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Stoke-on-Trent City of Culture 2021

Absolutely—I have a feeling that my hon. Friend will be receiving a packet of oatcakes before too long.

I can absolutely guarantee that no other city that has bid for city of culture 2021 will embrace it like Stoke-on-Trent will. Residents of our great city have always embraced the opportunity to highlight all that makes Stoke-on-Trent a fantastic place to live and, as many of my colleagues will testify, anyone who has ever visited will say that there are no friendlier people anyone could possibly meet. They are warm, they are generous, they are proud and they deserve the opportunity that city of culture status can bring. Liverpool, Derry/Londonderry and now Hull have enhanced the title of city of culture and been enhanced by it, and we will do the same.

To finish, I want to mention my, sadly now deceased, mother-in-law June Clarke. She was a paintress, like so many others, at Spode. She was walking past a shop a couple of years ago and stopped and said, “I painted that,” as she pointed through the window. Of course, as might be imagined, her comment was met with a little hilarity at the time, because she was pointing at a plate high up on a shelf in the shop. She described that, on the back of the plate, there would be a unique mark—her mark—that she had put on it many decades earlier. After going into the shop, lifting the plate down from that high shelf and turning it over, we saw that there was indeed her mark on the back. The level of skill involved meant that she could still recognise her own brushwork on that plate, which she had painted more than 40 years before. In many ways, that for me is the culture of Stoke-on-Trent: huge quality with a humble modesty—cultural excellence then, and cultural excellence now.

Stoke-on-Trent city of culture 2021 will be a perfect marriage of the historical excellence of our city and 21st-century creative genius. I am backing my city.