Why Pat’s legacy can help us move mountains again
LAST Thursday and Friday I was honoured and privileged to be a part of Danny Callaghan’s residency sharing The Pat Callaghan Archive as part of the Green Town Initiative at the Newcastle Common in Astley Walk.
Pat Callaghan was Danny’s mum, and a renowned broadcaster, environmental campaigner and activist with Radio Stoke, Staffordshire Wildlife Trust, and Groundwork, and spent many years in North Staffordshire pushing forward projects and engaging with public bodies on policy development.
During her career, she put together an enormous and fascinating archive of material - plans, strategies, policy documents and recorded material.
It is an incredible legacy, and alongside her broadcasting equipment, Danny has brought it to Newcastle town centre for public consumption. Danny has set out his mum’s office as it was, which adds a real personal touch to the archive and helps bring it to life.
During my two days in Newcastle,
I got to talk to some great people including Danny, the legendary Ray Johnson, and Jerome Whittingham, while one of the highlights was a visit by an older gentleman from Tunstall who told us about his time working for the likes of H&R Johnson and Twyfords.
The Green Town project is designed to examine the role of town centres – specifically Newcastle – in addressing climate change and has looked at issues such as waste from supermarkets, and the potential of repurposing buildings ahead of demolition.
Issues such as these will become increasingly important in the future, and as such, Green Town can be considered to be at the forefront of new thinking. And at the heart of this is the Pat Callaghan Archive.
I took a lot from both Green Town and the Pat Callaghan Archive, in particular three key points. Firstly, I was moved by what Pat did for North Staffordshire over a lengthy period of time and came away convinced that her archive is an extremely important and valuable resource for the Potteries. As a city, we can be better when it comes to developing and sharing archive material and given the nature of the Pat Callaghan Archive and the challenges that we continue to face, I believe that it is something that we need to find a permanent home for, and something that will provide important learning material.
Secondly, I was keen to examine historic policy documents with a view to determining whether we have moved on when it comes to thinking in terms of regeneration policy-making. My conclusion is we haven’t.
Pat’s archive included masterplans and strategy documents from the past four decades. Some of these have been part implemented, some not at all. But interestingly, some of the unimplemented things are still around today, which suggests that in some cases we need to move on.
Yet there is plenty within Pat’s archive that can point us in new and different directions.
Lastly, central to the Pat Callaghan Archive is the story of our city’s land reclamation heritage, something we don’t really talk about. This is something we became very, very good at, and it is something we really ought to celebrate and learn from.
As Danny has said, the Industrial Revolution in North Staffordshire led to a health and environmental disaster, and our land reclamation programmes helped to tackle both.
Part of Pat’s archive is Ray Johnson’s superb film Moving Mountains: The Story of Land Reclamation in Stokeon-trent, which charts the exploits of Stoke-on-trent City Council over a period of 20 years from the late 1960s, and looks at a number of projects including the reclamation of Hanley Deep Pit and creation of Central Forest Park, the clean-up of Westport Lake, the transformation of abandoned mineral lines into urban greenways, and the crowning glory that was the National Garden Festival of 1986. It’s an inspirational piece of work.
Our land reclamation heritage is as relevant today as it was all those years ago and may well be one of the key messages that comes from the Green Town project, because when we come to address the challenges the climate crisis will throw up for the North Staffordshire conurbation, we will need the same sort of thinking and ingenuity as we did in the 1960s when dealing with the destruction of industry.