New paintings and regular art updates.
Street art in Newcastle under Lyme yesterday. Someone called Ian Mood has painted on a metal cabinet with images of miners. They were working up to about 40 years ago when the Coal industry of the country was dismantled and destroyed by Margaret Thatcher who was the Prime Minister of the time. There is still a lot of dismay at what she did. Life is crazy sometimes.
Mystery Play mask. From 2018 or 2019. An outside play we did in the summer. One day only. About the history of the potteries. Set in a pottery museum that comes to life.
Why this? Because our local council want to cut jobs for curators and close the Gladstone Museum in Longton, Stoke-on- Trent, for five months a year and reduce the opening times for the Potteries Museum and Art gallery in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent. Why aren’t we promoting tourism, getting people to visit? The council say their £600,000 will only have a minimal effect!
For years the bandstand in the park had been a sad sight. Money was short and it wasn’t being spent on places like this. Then the politics changed. Our city voted with the ruling government and suddenly money was available. Since then, in the last few years, children’s centres and libraries have closed. Council offices are closed and were eventually knocked down. Police stations throughout the city closed. Now there are only one or two left. Even the Magistrates Court was closed. The argument had been that we didn’t need, or couldn’t afford these things. Although the council changed allegiance the city wasn’t rewarded with much, perhaps a few newly built office buildings in the city centre (some still unoccupied years later). Certainly not much to make up for the losses. Oh the town hall got a makeover with expensive wallpaper, but what of the rest of the city…. Well we got a lovely new bandstand! And I’m not being a grouch, it is lovely, but where is the regeneration we keep getting promised? Stoke-on-Trent was once a centre of industry, steel, coal, and pottery. Now, a city of warehouses. Sad.
I remember Walsall illuminations over the years. We went most years as children, it was always wonderful to wander through the Arboretum, a huge park in Walsall. The lights as we called them usually ran from September and the leaves that were starting to change, were lit with coloured lights, some of the light displays were brought in from Blackpool. The beauty was that you could walk through the park, eventually coming out by the boating lake where you could see a spectacular light show, especially in later years when they used lasers and fountains. Part of the charm was that they kept some of the tableau for years. Like the clock family. These were clock shaped with legs and arms and the hour and minute hands formed the faces. They were fibre glass and painted bright colours. With bulbs placed in them to light them. There was always a fair on in the park so children could go on the rides and have candy floss. It’s ten years since ‘cost cutting’ closed them down. So sad……
Mallaband-Brown