Talking Telford: Chasing status befitting our modern urban powerhouse of a town
I was away in Glasgow over the weekend, giving me an opportunity to take stock of Telford and ponder on how it’s doing compared with one of the great British cities.
Maybe it’s an unfair comparison, but with the rate of growth I fully expect Telford to be named a city within my lifetime (though it might need a grander name first - Telford-on-Severn? Telford-under-Wrekin?) so to me, it’s only sensible to get a headstart on gauging the competition.
Telford is already bigger in terms of population than quite a few UK cities, though it doesn’t have a cathedral (like Salisbury) or a longstanding history of trade (like Hull), education (Cambridge) or Roman military significance (Chester) to have justified city status so far.
I’ve always thought the most instructive example is one of our West Midlands neighbours, Stoke-on-Trent - a relatively small city population-wise, but spread across a huge geographical area, formed from six historic town centres that over time have been stitched together with miles upon miles of housing estates, bountiful green spaces and former industrial heartland.
You can’t tell me there aren’t some striking similarities. Squint a little, swap Hanley for Southwater, Burslem for Wellington, Tunstall for Dawley and pottery for coal-mining, and you’ve got the blueprint of Britain’s next great polycentric city. Southwater, Telford’s de facto city centre, already has a food quarter, hotels galore and a world-class conferencing centre.
I appreciate that city status isn’t as prestigious or meaningful as it once was. Our neighbours in Wolverhampton won city status in 2001 as one of three ‘millennium cities’, but spake to someone from Wolverhampton and you’re just as likely to hear them call it a town. Even those in the highest offices in the land still get confused too: the Boris Johnson government suffered minor embarrassment when it launched its Town of the Year competition in Wolverhampton, which hadn’t been a town for years. Even worse was the fact the then Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick, who was the face of the competition, was born in the Black Country. Oops.
But what a success story it could represent for Telford - a pioneering new town pulled up from the very earth and uniting several proud old market towns, only ever intended to be housing for city ‘overspill’ but still finding ways to reinvent itself at every turn. The M54 motorway will turn 50 in 2033 - it would be as fitting an occasion as any other for Telford to announce itself to the rest of the UK as a city fit for the 21st century.
