‘Dear Pugin, I am in a regular fix respecting the working drawings for the fittings and decorations of the House of Lords, which it is of vital importance to me should now be finished … I know of no one who can render me such valuable and efficient assistance, or can so thoroughly relieve me of my present troubles of mind as yourself.’
So Charles Barry to Augustus Pugin, inveigling that brilliant architect, designer, aesthete, social critic, philosopher of urban living and Gothicist into a decade of often tortuous work into helping to design the Palace of Westminster. Of course, Pugin despised the compromises – ‘Tudor details on a classic body’ – but we who work in the House of Commons or Lords adore all its idiosyncratic historicisms.
That is the subject I wish to address: the relationship of medievalism and modernity, and how Pugin saw his architectural vision interact with all the complexities of modern, urban living. He grew to manhood during one of the most startling periods of social and economic change in British society – the Industrial Revolution and the establishment of a modern urban world happened here in Britain first. Pugin’s response to that revolutionary epoch was part of a broader aesthetic and intellectual confrontation with modernity which would go on to shape our cities and suburbs to this day.

It is, of course, a particular pleasure to be talking this evening as the Member of Parliament for Stoke-on-Trent Central. We in North Staffordshire have come to think of Pugin as our own: ST1 not SW1 when it comes to the Pugin inheritance. Of course, we have – thanks to the generous patronage of the ‘Romantic Catholic’, John Talbot, 16th Earl of Shrewsbury, John Talbot – the restored Alton Towers, Alton Castle and Cotton College, but most importantly of all the masterpiece at St. Giles’ Catholic Church, Cheadle. Pugin wanted it to be ‘as perfect a specimen as we can make it’: ‘the complete English parish church of the time of Edward I.’ And few could deny he succeeded brilliantly.
But in Stoke itself, Pugin made contact with a much more modern figure – the great Herbert Minton who, in the words of Rosemary Hill, ‘brought to the revival of the Middle Ages all the resources and the energy of the steam age.’ From his London Road factory – now, inevitably, a Sainsbury’s – he pioneered the production of encaustic tiles, through the firing of different coloured clay at different temperatures. Once the science was mastered, the results were an immediate success. ‘Practical, hygienic and authentically Gothic, encaustic flooring, most often in buff and red, was – and remains in thousands of churches, schools and domestic hallways – the essence of Victorian decoration.’ Indeed, you walked on its tiles here this evening. And Stoke-on-Trent is proud of the relationship.
One other introductory thought: this is a surprisingly rich year when we think about the modern urban world. For 1812 witnessed not just the birth of Pugin – but also Charles Dickens, who was equally drawn to understanding the impact of urbanisation. On the one hand, he enjoyed the energy, the wealth, the vibrancy of metropolitan life; on the other hand, he condemned the inequality, the depravity, the inhumanity of the Victorian urban world. And, above all, the lack of connection, the isolation of city living. The atomisation of society had left the individual utterly at sea. It was a world which Dickens embodied in the character of Jo the crossing-sweep in his London epic, Bleak House (1852-3). Gently undulating through the text, Jo cut an anonymous, almost transluscent figure sweeping his lonely way through the ‘faces never-ending’ of a crowded, bustling city.
Then this year we also commemorate the death in 1912 (aboard the Titanic) of W.T. Stead – the legendary editor of The Pall Mall Gazette who, in his famous article ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, exposed the child sex slave industry of Victorian London and, by insinuation, the inevitable moral collapse of modern urban living. And 1912 also witnessed the death of Octavia Hill – the great housing reformer, protégé of Ruskin and FD Maurice, and co-founder of the National Trust who sought to counter ugliness of late 19th century London by breathing art and culture into her housing estates in Deptford and Southwark and getting them out into the countryside.

PUGIN AND CONTRASTS
All three of these thinkers clearly drew upon the works of Pugin. While he himself was inspired by the works of William Cobbett, Robert Southey and the Catholic Bishop John Milner, whose 1798 work The History of Winchester drew upon the German Romantic tradition to contrast a lost medieval world marked by social institutions and symbols of corporate faith with the civic decay wrought by the so-called ‘Age of Improvement.’
For the Age of Utility was transposing the city of guilds, town squares and monasteries with the iconography of individualism. The Poet Laureate Robert Southey on a visit to Manchester, the ‘shock city of the Industrial Revolution’, was drawn to contrast the city’s cotton warehouses to convents, yet he thought them ‘without their antiquity, without their beauty, without their holiness.’ Instead of vespers, there is ‘the everlasting din of machinery’, and when ‘the bell rings it is to call wretches to their work instead of their prayers.’
This, then, was the context for the zealous Catholic convert Pugin’s thinking on the city. To his mind, the reason 19th century cities were so ugly was because of an absence of true faith. The Reformation had undercut public faith and with ‘the growth of Protestant principles’ came ‘the fall of ecclesiastic architecture.’ Pugin regarded Birmingham as the pinnacle of this unedifying process, memorably describing it as ‘the most hateful of all hateful places, a town of Greek buildings, smoky chimneys, low radicalism and dissent.’
His response to the urban design of Nonconformist amorality in Birmingham was St. Chad’s – the first cathedral since Wren’s St. Paul’s. At the laying of the foundation stone, Pugin announced that he would not rest – in an interesting reversal of Southey’s critique – until the cathedral bells ‘drowned out the steam whistle and the proving of the gun barrels.’
But Pugin’s broader response to the state of the industrial city was, of course, his masterpiece Contrasts which contrasted the civic framework and institutional fabric of a ‘Catholic town in 1440’ with ‘the same town in 1840.’ The buildings and institutions of the medieval town present a harmonious and godly community, while the 1840 version exhibits all the faithless utility of an industrialised Victorian city.
What most obviously strikes the eye in the pictures is the contrast between the Church steeples and factory chimneys. The purpose of Contrasts was to show that medieval civic designs not only signified a harmonious, Catholic order but that it also emanated from deeply felt Catholic sentiments.
This was the foundation of Pugin’s Decorated Gothic aesthetic, his driving belief in Christian architecture. Pugin’s Gothicism was, in the words of Rosemary Hill, ‘a sacred style infused with inner truth, an architecture that did not merely evoke “Pleasing associations” but that embodied, in its very fabric, a metaphysical divine reality.’
And the enemy was Utility – the curse of the age. For Thomas Carlyle, the great author, journalist, and polemicist, the societal collapse he thought he saw all around him merely reflected a spiritual malaise. ‘Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age…Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance.’
What Carlyle intimated at was a change in the character of social relations which he attributed to industrial Britain’s loss of faith. With the Industrial Revolution came a new materialist age which was no longer united by any form of communal worship. Just as had happened to France during the Revolution, so Britain during the Industrial Revolution had lost its faith. ‘This is not a Religious age. Only the material, the immediately practical, not the divine and spiritual, is important to us.’

In place of faith, duty or affection inspiring man there was merely the pursuit of pleasure. And what gave the individual most pleasure was monetary gain. Mammon not God governed the industrial city. The philosophy of utilitarianism was the philosophy of urban life. A structured society of God-fearing people had been replaced by a collection of individuals all out for their own.
And it was these ideas about the nature of urban society which determined the shape of Charles Dickens’s greatest satire of urban-industrial life, Hard Times. ‘Coketown’ was such an awful, unnatural environment not primarily because of the physical pollution but because of its spirit. It was the embodiment of Carlyle’s age of machinery; utility stalked the city. Unusually for him, Dickens had great trouble coming up with the title for the book. Amongst the twelve possible options, he toyed with ‘The Grindstone’, ‘Prove It!’, and ‘A Matter of Calculation’ – all hinting at the utilitarian satire which forms the work’s polemical core.
Pugin’s architecture was the design accompaniment to Dickens’s Hard Times. The calling of the Catholic architect was to reconstruct the industrial city in such a fashion as to foster the old corporate spirit of community. A Catholic sensibility – and, with it, a medieval social morality of benign hierarchy in which each social class looked upwards for support – could only be furthered by Catholic architecture: by surrounding the people of Britain with some of the greatest Pointed designs wrought by Christian civilization. For Pugin thought, ‘it must have been an edifying sight to have overlooked some ancient city raised when religion formed a leading impulse in the mind of man, and when the honour and worship of the Author of all good was considered of greater importance than the achievement of the most lucrative commercial speculation.’ And through his churches, cathedrals, convents, monasteries, schools, and numerous houses, Pugin aimed to achieve just that.
But this was neither nostalgia nor the faux¬-medievalism of the Eglinton tournament: this was a forceful conviction that the ideals and values of the medieval, Christian past had something to offer the irreligion and atomism of the modern age. That was why Pugin – always hurrying to meet clients along the expanding railway network – was never afraid of the benefits of modernity. ‘There is no reason in the world,’ Pugin argued, ‘why noble cities, combining all possible convenience of drainage, water-courses, and conveyance of gas, may not be erected in the most consistent and yet Christian character.’ And so too with his growing enthusiasm for interior design. His true principles, as Rosemary Hill suggests, ‘had developed beyond antiquarian revivalism to embrace “any modern invention which conduces to comfort, cleanliness or durability.’ So at The Grange at Ramsgate there was plate glass rather than Gothic leaded lights; there were water closets and bidets. The intention was no longer to transport the inhabitants ‘back to the 15th Century’ but to show them the nineteenth century in a new light.
But, of course, the real irony of Pugin’s relationship with the modern was that a man who drew inspiration from the 15th century would underpin much architectural philosophy of the 20th century. For Pugin’s guiding principle that, ‘there should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, construction, or propriety’, and that ‘all ornament should consist of enrichment of the essential construction of the building’ – seen to such effect in the Palace of Westminster – became one of the central tenets of modernism.

PUGIN TODAY
So where does all that leave Pugin today, in our modern world? First of all, a belief in the importance of ideas in architecture: a profound conviction that ideology, faith, and meaning was embedded in clock towers, arched ambulatories, high crested roofs and lintels. And that, as such, architecture deserved to be debated: a battle of styles was a good thing; rather than just the bureaucratic, corporate inevitablism of so much modern design. For Pugin, architecture could never be a trade – it constituted an altogether grander calling.
Secondly, a sense that cities matter – if there is something wrong with our cities, then there is something wrong with ourselves. In a complicated, modern, urbanised world, city planning was important – that civility, fellowship, humanism, and faith followed the design of buildings along clear Christian principles. And even in our secular age, that must translate into a broader belief in the beneficial results of good design, particularly in high-pressure urban environments with our modern mix of faiths, ethnicities, residents and businesses.
Thirdly, a respect for the past. Pugin was not particularly interested in restoration; he was a new build kind of man. But he did have an abiding admiration for the wisdom of his forebears and the social impulses that underpinned those designs. At a time of such progress and improvement, his was a voice that allowed medievalism to inform modernity.
And that is why the great age of progress was festooned in monuments to the past. At a time of such remarkable, urgent change the aesthetic of the day drew upon the long lost past.
Pugin’s legacy – in Manchester, Birmingham, London, and Stoke-on-Trent – was and is the fabric of the Victorian city. And in our own era of perhaps equal and unnerving change, the power of Pugin’s urban vision still speaks to us. In Stoke-on-Trent and Westminster; in ST1 and SW1.

My article for the Institute for Public Policy Research can be read below. It was written to mark the 20th anniversary of the final publication of “Marxism Today”.

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The great strength of Marxism Today – which closed its doors 20 years ago and which IPPR is marking with a special edition of its journal PPR – was its intellectualism and its catholicism. One of its main contributors was the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm whose most profound contributions to the intellectual history of the Labour movement centred on his 1978 lecture on ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’ More than a generation on from that groundbreaking intervention – and following on of Labour’s worst election defeats – it is timely to return to this thesis and assess the popular and political prospects of the centre-left today.

On retracing the terrain of the debate, one is immediately struck by two points. The first is the remarkable foresight of Hobsbawm’s original lecture. In it, he provides a comprehensive sociological history of the British working class before turning to speculate on the trends which may shape the Labour movement in the immediate future. From its depiction of union sectionalism, to its highlighting of stratification and decline in the industrial manual classes, and its illustration of a culture of masculine-dominated ‘Labourism’ struggling to come to terms with new forms of identity, it captures the essence of a movement undergoing a profound sociological and political crisis.

The second point, seen retrospectively, is the reluctance of the movement to face up to the scale of the problem. The influence of Marx’s historical materialism, the comforting certainty that history was on the side of socialism not capitalism, still exerted a powerful hold on leftist critiques at that time. Even electoral defeat, when it arrived in 1979, would be blindly greeted by some as merely an impasse – with normal service shortly to be resumed

Examining this history is important, not least because certain parallels between 1979 and today are inescapable. Like then, we live in the eye of a volatile and unpredictable economic storm, brought about by excessive faith in a hegemonic economic ideology. However, unlike the post-war consensus, the neoliberal consensus does not (yet) appear to be on the brink of collapse. In part, this is because neoliberalism is a peculiarly resilient ideology. Indeed, in Europe and across the developed world, it has so far often been to a resurgent right that voters have turned.

As in 1979, the right has successfully mobilised its response to the crisis in language that the public can understand. Nowhere is this phenomenon more pronounced than here in Britain where, with breathtaking ruthlessness, the Conservatives have successfully reframed the crisis. The political agenda is not dominated by how to correct the problems associated with unregulated market power, but about how to deal with unrestricted government spending.

The temptation is to fight back, but it is vitally important that the Labour movement does not delude itself into thinking that we can build a new consensus purely through waging a persistent, attritional war of rebutting the government’s more specious claims. It is correct that the deficit was caused by the seismic shock of the financial crisis, but politics is not an empirical science. It is about peoples’ perceptions and emotions, their hopes and insecurities. Directing a sceptical public to the relevant graphs and statistics will never be a winning strategy. The Conservatives mounted a sustained argument, firmly rooted in popular notions of common sense – rooted in the image of household finances – leaving Labour’s positivistic and technocratic tone lagging.

At this stage in the electoral cycle it is more important to identify the process of renewal than speculate on the answers: asking the right searching questions and, where necessary, facing up to the unpalatable truths. This is not just about rejecting false choices – between the politics of aspiration and security, or of prioritising the middle class progressive over the working class communitarian – though that would be a welcome start. It is about embracing a methodology for strategic political renewal that goes far beyond the usual psephological clichés. This is how we can avoid aligning ourselves to declining demographic groups and anticipate the political challenges of the future.

This requires a change in mindset. Too often we translate new political contexts into policy challenges, rather than exploring the opportunities they afford to develop a broad-based coalition that could lead back to power. For example, the correct question to be asking in response to the rise of Scottish, Welsh and English national sentiment is less whether we should advocate an English parliament or a greater devolution of powers, and more how we might find a language and identity that embraces the vitality and distinctiveness of different nations and places. Deprived of the old language of class, but as the only party with a popular reach across all of Britain, the identity Labour embraces must be nimble enough to accommodate the tension between nationalisms while maintaining the union.

Arguably, the biggest strategic challenge is posed by the polarised patterns of ‘winners and losers’ that globalisation has created. Left unchecked, this will make building our majoritarian coalition even more challenging. While Labour lost votes across all sections of society in 2010, our losses were greatest in what might be described, loosely, as traditional working class areas. A recent study showed that the average fall in the Labour vote in constituencies where more than a quarter of the economically active electorate were manual workers was 3 per cent higher than in constituencies where the share was less than 18 per cent. Despite its real achievements, there is some justification in the charge that New Labour exercised an almost-whiggish zeal in the benevolence of progress, elevating ‘change’ to an end in itself. Inevitably this alienated those most uncomfortable with change. If Labour is to recommence its forward march, it must once more reach out to these communities.

This alone, of course, will not be sufficient. Hobsbawm’s analysis showed that Labour was never purely the representation of a uniform working class (and certainly wasn’t in 1979 or 1983). Yet, even he might be surprised by the extent to which the Labour vote in 2010 appears to be classless or ‘post-class’. In the 2005 election, a greater percentage of Labour voters came from the ‘AB’ than the ‘DE’ social class group. This is partly the result of the expansion of the professional middle class. The road to electoral success for Labour will always will be through building a popular, majoritarian coalition across all areas of society. Yet, ‘reconnection’ with lower social class groups is of vital importance for two reasons. ]

First, to put it bluntly: when we do, we win. In 1983 and 2010, Labour’s lead over the Conservatives in the DE class of voters was 8 per cent and 9 per cent respectively. By contrast, in 1974 the lead was 35 per cent and in 1997, 38 per cent. The same is true of the C2 class. In 1983 and 2010, the Conservatives led among this group by 8 per cent, while in 1974 and 1997, with suitable symmetry, they led by 23 per cent.

Second, and more importantly, being disconnected from these communities will have disastrous consequences for the way we do our politics and our ability to engender change. People have turned away from politics in their droves – and the managerialism of contemporary political culture has played a significant role in this. Labour is not entirely to blame for this, but we must take our share of responsibility. When told of a failing school, we replied that GCSE results kept on improving every year; when people spoke of not feeling safe, we responded with statistics indicating a fall in crime rates.

Hobsbawm warned us about this danger in a 1983 article. He suggested that there are inherent weaknesses to what he called the ‘neosocialist’ strategy for achieving popular support:

‘This [neosocialism] implies abandoning the traditional character of such parties as mass parties, based on mass organisations, especially those of the working class, and turns them into common electoral fronts of all who are, for one reason or another, opposed to reaction, interested in reforms, and prepared to sympathise with progressive appeals … [T]he weakness of this strategy lies in the instability of the political support gained in this manner, the lack of activity and feedback from the citizens, the undoubted temptations of opportunism it encourages, and the lack of any organic base for the policies of such parties.’

Of course building a ‘common electoral front’ is, as Hobsbawm also realised, essential for electoral success. His criticism is more subtle: it is when we consider how to turn a broad-based electoral front into a project to transform society that the importance of being rooted in our communities is brought into sharp relief. The unfortunate history of Labour governments is that having acquired access to the levers of state, they forget about other avenues for change. Rooting our political strategy once more in the popular concerns and aspirations of the communities we care most about improving would create the potential to develop an ‘organic base for policy’ and a popular movement for transformative political action. We can build a movement that not only strengthens the ties that bind us together but one that is ready to play an active role as a partner in creating a better society.

This is an edited version of an essay which will appear in the forthcoming edition of IPPR’s quarterly journal PPR. This is special edition to mark the 20 anniversary of the last edition of Marxism Today, an iconic magazine of the British left.

The High Court has ruled that assets held by the Wedgwood Museum in Stoke-on-Trent can be sold in order to fill financial gaps in the Wedgwood Group Pension Plan. There are some 7500 members of the pension plan, of which 3500 are currently receiving a pension.

This is a sad day for Stoke-on-Trent and for the nation’s heritage. The collection of pottery at the Wedgwood Musuem is an unrivalled, one of a kind collection that showcases the ingenuity and creativity of the ceramic industry in the UK.

Tristram is now seeking urgent meetings with ministers to assess the fallout from this decision.

A full press release on the judgement can be read at http://www.tristramhunt.com/web/WedgwoodPension.pdf

On Tuesday, 6th December 2011, I delivered the Speaker’s 1911 Centenary Lecture.The subject was Tony Benn, a Puritan in Parliament.

A transcript of the speech can be downloaded here.

You can also watch the speech on the BBC iPlayer here.

The Policy Network have published thier document entitled,’What mutualism means for Labour’.

My chapter, ‘Big Society, Big Danger’ can be read here.

My ‘The Diary’ for the Financial Times.

The story can be read at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/58c57fd2-fa4e-11e0-b70d-00144feab49a.html#axzz1bmuZTrTj or a transcript is available below.

Stoke-on-Trent’s version of the Great Wall of China isn’t visible from outer space but it is striking. In the middle of the whitewashed, high-ceilinged, dust-laden China Hall, once the beating heart of the old Spode Works, leading ceramics designers from the city, where I am MP, have put together an inspiring monument to manufacturing. Not yet up there with the Hay or Edinburgh festivals, not quite London fashion week or Frieze, but Staffordshire this October hosts the British Ceramics Biennial and can expect an influx of art students, international designers, museum curators and wily investors.

What has made this possible is a ceramics industry that’s back from the brink and is once again delivering healthy profits. So there they stand cheek-by-jowl, our modern pottery barons – Burleigh, Emma Bridgewater, Royal Crown Derby and Wedgwood. But the hero of the hour is Spode. The original manufacturer of those blue Italian willow designs, found in nearly every middle-class household, had gone bust by 2009 as it outsourced production and abandoned innovation. The company that had bested Chinese porcelain with its own bone china in the late 18th century had, in a cruel revenge of globalisation, been brought to its knees by competition from China and elsewhere.

Then the Portmeirion Group intervened – buying up the brand, returning production to Stoke and reviving its fortunes. It understood that authenticity – “Made in Staffordshire” – was essential for success. So, recently I found myself at this former Spode potbank, taking a delegation of dignitaries from Zibo in Shandong province, China, around the biennial’s installations; or, telling the Chinese about china in the old China Hall.

What is also getting us really fired up in Staffordshire is the indecision surrounding the future of the Wedgwood Museum. For readers unfamiliar with the tale (raised previously in these pages by AN Wilson), this remarkable museum – based at the Wedgwood plant in Barlaston – is in danger of liquidation thanks to a perverse piece of legislation. The Pension Protection Fund, which is meant to secure the pensions of former workers whose companies have gone into administration, is pursuing the Wedgwood Museum for tens of millions of pounds following the previous insolvency of Waterford Wedgwood. The pensioners themselves will see little benefit but Staffordshire could have itself stripped of one of the greatest ceramics collections in the world.

The museum stands as one of the great embodiments of the English Enlightenment. It was Stoke-on-Trent and Lichfield, Derby and the Derwent Valley that nurtured the enterprise and experimentation of the 18th century. With great brilliance, the museum charts that story – of Wedgwood and Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley and James Watt. To have that taken away by a state agency would be an act of unspeakable cultural vandalism, and also put at risk the future of numerous local authority, company and trust museums up and down the country. I note the government has recently discovered £250m to empty the bins more regularly; we trust it might just see the value of the Wedgwood collection.

Wedgwood himself was a founding investor in the construction of the Trent and Mersey canal, which enabled him to ship his wares from Stoke to Liverpool and then across the Atlantic to the booming colonial markets of Bridgetown and Boston. Following its path, I decided to visit the new Museum of Liverpool during last month’s Labour party conference. I was sceptical of the Kim Neilsen design as yet another attack upon the waterfront by Liverpool city council. And while the nearby black-windowed Mann Island development is an absolute shocker, the Museum of Liverpool works well.

Inside, the Guggenheim-style circling wooden staircase produces a wonderfully airy space full of civic valour. Unfortunately, very few of the galleries were open but the one that was, on Liverpool’s imperial past, contained a rather interesting interpretation. During an account of the East India Company, the panel mentioned “The First War of Indian Independence”. I can only presume the curators were referring to what was once known as the Indian Mutiny of 1857.

No doubt, this version of history is regarded as inclusive and politically correct but it is, in fact, highly contested territory. Jawaharlal Nehru always thought of 1857 as the Mutiny, whereas the BJP, or Indian People’s party, like now to think of it as the first war of independence. But for British visitors, there might at least be some acknowledgement of the more well-known “Mutiny”.

The city’s galleries, however, are really about China rather than India, celebrating its historic connections with Shanghai – as well as subtly highlighting the coming global reality of growing Chinese investment in Liverpool. Or what is now known, as Wedgwood surely knew it too, as “the Atlantic Gateway”.

Back to the House of Commons and you can’t move for Conservative ministers complaining about how lazy the prime minister is. Never does his boxes; not on top of his brief; thinks he can wing it. So what does he do with his time? From the endless photoshoots of his DVD and book collection, we know he is a total philistine (unlike the Machiavellian George Osborne, who loves a good Shakespeare history play). But at least David Cameron spends time with his family.

Harold Macmillan, another Old Etonian prime minister, liked to busk the workload so he could while away the hours in his armoury of West End clubs. So much so that, as writer Ferdinand Mount recounted in a recent essay, a member of the club Pratt’s called in there one evening in the 1960s and asked whether there was anyone about that night. “Nobody at all, sir, only the prime minister.” Those were the days.

Tristram Hunt is MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central. The British Ceramics Biennial runs until November 13, www.britishceramicsbiennial.com

On Saturday, 15th October 2011 the first ‘Stoke Stories’ conference was held at Staffordshire University.

The conference brought together delegates from the Third Sector, Social Enterprises and local businesses to start conversations about civic regeneration and how those with the means can help those addressing the needs.

I must thank the WEA and the RSA for their continued support in organising the vote and also Paul Richards and Staffordshire University for hosting the day.

The RSA’s Matthew Taylor has written a wonderful blog on the day and that can be read here. 

http://www.matthewtaylorsblog.com/thersa/stoking-the-flames-of-renewal/

My article on the Tory plans to concrete our countryside was published in ‘The Daily Mirror’ on Friday, 23rd August 2011 and can be read here.

A transcript can be read below.

WHAT makes England special? Is it the pubs, the football or the seaside?

Or is it the countryside, that green and pleasant land, surrounding our cities, with its hedgerows, streams and woodlands?

Flying back from abroad, you instantly know you’re over England when you see that luscious, natural quilt of town and country, farmland and fields.

But under David Cameron’s new planning reform, it is all set to go.

The draft National Planning Policy Framework sounds dull but it could vanquish our unique landscape.

Yes, we need more housing, growing businesses and good ­transport links, but not by way of this developers’ charter, which imperils our great distinctiveness.

Sadly, such vandalism is all in tune with Conservative attacks on the countryside.

In 1933, writer JB Priestley set out from London on a journey along the Great Western Road and he was shocked by what he saw: a never-ending sprawl of light industry, petrol stations, advertising hoardings and traffic stretching into the country.

“This is the England of arterial and bypass roads, of filling stations and factories that look like ­exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance halls and cafes, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, ­Woolworths, motor coaches and everything given away for ­cigarette coupons. We might have rolled into California.”

This was the sprawl of the ­inter-war years when a lack of ­planning meant towns and cities leached out into the countryside.

The arrival of cheap motoring produced never-ending ribbon development along arterial roads.

Town and country merged – to the benefit of neither.

It was the prospect of British countryside lost for ever which spurred Labour into action.

London County Council leader Herbert Morrison came up with a plan to “provide a reserve supply of public open spaces and to ­establish a green belt or girdle of open space land, readily ­accessible from London’s urbanised area.”

When Labour came to power in 1945, protecting the countryside was a priority. Many who had fought during the Second World War had done so to defend the fields, valleys and lanes of their homeland.

In 1946 the National Land Fund was created to buy tracts of ­countryside to honour the fallen. “I should like to think that through this fund, we shall dedicate some of the loveliest parts of this land to the memory of those who died in order that we might live in freedom,” explained ­Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton. Then followed the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act that put an end to ribbon development – building only next to existing roadways – and separating countryside from city.

Most successful of all was the creation of National Parks.

Many on the Left had long thought it wrong that working people were denied access to natural wonders that owners of stately homes enjoyed.

National Trust founder Octavia Hill thought the country should be protected, “for the enjoyment, refreshment, and rest, of those who have no country house”.

In 1932, thousands of ramblers invaded the Duke of Devonshire’s lands in Derbyshire in the Great Kinder Scout Trespass, hoping to enjoy the outdoors.

So it was only right that the Peak District was the first, in 1951, to be awarded National Park status.

Now millions of­ ­families, hikers and ramblers enjoy the ­landscape, wildlife and clean air of these stunning, unspoilt areas.

This was the Labour legacy in the post-war years – and a legacy which the Conservatives have been trying to undermine ever since.

They did pretty well in the 80s when they relaxed green belt rules, allowed endless out-of-town ­superstores and hollowed out our high streets.

From 1980 to 2000, more open land vanished under ­development than at any time last century.

When Labour got back into power in 1997 we stemmed the crisis by prioritising building on former industrial sites, reviving our high streets and protecting green belt.

People moved back into the city centres of Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and Birmingham. New museums, bus stations, hi-tech businesses, our cities came back to life.

Sadly, the threat has now returned with the Government’s latest ­planning policy.

As his hapless economic policy produces no growth, Chancellor George Osborne has resorted to concreting over the countryside.

From next April, there will be a presumption in favour of all ­planning permissions, any out-of-date application will be waved through and there will be no need to develop brownfield land first.

And why? Such a planning free-for-all has done little to promote jobs and businesses in recession-hit Ireland, Spain and Greece.

Given that some 750,000 homes currently sit empty and there exists planning permission for 330,000 unbuilt houses, it will do nothing to kick-start house building.

And with business park vacancy at 17% and some 1.6million square feet of commercial space free for letting, bulldozing Britain won’t promote growth. It will ruin that special rural-urban divide – we’re back to the ugly 30s again.

That unique balance between city and countryside, so much a part of what makes England, England, is in peril. We need to do all we can to stop this Tory attack on our land.

With the British Ceramics Biennial opening in September I have argued that the ceramics industry still has place in the regeneration of Stoke-on-Trent. You can read the full article by going to www.tristramhunt.com/web/craft_council.pdf

You can read my article from ‘History Workshop Journal’ on the Importance of Studying History and the impact that the Coalition cuts are having on secondary History education.

www.tristramhunt.com/web/studyingthepast.pdf