Notes

Reference Number: DR2004:0089

• Title: 'Potteries Think Belt: A plan for the establishment of a major advanced educational industry in North Staffordshire'

Form: textual records

Catalogued items within this file 0

People:

• Cedric Price (archive creator)

Description:

• three bound reports of 'Potteries Think Belt: A plan for the establishment of a major advanced educational industry in North Staffordshire', Feb. 1966

Quantity / Object type:

• 1 textual record(s)

Extent and Medium:

• 0.02 l.m. of textual records

Credit line:

• Cedric Price fonds
• Collection Centre Canadien d'Architecture / Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal

Folder Number:

• 144-118-002

• Thumbnails of a selection of the drawings indexed above are shown (right).

They provide links to digitized copies of the originals archived in the Cedric Price fonds at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal.

Notes

• OVERALL PLAN

• FACULTY AREAS

• TRANSFER AREAS

• HOUSING AREAS

Notes

Cedric Price felt that one of the major weaknesses of the British University system was:

• "The lack of awareness of both the correct scale and intensity at which such education should occur. Present institutions are both too small and too exclusive. Through lack of acceptance of advanced education as a prime national industry, the present context is in danger of lacking, on the one hand, recognisable social relevance, and on the other, the capacity to initiate progress rather than attempt to catch up with it."
• Cedric Price, "1.1 Introduction", Potteries Thinkbelt, (unpublished manuscript), February 1966, Cedric Price fonds.

Cedric Price claimed:—

• "This study helps to indicate a valid national and regional distribution of educational institutions."
• "In addition, through postulating varied forms of exchange utilising electronic static communications systems and equipment together with mobile and variable physical enclosures, the Study demonstrates the resulting physical organisation and indicates the changing validity of finite location."
• "Both the overall planning and detailed architecture of this project suggests the likelihood that education and the need to exchange information can equate to past needs for defence, energy and commerce as a generator of urban location and form: cities caused by learning."
• (ib.)

Cedric Price also claimed:

• "The re-assessment of the contemporary housing requirement in this Study together with an avoidance, at the first development stage, of any "civic design" indicates the order and priorities proposed for urban design method."
• (ib.)

Notes

1. Peter Laslett
2. Professor Harold L. Cohen
3. Sol Cornberg
4. British Rail
5. City Architect
6. City Engineer
7. Federation of Clay Industries
8. Ministry of Labour
9. National Coal Board
10. Public health Department
11. Frank Newby

Notes

As Cedric Price explained:

• "The P.T.B. [Price's acronym for the Potteries Thinkbelt] is planned to break down the isolation and peculiarity associated with further education."
• Cedric Price, "2.2 Educational", Potteries Thinkbelt (unpublished manuscript).

Notes

The West Midlands : a Regional Study

Cedric Price was well aware of the dire conditions in North Staffordshire and wanted to give something back to his homeland:

• "This area of North Staffordshire—including the Potteries and Newcastle-under-Lyme—is economically less prosperous than the rest of the region. As far as built physical environment goes, it is a disaster area—largely unchanged since its industrial expansion throughout the nineteenth century."
• Cedric Price, "3.0 Regional Implications" and "3.1 West Midlands Regional Study, HMSO 1965", Potteries Thinkbelt, (unpublished manuscript), February 1966, Cedric Price fonds.

Cedric Price noted as well that the Keele technical college remained aloof from the real needs of the Potteries:

• "The first post-war New University at Keele has shown the slowest growth of all Universities (present student population approximately 1000) has little contact with the area and few faculties related to the industrial content of the area."
• Cedric Price, "3.2 Educational", Potteries Thinkbelt (unpublished manuscript).

Notes

Cedric Price explained that:

• "Its size, 20,000 students, is such that its effect will be national rather than regional."
• Cedric Price, "4.1 Relationship to existing Universities", Potteries Thinkbelt (unpublished manuscript).

Notes

Cedric Price considered mobility and flexibility to be essential to the success of the project:

• "The proposed development is planned to enable advanced education to be undertaken in conditions taking full advantage of present day national and individual mobility. However, it is so designed to prevent its form and organisation from being restrictive in the future. [...] A far greater mobility of students between all educational establishments is envisaged. This necessitates calculated “slack” in the educational spatial capacity so planned."
• Cedric Price, "5.1 Educational", Potteries Thinkbelt (unpublished manuscript).

The Thinkbelt, Cedric Price promised, would:

• "...replace the existing rigid age and time structuring of university occupancy with a more elastic system enabling full participation by part-time and re-education factions. The pure and applied science and engineering bias of the P.T.B. involves an emphasis on large flexible organisation of faculties with easy links to national networks."
• (ib)

Notes

Madeley was the largest of the Transfer Areas. Cedric Price designed the area to permit easy linkage between the internal Thinkbelt rail and road systems and the national M6 motorway, and to provide "facilities for handling, assembly and construction of large scale goods and equipment."

The Meir Transfer Area linked the Thinkbelt network to an airfield, "providing facilities for rapid exchange of personnel or lightweight goods from P.T.B. to national or international networks."

1. Meir
2. Madeley
3. Pitts Hill

nb Change transparency of overlay to compare "before" and "after".

• Models available from Edukit on 3D Warehouse

Notes

Cedric Price designed six types of mobile, rail-based units to roam the rail lines of the Thinkbelt.

• Models available from Edukit on 3D Warehouse

Notes

1. Silverdale
2. Tunstall/Pitts Hill
3. Fenton/Longton

• Hanley - Shelton Iron and Steel Works
• Silverdale Colliery
• Keele

nb Change transparency of overlay to compare "before" and "after".

Notes

• Models available from Domestikit on 3D Warehouse

Notes

• 'Potteries Thinkbelt: Perspective and detail', courtesy of CCA

Preliminary sketch of view from train arriving at transfer area. The drawing describes Cedric Price's efforts to ascribe 'an aesthetic quality to the idea of indeterminacy' (Jeremy Melvin)

Notes

Cedric Price challenged architects to recognise that their true objective should not be the creation of monuments symbolising the "image of a city", but simply the provision of the means of "improvement of the quality of life".

Cedric Price refused to refer to the Thinkbelt as a university because he disliked the upper class connotations of the word, complaining that universities were little more than "medieval castles with power points [electrical outlets], located in gentlemanly seclusion".

In his introductory remarks, Robin Middleton underscored Cedric Price's idea of education as industry:

• "The Potteries Thinkbelt is a seriously considered project for revitalising that area in northern Staffordshire which has for generations depended for its livelihood and all sense of community on the manufacture of pottery. This industry has now become stagnant; the area a wasteland. Cedric Price's revolutionary proposal is that advanced education—and in particular advance technical education—should become the new prime industry."

Cedric Price envisioned a new form of community, which rejected traditional notions of public gathering.

• "For students would live all over the area. Their dispersal would mean that they would not live within a self-conscious and artificial 'studnet-community'. They would be members of a whole community, living and working together."
• ib.

Notes

Cedric Price updated the text from the report. For example:

• "The prime weakness of the advanced educational system in Britain is a lack of awareness of both the correct scale and intensity at which such education should occur.
• Institutions today are too small and too exclusive. Because advanced education is not regarded as a major national industry, it is in danger of failing to achieve both a recognizable social relevance and a capacity to initiate progress rather than attempt to catch up with it."

In a key change from the report, Cedric Price now claimed:—

• "This study proposes a valid national and regional distribution of educational institutions."

Cedric Price wrote:

• "...further education and re-education must be viewed as a major industrial undertaking and not as a service run by gentlemen for the few."

Cedric Price was adamant that the Potteries Thinkbelt would have a deliberate "bias towards pure and applied science and engineering".

Notes

Cedric Price hoped that the close integration of the project with the community at large would further break down the distinction between learning and living, allowing education to become a normal part of the daily life of the community:

• "The system by which the public is self-consciously invited to participate, on sufferance, in certain activities in existing universities will not obtain in the PTb, since the flexibility of learning equipment and methods will allow national participation by students in fields at present rigidly defined as secondary or adult education."

Students would benefit from observing and analysing traditional modes of manufacture in existing factories, while new factories could be built to implement the resulting advances in technology:

• "Though the effect of the PTb in providing new forms of employment directly related to the complex will be of short-term benefit to a community once heavily dependent on two basic, and contraction industries [coal and ceramics], the long-term value of the PTb will rest on the capacity of its research facilities to attraact new industries to the area and to reorientate and revitalize existing industries such as ceramic manufacture."

Notes