Festival Park

Last updated 10th, February, 2009

THE area known today as Festival Park was once a sprawl of steel mills and slag heaps, spewing smoke and ash over industrial Stoke-on-Trent, writes Richard Ault.

Now it is a bustling retail and leisure complex which attracts more than one million visitors every year.

Festival Park, in Etruria, sprang to life as the result of an ambitious regeneration project, in the aftermath of the National Garden Festival, which was hosted in Stoke-on-Trent in 1986.

Shelton Bar Steelworks

The British Steel plant, which employed 10,000 people in the 1960s, fell foul of increasing competition from abroad.

During the late 1970s, the situation reached crisis point when British Steel announced plans to close one mill and two blast furnaces. The hammer blow would result in the loss of more than 2,200 jobs.

By the end of 1979, just 700 employees still remained in work at Shelton Bar and the plant was being described as the largest derelict site in the West Midlands.

Staffordshire County Council acted to push forward a project with three aims: to rapidly create new job opportunities; to reclaim the derelict land at Etruria; and harness the changing economy while retaining the region’s manufacturing base.

The National Garden Festival

The National Garden Festival project was designed to be a phoenix rising from the ash, slag and melted steel at Etruria.

With Government support, the county council created the festival on the 165-acre Shelton Bar site, specially designing the reclamation and landscaping plateaux around each side, including three lakes.

The Garden Festival hosted in Stoke-on-Trent was the one of only five held in the country to achieve the combined aims of reclamation of a huge site and creating economic regeneration.

The festival itself – held on a purpose-built £25 million showground – was blighted by poor weather, but it brought thousands of people to Stoke-on-Trent, shining a national spotlight on the Potteries and its innovative treatment of derelict land.

In that it achieved its ultimate aim, which was to pull in visitors from across the country and overseas with an interest in bringing jobs and investment to North Staffordshire.

Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II opened the festival on May 8, 1986. It lasted for six months. The Queen said she was delighted to be in Stoke-on-Trent to formally open the event and the regeneration of the site would produce a heritage which would have made Josiah Wedgwood extremely proud.

The festival needed 20,000 visitors a day to break even but organisers insisted they were not disappointed with the 14,000 who turned out for the royal visit, as it fell on a working day.

Remembering the festival, Harold Hancock, the city council’s nursery manager, told The Sentinel in 2006: “It never stopped pouring down. The irony of it is that, two years after, the site looked far better than it did during the festival, because everything had bedded in and settled down.

“Another thing we noticed after the festival had gone was that it was like Watership Down around here, rabbits everywhere, and never taking any notice of you. But the building continued and the rabbits are gone now.”

Festival Park

A year after the Garden Festival, St Modwen Properties, following competitive tendering, were appointed as the developer of the site.

They built a major retail park and leisure complex, including a ski slope, a 150-bedroom hotel and nearly 300,000 sq ft of offices and employment space.

The Festival Park scheme, as it was re-christened, was very successful and the majority of the original Garden Festival site was redeveloped by the early 1990s, creating a scheme valued at more than £100 million. Around 3,000 jobs were said to have been created.

And Festival Park prompted a much wider regeneration impetus for Stoke-on-Trent. A partnership company, Stoke-on-Trent Regeneration Ltd, was formed between St Modwen and the city council in 1993, with the specific aims of building on the success of Festival Park and targeting the wider regeneration of the city.

Mike Herbert, regional director of St Modwen and a director of Stoke-on-Trent Regeneration, told The Sentinel in 2007: “The Garden Festival site has in the 21 years acted as a significant catalyst to the regeneration of Stoke and was the impetus that helped put the city on the map.

“It also gave the area the skills and ability to react to the massive structural change in the area’s three major industries – pottery, coal and steel.”

St Modwen is in the final stages of developing the final acres of the Shelton Bar steel mill that finally closed completely in summer 2000. Vodafone and Wade Pottery are due to move onto the site when work is complete.

St Modwen now estimates the total number of jobs created on the site so far at around 6,000.

Family attraction

Now, Festival Park is a prime location for adults and children alike, for shopping, watching a film, eating a meal or enjoying a game of 10-pin bowling.

The Odeon cinema, which also boasts a licensed bar and video games, has 10 screens on which to show all the latest film releases.

Nearby is Tenpin Bowling, where families can enjoy a 30 lane 10-pin bowling alley, a diner, a licensed bar or a video game arcade. Hot Shots snooker and pool hall is also popular.

Waterworld, with its swimming pools, fun slides and wave machine, attracts 400,000 visitors every year.

A trip to Festival Park could also take in Stoke Ski Slope, where visitors can learn to ski on a huge dry ski slope.

Diners can eat a meal at Frankie & Bennys American-Italian restaurant, Pizza Hut, or McDonalds. There is also a carvery at the China Gardens pub.

Retail was left out of the original brief for the complex, but St Modwen went against that instruction and there are now a wide range of shops including Boots, PC World, Mothercare, Next, Comet, Curry’s, Brantano, and a Morrisons supermarket. The variety and parking makes it a viable alternative to Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent’s official town centre, and has certainly been to the detriment of trade in the main shopping district.

It is also expanding as a trade park and houses a number of businesses, including banks like HSBC and Nat West, The Hanley building society, Beth Johnson Housing Association, architects Hulme Upright, IT recruitment firm Omnium and bookmakers Bet 365.

Festival Park has even become – to the annoyance of traders – a popular haunt for boy racers, but the practice of young drivers gathering on the site during evenings could soon be outlawed by a city-wide ban.

Festival Park also houses Greenhouse 2000 – Stoke-on-Trent City Council’s nursery, growing thousands and thousands of bedding and decorative plants every year.

It’ is one of the few parts of Festival Park that remains unchanged from the Garden Festival in 1986.