My kind of town is shaped by the experiences of childhood, growing up in the heart of industrial Britain, and now fearing that Starbucks will start to sell fish suppers.

The Pert family came from Ferryden, a quaint village with a long history of seafaring on the south side of the River South Esk, opposite Montrose. My great-great-grandfather was a fisherman and recent trips have uncovered numerous remnants of an industry of smoke-houses, ice-houses, harbour walls and coastal defences like Scurdy Ness Lighthouse, an infrastructure serving a community that has now all but gone.

Following the decline of fishing in Ferryden large parts of the community relocated. My grandfather headed west to Clydebank, north-west of Glasgow, a town created to house the shipyard workers who built the Lusitania (1906), Queen Mary (1934), Queen Elizabeth (1938) and the QE2 (1967). Also here was the Singer sewing machine factory which opened in 1885 and by 1960 employed 16,000 workers. In 1941, the Clydebank Blitz destroyed 4,000 and damaged all but seven of the town’s 8,000 houses. Thirty years later I was born in the top-floor red sandstone Clydebank tenement now occupied by the planning department. The flat overlooked the Singer factory at the front and the Clyde shipyards to the rear, and my fondest memories are of the comings and goings of the people whose lives were dominated by these two great industries. Clydebank was a world leader in manufacture and industry and its people shared a collective pride for the place and the products of their labour.

After the Blitz the construction of workers’ tenements gave way to low-density Garden City housing with wide streets. But it is the powerful image of the tenements that lined the bus route into Glasgow, passing through the shipbuilding neighbourhoods of Yoker, Whiteinch and Partick, that sticks in my mind. To the south and west were the red sandstone tenements with ‘wally’ (tiled) closes for the middle class, and to the north and east were the blackened grey sandstone of the working class tenements.

In December 1980 my brother and I counted 700 Christmas trees in the four-storey tenement bays on the 40-minute bus ride back from Glasgow. Last year I took the same trip with my four-year-old daughter and could manage only 254 – proof enough that low-density living affects us in mysterious ways.

Fast forward to 2009 in Stoke-on-Trent where we are working with Bridgewater Potteries on a new factory within a canalside redevelopment. Stoke-on-Trent became a single borough in 1910, uniting Hanley, Burslem, Longton, Stoke, Tunstall and Fenton. Once the pottery capital of the world, today Stoke is a ravaged battlefield where the Industrial Revolution was won and lost, a wasteland of ruined factories and rusting machinery. The landscape of 4000 brick kilns has been reduced to just 47, and the distinctive brick and ceramic terraced housing stock is giving way to generic house types and developer sprawl. For more than 250 years the North Staffordshire Potteries were the centre of the English ceramics industry. Here Josiah Wedgwood and Enoch Wood (Cedric Price’s great-great-grandfather) opened the first ‘porcelain manufactories’ and by the 1970s some 75,000 people worked in the Potteries – today there are 7,500.

Architectural identity is dissolving and the distinctive terraced houses are being demolished, Wedgwood and Doulton have all but gone, Armitage Shanks has reduced production and Minton’s factory was demolished in 1987. The closure of hundreds of potteries has fractured the continuum of past, present and future, and with it the sense of belonging and identity.

Britain’s industrial infrastructure has become increasingly obsolete as the ‘culture’ of the new capitalism negates craft knowledge and skills and workers in old industries are haunted by the spectre of uselessness. What is the future for these towns and villages and where is the future industry that will offer us the twenty-first century terrace, tenement, lighthouse, kiln, ice house, smokehouse, factory, clocktower and canal – and the opportunity to count Christmas trees? In Hanley and in Clydebank there is a small glimmer of hope.
Alan Pert is director of NORD, whose current projects include Wexford County Council headquarters and a 2012 electricity substation.
AT199/June 09 p96