There is a hole on the top of Rishi Sunak’s head. Roger Bairstow thrusts his index finger inside, presses his palm around the prime minister’s ears, and thumps him hard on the table.
“It’s been non-stop,” he exclaims through a mischievous grin. “It’s just been go, go, go: one prime minister after another.”
Next to Sunak are four other clay figures, each five inches in height, each dethroned by the person to their right. “The gang,” Bairstow calls them: Liz Truss, Boris Johnson, Theresa May, and David Cameron. He crafted each one by hand.
Bairstow has been a potter since he was 14, born and raised in Stoke-on-Trent, the city that built Britain’s ceramics industry. He’s been making jugs depicting British leaders since 1997, when, at a trade show, he felt a sudden urge to lampoon Tony Blair’s ears.
Roger Bairstow’s family has been making pottery in Stoke since the 1930s.
Bairstow holds one of his creations: a mini Toby jug depicting Rishi Sunak.
The floor of his workshop, caked with dry paint, crunches underfoot. “You’ve got to be very careful when you’re handling clay,” Bairstow says, deadly serious now, pointing to the kiln where his leaders are fired at 1,215 degrees Celsius (2,220 degrees Fahrenheit). “One wrong move and… pfft.” His hands smash together for effect.
But work has never been more demanding, because in London, leader after leader has succumbed to the heat.
The Conservative Party has ruled Britain for 14 tumultuous years, deposing its own prime minister four times in the process. It has thrashed from one ideology to another, and one scandal to the next, indelibly transforming the country while transfixed in an endless internal war. Sunak entered Downing Street in October 2022 when Truss’s premiership imploded after just six weeks; the paint was barely dry on her figurine when she quit.
And perhaps no city has convulsed with the consequences of the 14-year Tory project more violently than Stoke.
Its six federated towns — also known as the Potteries — lost libraries, childcare programs and community centers when Cameron’s austerity program bit in the early 2010s. They voted overwhelmingly for Brexit in 2016 when Johnson convinced the country to forge a path away from Europe. And they broke with decades of tradition in 2019, abandoning the Labour Party in an election that Johnson won in a landslide.
What did it get back? “It’s just a mess,” Bairstow, a lifelong Tory voter, says of his city. “We’ve got no character.”
Stoke’s decline wasn’t reversed. Its high streets are empty, its wages are low, its public services are struggling and crumbling kilns litter its skyline. It is Britain in miniature; jaded but soldiering on, desperate for change but doubtful that anyone can deliver it.
Stoke, and the rest of the “Red Wall” political battleground that straddles England’s Midlands and North, is primed to end the Tory era on Thursday; forecasts indicate its voters will abandon the Conservatives in the general election, sending Labour back into power with a potentially monumental landslide.
But Stoke is, to use the parlance, knackered; skepticism is the currency. Every pollster predicts an epochal shift on Thursday. Most people in Stoke wonder if anything will actually change.
A painful legacy
Everyone seems to remember a better time in the Potteries.
Bairstow recalls with a twinkle the commute to his father’s factory in the 1950s, when his town of Hanley was bustling.
“There was a factory on every corner,” he says. He misses it; Bairstow was 6 years old when he fell in love with pottery. “It’s just always been there,” he says. “Always.”
Bairstow has created jugs of every British prime minister going back to Winston Churchill.
Bairstow balks at the use of computerized machinery in Stoke’s remaining pottery factories. Here, everything is done by hand.
Stoke-on-Trent’s towns — Hanley, Burslem, Tunstall, Longton, Fenton and Stoke — found fortune under their feet two centuries earlier, in the form of clay and coal. It was a “remarkable geological combination,” explains Tristram Hunt, the director of London’s V&A Museum, who served as Stoke Central’s Labour MP between 2010 and 2017.
But the post-industrial era has been harsh. “Pits n’ Pots” workers felt targeted by Margaret Thatcher and ignored by Tony Blair. And since 2010, austerity — a severe cost-cutting program overseen by Cameron, aimed at reducing budget deficits — has chipped away at Stoke’s foundations.
Stoke’s council nearly went bankrupt this year. Bus services have been slashed. Homelessness has risen. Community centers were closed. Nearly four in 10 children live in poverty. Ambulances often take hours to arrive, then return to a hospital that has struggled with staffing.
A high-speed railway was meant to connect this part of the country to its economic hubs. It took time, it cost money, it caused arguments, and in the end, it never happened.
“The country’s screwed now, basically,” says Mark Gibney, 40, who once ran a baby clothing shop, but now works in a pub. He walks home every day past his former business’s boarded-up storefront. He looks towards his daughter. “What’s it going to be like when they reach my age?”
Britain’s towns urgently need a jolt. Johnson’s government, distancing itself from austerity politics, siphoned funds out of major hubs as part of its much-hyped promise to “Level Up” the country. Stoke, an electoral battleground, was a litmus test for the scheme.
But even the city’s former Conservative MP admits the project fell short of the impossibly high expectations it created.
“A huge amount of money’s come into the city, but people don’t see it (because) they walk into the city center and there are still homeless people,” says Jo Gideon, who won Stoke Central for the Tories in 2019, but was not selected to contest it again.
Funding promises, she says, fall flat when people “can’t get a doctor’s appointment, or the potholes haven’t been fixed, or the trains don’t run on time.”
Gideon calls herself the “accidental MP” — her win in Stoke in 2019 defied expectations and a century of evidence that the city would vote Labour.
But she says her party quickly lost its way. “Politics is won in the center ground — why are we ceding that ground to the Labour Party?”
Jeff Barber is what Labour strategists call a “hero voter;” He supported Labour his entire life, then backed Brexit, and finally switched to the Tories in 2019 to see it through. He and millions who did the same defined the last election, and Labour must win them back to return to power. But Barber has lost faith. “Conservatives, Labour, it never does any good,” he says from his favorite pub in Tunstall.
Decorations adorn The Tavern pub in Tunstall while England’s soccer team take part in the Euro 2024 championships.
The constant churn of promises, policies, and leaders has left a wound. “Trust has gone,” Gibney says. “Everyone says one thing and does the complete opposite.” Faith in politics is at a record low in Britain, according to the British Social Attitudes survey.
Some in Stoke point to a single moment they lost faith in government — the unfulfilled promises of Brexit; the flurry of sleaze scandals; the pandemic “Partygate” saga that demolished Johnson’s premiership; the catastrophic Truss economic experiment. But for most, distrust has grown slowly, like street noise seeping into a dream.
Gibney has other concerns, anyway. “Since Friday, we’ve had a person jump from the roof of the pub up the road, we had a car fire on the street I live in, and this morning we had a drug raid,” he says. “I’d love a little box on the bottom of the (ballot paper) where it says: ‘no confidence.’”
A ‘destroyed’ city
The paint is chipping on Hope Street.
Fifteen years ago, on this road in Hanley, you could fix your bike, tune your guitar and pick up a takeaway without passing another storefront. All those businesses, and more, are gone now.
There are many culprits: Online shopping, wages that haven’t kept up with inflation, higher household bills. Stoke has the country’s highest rate of households living in fuel poverty, meaning that their income after paying for energy will fall below the poverty line, according to National Energy Action. Incomes here grew just 0.7% per year, on average, between 2010 and 2021 — far behind the 1.2% yearly growth they saw between 1998 and 2010.
At the top of the road, Paul Ray paces uneasily. He blames another menace. “Dust has destroyed the city,” he says. “It’s changed the drug game, changed the city, changed everything.”
Stoke is the reluctant capital of “monkey dust,” a dangerous new synthetic drug that authorities have struggled to control. Ray, 30, says it leaves people “climbing on buildings, stabbing each other, losing the plot.”
He says his own life was derailed by an addiction to dust. Ray is just out of prison on a firearms offense, and he’s waiting outside a drug treatment center.
He has bounced between Stoke’s police stations, hospitals and drug underworld for years; he plans on staying in the city to get clean. But Stoke needs help, he says, and all he’s seen is drama.
“I’ve voted Conservative the past few times. Now, I don’t know why I’m bothering with it all… It’s been like a revolving door.”
Politicians “choose where money goes, and what services money goes into,” he says. “Housing’s an issue, then you commit crime, then drugs… It’s like a fire triangle; if you take one of those (problems) out, it could fix the whole thing.”
A new era
Gareth Snell understands the scale of the problem.
“I used to find, as an MP, that Stoke would be at the top of the lists of things you didn’t want to be at the top of, and the bottom of lists of things you didn’t want to be at the bottom of,” he says.
He is running to return as Stoke Central’s Labour MP, after losing to Gideon in 2019. That night, pundits spoke of a decade of Tory rule under Johnson’s stewardship. They wondered when, if ever, Red Wall towns such as Stoke would return to Labour. CNN’s request to interview the Conservative candidate for the seat, Chandra Kanneganti, was declined.
Hope Street in Hanley, where many businesses have been shuttered.
The Portland Street estate, where homes were offered for £1 under a council regeneration scheme that attracted global attention.
Politically, the Labour party is largely transformed now, dragged to the center by former barrister leader Keir Starmer. They are, by every single forecast, on the cusp of a monumental victory; even most inside the Tory campaign privately admit the game is up.
But the scale of Labour’s offer to revive Britain’s public services is modest. The non-partisan Institute for Fiscal Studies says its public spending promises are “tiny, going on trivial.” It adds that “delivering genuine change will almost certainly also require putting actual resources on the table.”
“The people I’m talking to,” Snell shoots back, “aren’t reading IFS reports.”
“Any manifesto could always be bolder, but the reality is we don’t know what we’re inheriting financially,” he adds. “There isn’t an infinite pot of money that we can magic up overnight.”
He insists that he’ll push for funding that Stoke needs — “You can say no once, but I’m going to keep coming back” — but he won’t be alone.
‘I’m always fighting’
One town over, June Cartwright isn’t waiting.
Everyone in Burslem knows Cartwright, an 80-year-old community organizer who has worked against the grain to improve her hometown. “We used to have community centers, we’ve got nothing like that (now). No library. It was such a bustling, busy town,” she says.
Cartwright epitomizes the one public service increasingly available here: a determined, neighborly goodwill.
“I’m always fighting,” she adds, with the energy she has left. The fight began in 2011. “The council decided they weren’t going to fund a Christmas tree for us. And my friend’s little boy said: Isn’t Christmas coming to Burslem?” she recalls.
Cartwright raised a few thousand pounds, and staged a Christmas festival. The next year, there were summer parties too, and a fully-fledged community group.
But the so-called Queen of Burslem is trying to retire, if the phone ever stops ringing. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do more,” she says.
Down in Hanley, Anna Francis — 40 years Cartwright’s junior — is picking up the baton. A decade ago, Francis bought a home in Hanley’s dilapidated Portland Street estate for £1 (then $1.70), as part of a council initiative to improve the neighborhood which required buyers to renovate their property and engage in the community.
There were tense interactions, at first, with her new neighbors. “Some of the existing community were really angry; (they) said: you’re not welcome.’”
But the scheme largely worked. “My next-door house was a boarded-up house, the one opposite had been burned out and had no roof, and the one next door to that was empty… all of those have since been renovated,” Francis says.
Francis won funding to turn a disused pub into a local community space. While it is renovated, her community group holds pottery workshops in a shipping container across the street.
Anna Francis bought a home in the Portland Street estate for £1, and has since helped found the Portland Inn Project, running art programs for locals and raising funds for a community space.
A local woman crafts a “Portland Pigeon,” a decorative ceramic tile that pays homage to Stoke’s rich ceramics history, during a class at the Portland Inn Project’s temporary space.
On this day, and every Tuesday, as the summer sun sets, local mothers are making pigeon figures from clay. Their children box and play soccer outside. “Some people call (pigeons) really brilliant companions, and other people call them flying rats,” Francis says. “There’s a dual way of looking at our neighborhood as well, and we’re trying to flip it so we see the positive story.”
It may not look like the work Roger Bairstow has done since the age of 14. But this is Stoke’s centuries-old pottery tradition carried into an uncertain future.
As the emotional chasm between Stoke and Westminster grows impossibly wide, the city has become reliant on people like Cartwright and Francis. Both say their neighbors need support, and they can’t provide it all. But for now, they’re making something out of very little.
“Stoke is a really creative city,” Francis says; its history consists of “people who would recognize the resources of the place.”
Centuries ago, that meant “digging clay out of the ground and transforming it into something beautiful, and then firing it,” she says. “Today, it’s a different set of issues and resources.
“But it’s still the same ethos.”
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