities vibrant and alive. Parts of the place do suggest the long shadow of a lost industrial past and a future that has still to get going. But there are a lot of contrasting facts known more to locals than visitors. Staffordshire university has a student body of 15,000, and Stoke is bidding to be the UK’s capital of culture in 2021. Though its coal mines may have long gone, the city’s ceramics industry is in the midst of a revival.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and reporters in Stoke on Friday. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

When my reporting work was over, I regularly gravitated to Hanley’s cultural quarter. I spent time at a bar and beer shop called Bottlecraft, full to bursting with people drawn to a place that could easily have been plucked from Berlin or Brooklyn. Across the street, there is a music venue called The Exchange, where you can while away long hours wedged into the nooks and crannies of its imposing Victorian architecture. And, as happened the last time I was in town, I was woken in my hotel at around 3am by the noise of the night-time economy in full effect: clattering heels, taxi horns, shouted questions about where everyone was going next.

For every major British political event, there is now a town or city picked to symbolise it and act as a signifier for either a political party’s collective anxieties, or a deeper sense of national failure. In the wake of the general election of 2015, it was Nuneaton, the Conservative/Labour marginal that Ed Miliband’s party failed to win back. A year later, the EU referendum became indelibly associated with Sunderland, a city held up to be the embodiment of Brexit’s irrationalities by zealous remainers: how, they wondered, could a place so dependent on its gleaming Nissan car factory vote for something that would threaten it?

Seven months later, when Tristram Hunt announced he was resigning as the MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central and taking a new job as the director of the Victoria and Albert museum, it was Stoke’s turn for this treatment. As usual, there was a familiar sense of misapprehensions and potential or actual political misreadings, which took often took precedence over the complex reality. A slew of coverage fixated on the “left behind” working class, the aftershocks of the referendum, and the contrast between the city’s glorious industrial past and its supposedly grim present.

Early on in the campaign, both the Daily Telegraph and Nuttall named the city “the Brexit capital of Britain” (an honour that actually belongs to Boston in Lincolnshire, whose vote for the leave side was 75% against Stoke’s 69%). In a report headlined “Violence, vandalism and race hate in Britain’s grubbiest byelection”, the Mail on Sunday said that, though the city was “reversing the long decline in its famous ceramics industry … so many areas remain neglected, boarded up or burned out.”

Bloomberg portrayed a place where “pawnbrokers and empty units occupy what was once prime real estate and the local newspaper carries stories about growing problems with homelessness and drug abuse”; the Spectator said that the city’s famous ceramics industry “has retreated, leaving a moonscape where pottery kilns used to fill the city with smoke and glow”.

Not many of these accounts left any room for complexity, nor any recognition of Stoke’s collective push for regeneration and revival, and plenty of local people greeted them with a mixture of anger and anxiety. “It’s hard not to conclude that most commentators do little more than make a quick leap off and on the train while searching out a small corner of bleakness that confirms views purloined from other idly compiled articles of a similar ilk,” said the Stoke Sentinel. “Because Ukip have a got a chance of getting in here,” said one man I met last week, “people who don’t understand what Stoke is about and what the people are like here think everyone’s a Neanderthal. People miss all the things that are going on.”

By way of a mea culpa, when reporting on Stoke in the recent past, I have described parts of its cityscape as “empty” and “forlorn”. I have written about a place “haunted by ghosts” – which, on reflection, was probably a bit much. That said, it is in the nature of grassroots political reporting that you feel duty-bound to alert your viewers and readers to the kind of social and economic problems that the media and establishment arguably ignored for far too long, and which the vote for Brexit brought to the fore.

Clearly, Stoke-on-Trent – or, more specifically, its six constituent towns of Hanley, Burslem, Fenton, Longton, Stoke and Tunstall – does have serious social and economic difficulties, thrown into sharp relief by the comparative successes of Birmingham to the south, and Manchester to the north. There are too many empty buildings and a preponderance of low-paid jobs, which many local people put at the heart of their predicament. Many of the city’s residents need no persuasion to talk about the place’s failures: sclerotic city government, an alleged lack of official ambition. But the big question highlighted by the byelection is whether politicians and the media can put such problems in any kind of nuanced context, especially when they portray the place crudely – and unfairly – as some kind of middle-English Detroit. That might suit the anxious, borderline apocalyptic mood since the referendum, but it tends to have precious little to do with reality.

I first came to Stoke in 2006, when the then-buoyant British National Party was spreading its poison and about to increase its number of local councillors to five, a total that would reach nine before its presence receded. Over the next few years, I paid a couple of non-working visits en route to the north-west. Last year, I returned for the European referendum, and though I was often struck by the sense that it needed a huge injection of money and energy, I was also fascinated by the ornate Victorian buildings, a growing number of trailblazing businesses and the sense that the most economically productive kind of bohemia often takes root in trying circumstances.

A pot bank in Stoke. Photograph: Tony Smith/Alamy

Time and again, I was reminded of a spirited local attitude, mixing some of the same phlegmatic sarcasm you pick up in Manchester with a friendliness and open humour too often overlooked. Perhaps most importantly, I learned anew that even if the area’s famed pottery industry had once employed 50,000 people, 8,000 were still producing world-renowned products for companies looking to expand. The locally based Portmeirion Group has increased its overseas sales by more than 50% over the past six years. Dudson, which supplies china to Virgin Rail, the Disney Group and Princess Cruises, announced last year that it was taking on new staff and embarking on a £500,000 investment programme.

The most vivid Stoke success story might be that of Emma Bridgewater, who founded her ceramics business in 1985. She emphasises the importance of Stoke as a symbol of old-school quality, employs 280 people and is about to recruit 70 more. “Here we are,” she said last year, “right in the centre of Britain, great communications, real estate is as cheap as it could possibly be in the UK, and there’s a great population ready and wanting to work. It feels like a wilfully ignored secret. I think we’re turning a corner at the moment. There’s a real sense of purpose and hope. It just feels like we could see some real meaningful change now.”

Last Friday morning, I spent time in Hanley’s Potteries museum and art gallery with Fred Hughes, a well-known local historian and former Labour councillor. He talked about the local industries that went back to Roman times, and the city’s need for an identity that looked beyond its past. “There’s a bravery that’s still here,” he told me. “And there’s a turnaround. Manufacturing of pottery is changing. Small craft shops and art and culture are coming here. It’s not visible at the moment, but it’s there.” He cast his eyes around glass cases full of exhibits about coal mines and the local factories known as pot banks. “There’s so much energy underneath the soil,” he said.

Six hours after it was announced that Labour had held the seat, leaving Ukip and the Tories almost tied on just 5,000 votes each, I chatted to Ruth Smeeth, the MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, whose path I had first crossed during the EU referendum. In the past week, she said, she had had no more than 10 hours sleep – and, particularly at the campaign’s outset, she had been anxious about the prospect of Ukip winning. “At various points, it looked like it could be a three-way marginal,” she said. “I was worried about what it would mean to people were looking to move to the city, or go to university here, or get involved in the place, if they had a Ukip MP. And there were points when it looked they were cutting through.”

Nuttall, she said, had “taken every opportunity to talk down our city”. He had talked about the need to “fix” the place, and his leaflets had used images of dilapidated pot banks, “which can’t be knocked down, because they’re all listed.” In addition, she said, “there’s been a huge amount of nonsense written by people desperate to file copy. They have not done their homework. I’ve got thriving industry in my constituency: hi-tech, big factories. They have a smaller footprint than they did in the past. But people have ignored that and maligned our city for the last month, not thinking about the impact, and what they’re leaving behind.”

She had already spoken to the city council and other local MPs about industrial summits and new marketing drives, so as to put things right. “We should be celebrating who we are and what we do,” she said, before pausing for thought. “It’s really about the people,” she said. “They’re kind, they’re generous – they will look after anybody, even if they’ve got nothing themselves. It’s too easy just to look at buildings. Unless you talk to a proper Stokie, you’ll have no idea how special we are.”