The volunteers in Stoke cleaning up the Labour council’s mess

It is a grey morning in Tunstall when a group of men in bright blue jackets stride out across the high street, armed with ropes, brooms and plastic bin bags. They are volunteers from TS Domestics, the local hardware store, and they are heading off on their latest mission: cleaning up their town.

The “Big Tunstall Clean Up” began in October 2024, born out of a growing belief that Tunstall was slipping into a state of disrepair. The council, the volunteers thought, was taking insufficient action to tackle the issues, and so the volunteers decided not to wait; instead, they rolled up their sleeves and, as they put it, sought to “Make Tunstall Great Again”.

Tunstall is one of six original pottery towns that formed Stoke-on-Trent. Today, it falls under the control of Stoke-on-Trent city council – a Labour-run authority with 28 Labour councillors, 13 Conservatives and two independents. Nearly 7,000 people live in Tunstall, and 30.1 per cent have no qualifications, far higher than the national average of 18.8 per cent. Once an industrial hub, its high street has now dwindled into a row of shuttered and dilapidated shops.

“When I was younger, it was bustling, it was a great place,” says Curtis Peters, 35, who owns the local hardware store. “But over the years, it’s just got worse and worse. We just got up and thought, let’s stop waiting for someone else to do it. If we do it, it might bring people back to the high street. It’s better for business, and better for everyone. I’ve got three children; I don’t want them walking around in a place like it’s neglected.”

For Peters and his colleagues, passively watching their town decline was no longer an option. “It’s all just come from waiting for things to happen,” explains Rhys Oakes, 31, a content creator who also works at the shop. “It was Curtis who came in one day and said ‘Why are we waiting for other people to do it? Why don’t we just roll over our own sleeves and get on with it?’”

Their most ambitious achievement so far has been the restoration of the Tunstall Market Clock Tower, a light stone and wood obelisk dating to 1893 and, as Peters describes it, “the centrepiece of the square of Tunstall”. Neglected for years, it was jet-washed back to life in November 2024. The public response has been overwhelmingly positive. The group’s TikTok account now boasts 13,200 followers, with many of their videos raking in over 500,000 views. “I’ve been in pubs, and people have just come up to me and said, ‘Oh, you’re the guy who’s doing that stuff,’” Peters says.

Today, the volunteers are tackling the pond in the local park. They stand around the outside of the lake, throwing magnets attached to ropes into it to retrieve metal items that have been buried under the water for years. Twenty-year-old Eddie Rutter wades into the water with a rope around him to retrieve an abandoned scooter, a bicycle, a traffic cone and a huge shard of glass, while others sweep the banks and collect the rubbish. A couple of volunteers with yellow gloves busily tidy up the banks.

Among them is 46-year-old Ruth Holloway. “I saw videos on Facebook and thought it was amazing, and a brilliant idea,” she says. “We can’t always rely on the council because there are so many places that need to be maintained.”

She believes that “red tape” often frustrates volunteers. “There was talk about not being insured… safety, falling in… whereas in the Seventies and Eighties we’d have been wading in there, pulling it out by hand,” she says. “[People] want to help, but there are so many obstacles for them to be able to help… it’s making it more difficult for people.”

Peters acknowledges the same problem: “If we ask permission for these things, then we probably would have hit a lot of red tape,” he says. “But we just have the attitude of just go and do it. Otherwise, a job that should take two hours takes 10 days.”

Another volunteer, 67-year-old Steve Lawton, says that though he enjoys the community aspect the work brings, he thinks the volunteers are ultimately doing work the council should. “All these flower beds were full of roses and daffodils,” he reflects of years gone by. “Now the council just leave it because it’s easier to manage as it is.”

Yet the volunteers insist they are not interested in political blame. “We try to stay neutral, and not comment on the council but ultimately it’s about what’s not happening – so we’ve just gone and done it,” says Peters. “Whether it’s because the council has got no money or whatever, but we’re not really interested in who’s to blame, really, we’re just like, let’s just get it done.”

They even believe that their work may be pushing the council to act. “We are seeing the council go and do stuff that we might have planned to do,” Peters says. He recalls how they organised a day to refurbish railings in the Memorial Gardens – only for the council to turn up an hour earlier. “The railings hadn’t been touched forever, we were about to repaint them, when all of a sudden, they had been taken away for refurbishment… I’d like to think because of what we’re doing.”

With the pond finally cleared, the volunteers prepare to head home. “It’s done now, we haven’t harmed anyone,” says Oakes, adding drily, “without a single sheet of paperwork”.

After their pond visit, the council got in touch with the team and put forward a plan for it to work with the group; offering first-aid training, health and safety training, some possible funding for bigger projects and also keys to areas that they had struggled to access in the past. “They’re aware we have a good social media following and good rapport with the public so are entrusting us to oversee a few key areas as long as we follow health and safety protocols,” says Oakes.

“We’re not harming anyone,” adds Peters, “We’re making the place better. So we just go and take action.”

A spokesman for Stoke-on-Trent city council said significant work to improve Tunstall was under way but welcomed the work of the volunteers, saying “the passion TS Domestics shows is admirable”.

But the council denied that it was “red taping” the volunteers, saying that its officers “met with the team last week for positive discussions about how we can support their work” but that the council had a responsibility to ensure that anyone doing such work had the appropriate insurance and met required safety standards.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]