Sun Street, Shelton
where industry had resisted Victorian insistence
on gridiron back-to-back town-planning, so shaped
the street’s progress into dog-leg, its knee-joint cricking
at unholy trinity of bottle-kilns – Brobdignagian skittles
standing high against skylines – and the shoe-box-builds
of pottery factors with their brick-and-shuttering sheds,
their lean-tos, crocks and tiles piled high, and shordrucks
of broken pots cluttering-up cobbled factory-yards –
no way could this glutted clutch of buildings be upped
and gone, so, broken-backed, the street was thrown off
Corporation schemes, their planning dream shelved
under “Pending”. And yet, terraces were built, and quickly:
chains of them, two-up, two-down with scullery, and shared
privies down the Staffordshire blue brick yards.
*
Sun Street? Some joke: sunlight hardly ever visible.
For decades. Fifty weeks of the year, terraces, factories,
yards were smothered under palls of belching smoke
and veils of soot at stoking-times from pottery-kilns,
steel-works and mines until the no-pay Wakes holiday
and chimneys cooling off for days. Sun, then, a blessing.
More usually rain, till back to work again.
*
At right angles to the Sun Street’s straight run, Argyle and
Clyde Street laddered up-bank, like giant steps, to Rectory Road;
and, below, Mrs Highton’s corner shop – salling avrythink -
and, opposite, Perry’s Shoulder of Mutton, where saggar-makers,
kiln-placers, jiggerers, jolleyers, firers, miners, furnace-workers
slaked their clay-and-coal-dust thirst, coughing up guts on
sawdust floors, swigging bitter, singing music-hall songs – Roll
aht th ba-rel – at jangling pianos, and getting sentimental
on dreams of country-air with Savanteen cum Sundee.
*
Feted on wasteland at Sun Street’s hub,
T’ Dogs racing-track, ovalled out in blackened ash
and dirt, the promiser of other dreams.
In open terraces under waving zinc, pay-packets
changed hands, and lives were broken, fortunes made and lost
as desperate men bet on skinny whippets – Ger on, yer bute.
Shift yer sen. Run, ruuunn – thin and keen as the wind –
restless on velvet feet till chasing after
a bag a fer that’s nowt lark a ‘are – the rising dust
shimmering like fine mist in the late summer dusk.
