015: Good News for Stoke & Staffordshire

General Election, Boundary Changes, Closer Look at Levelling Up, SCFC New Kit - Heritage Identity, Tortoise News in Stoke, More Harmful Reporting on Stoke and What Needs to Be Done, Now.

Good News 🎉

• General Election, there are Boundary Changes. On July 4th you’ll get your chance to vote in the general election. We’ll be partnering with The Lead to provide election coverage (they wrote the piece on levelling up below). For now, here are some helpful links to prepare for the new boundary changes across Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire.
  
  🗺️ Interactive Map to view new electoral boundaries.
  🌎 Write up on new electoral boundaries across Staffordshire (in ALBOS, by Phill Corrigan - originally published in The Sentinel)
  📍 Where you will vote
  📸 What you need to vote
  ✋ Who you can vote for (this is not final)

• Closer Look at Levelling Up Regeneration Projects. The Good News issue last week provoked some challenge. Particularly, “What makes these developments good news?”
  
  Stoke-on-Trent's plans to ‘level up’ were ambitious but in 2021 they seemed to be moving closer to a reality. The city council, then under Conservative leadership, was successful in securing £56m of the government’s Levelling Up fund to accelerate progress on three transformational schemes across the city.
   

  Two years on and much of the work that promised to transform the city has stalled or been scrapped. The now Labour-controlled council has claimed just £21.3m of the funds is successfully bid for and the clock is ticking for it to spend the remaining £34m before their deadline in March 2025. 
  
  The government says Levelling Up is “breathing new life into businesses and regions across the UK”. It’s about “growing the economy, creating jobs and supporting communities”. But much of the work in Stoke-on-Trent remains to be seen. READ ON.

• Stoke City FC Launch New Club Kit. I said we’d keep away from sport, but this SCFC kit launch is a great piece of content that has appealed to fans by re-connecting to the city’s heritage and history. The club have taken the emblematic bottle kiln as a design asset now carefully embroidered into the club’s physical and digital presence. Port Vale did this two years ago too with a 21/22 away kit too. The scale and reach Stoke and Vale have in this region, nationally and internationally should not be underestimated. Stoke City FC have 400,000 Instagram followers and on a recent trip to Cape Town, a Zimbabwean taxi told me all about Stoke and them beating Liverpool in Stevie G’s last game. Clubs that boldly represent the people (and perform well) have a huge impact in aspirations, pride and global image. Chapeau, to the makers of this kit and accompanying promotional video.

• Podcast, Tortoise News comes to Stoke. Another newsroom trying to do things differently, Tortoise are championing a “slower, wiser” news, in a similar vain to media like The Rest is Politics, they’re journalists and experts that are branching out from typical news rooms. They came to Stoke to speak to Jenna Goodwin (The Red Haired Stokie), Cris Cohen (FEASTED) and Anna Francis (Portland Inn Project) about all things election, Reform UK and what should be in the news. The conversation eventually landed on education, hospitality and the arts which is a provoking conversation as our region deliberates on the skills we need for the future.

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KNOT HAVING IT ❌

• Here we go again. Deep breath. Some people don’t believe I should give the “bad” or “negative” stuff any air time. My blood was simmering nicely and is now beginning to boil at the harmful damage I believe SOT Live is doing to Stoke-on-Trent and North Staffordshire. Drivel like this about Stoke being the “ugliest city in the country” is not important news, it’s gossip and is very damaging to pride and perception of our region at home and everywhere else. “News” delivered at this scale is picked up by national papers. This article about Newcastle-under-Lyme BIDs new team member is littered with falsehoods and misleading statements. Claiming that the person in question is “a Londoner in charge of saving struggling Newcastle”. Having met the brilliant people working in the BIDs to improve our town centres, I find this kind of writing disgraceful and harmful to the people and organisations being “reported on” and the people reading it who don’t have an alternative (yet). Simply ignoring this “news” is not enough, actively challenging the people writing or reading it is a civic call to arms that we all must be part of to protect what remains of our pride and identity.

Editor’s Note

I’ve said what I need to say above. Personally my next step is to try and make contact with The Sentinel/SOT Live in some way to improve this situation. They will not go away and serve a purpose. Without their presence there would be no news at all and that must be acknowledged. The question I’m sitting with is how we can play a part in working with them so that their journalism can be a force for change? Right now it is quite the opposite.

Cheers,

James

p.s the best way you can support The Knot is by sharing it with anyone you know, on social media or in any group or community that you are part of.

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• Daily Focus, North Staffs News, Red Haired Stokie, The Stoke-on-Trent Lead, welovestoke, A Little Bit of Stone, Made in Stoke, We Are Staffordshire