Parksite Estate, North Staffordshire
Parksite
I was born and bred on an estate called Parksite. The estate was built in the late 1960s and completed in 1972. There is not much information to be found on the internet about Parksite; when you search on Google you will see listings for Parkside. Parkside is located in Lancashire and used to have a big coal mine called Parkside Colliery just like the Silverdale area where I lived. The coal mine near me was called Silverdale Coliery located in the area of Silverdale in Newcastle Under Lyme. Parksite is also located just outside of Silverdale. It’s less than half a mile away. Silverdale is a village and civil parish in the Borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire, west of Newcastle-under-Lyme. It is a self-contained ward of Newcastle Borough Council returning 2 Councillors. Historically, the village was dominated by the coal industry and records indicate coal was mined in the area as long ago as the 13th century. The last colliery, Silverdale Colliery, closed in 1998. Brick-maker Ibstock also operated a large clay quarry next to the former colliery. The thee Photographs below were all taken in 1993 by me looking from the old coal tip used by Silverdale Colliery. Below are two photo-stitched photographs I took in 1993 of Parksite. One is looking towards Parksite from the coal tip and the other is looking from my bedroom window towards the coal tip and you can see Droitwich Close below. You can see Silverdale Coilery on the left in the first photograph. You can see Furnace Pool where a Furnace was once located. In the second photograph, you can see the coal tip. On the right, you can see the opencast. The open cast is now all filled in and the land is now used as a nature reserve. The old Black Bank was replaced with a new road called Black Bank. The Transmitter you can see in the distance was erected in 1974 and is used for local radio like BBC Radio Stoke and Signal Radio. It is also used for the local digital radio radio broadcasts. You will notice how high up some parts of Parksite are and you get some really good views up there. From the highest point, you can see all of Newcastle and as far as Trentham and parts of Stone. You can also see Mow Cop from the highest points of Parksite. Parksite had four shops when I was a you lad and lived on the estate. There was a butcher’s shop, a Vegetable Shop, a Paper Shop and a Normal Shop that two men ran up until the late 1980s. Their names were Jack and Don. I remember the paper shop being run by a lady and a man named Ron and Kay and before that was an old man. I remember a lady and a man running the butcher shop but did not know their names. All of the shops have now closed down and the buildings are due to be demolished and new property built on the land.
View of Parksite from the old coal tip.
One of the many views you get from Parksite as seen from what was my bedroom window on Bath Road.
Prefab Houses on Bath Road
I lived in one of the Cornish Houses on Bath Road on Parksite Estate and they might have looked like a bungalow but they were not. The houses had two open coal fires one in the front room and one in the back room. There was no central heating in them unless the people who lived in them had it fitted. In the winter it was very cold upstairs as well. The outer walls of the bedroom were plasterboard but the main Internal dividing walls are made of PC wall blocks or brick. The photographs below were taken in June 1993 and show how the house looked before the bottom half was modernized with brick. The modernization started around 1989 for the people who had bought their houses. The rest was owned by a private landlord in Southampton, England. The house I lived in was rented and the landlord failed to maintain the outside of the house. If you look at the photograph below on the left you will notice that the bedroom windows of the house on the right where I lived have a different design. They had to be replaced due to the wood rotting and parts of the wood falling off the windows. My mum and dad tried to get the landlord to replace the windows but they never did any work. So had to get in touch with the local council and they did the required work and replaced the windows then sent the bill to the landlord.
Bath Road then and now
The remaining houses eventually had the bottom half modernized in the late 1990s and completed in 2000. You can see how all of the houses are now in the screenshot below on the right using Google Street View. The photograph on the left shows how the street was in 1993. The house I live in did not have a fence at the front or rear garden and was a good shortcut leading to Droitwich Close below. Some people would ask if they could take a shortcut through the garden but some did not. We eventually had a fence built at the bottom of the rear garden and it took a lot by surprise watching them walk up from Droitwich Close and find they could not cut through to Bath Road and would have to walk the long way around up Peebles Road leading to Bath Road. My mum and dad decided they wanted to move off the estate like a lot of other people did at the time and we eventually moved in April 1994.
The inside and outside
The summertime was nice to have a walk around the Haying Wood or other parts of the nearby countryside and there was a lot of it as you will have seen in some of the other photographs. The photograph below on the left shows the front living room and you can see the fireplace that was used to burn coal to heat the room in the winter. The rear room which was also the kitchen had a fireplace with a small metal boiler at the rear of the fireplace to heat the water for the main big copper tank in the airing cupboard. The centre photograph shows the rear garden with the fence that was erected in 1993 by me and my dad. The photograph on the right shows the large coal shed used to store the coal and other things used for the garden like the lawn mower. My bike was also stored in the shed as well. We used to throw old bread on the shed roof and you would see a lot of birds from the bedroom window. I remember when I was a young lad we had an NCB coal wagon delivering coal that was free because my dad worked for the NCB in the 1970s. The shed was full and my bike was buried under all the coal.
The Inside of the house now and then
The two photographs below show the rear room of the house that is used as the kitchen. The photograph on the left was taken in 1993 and you can see how different the kitchen looks with the pantry on the left and me standing by the cooker. I was about 21 years of age back then and had plenty of hair. The small room that I am standing in was used for the cooker and led to the back door. You can see two small doors on the right of the photo with two smaller doors under those. That is where the big copper tan was stored to store the hot water and a storage part underneath. The photograph on the right is the same kitchen and house taken sometime in 2023. You can see how much the kitchen has changed with the pantry, airing cupboard and fireplace being removed.
The two photographs below show the front living room three decades apart. The picture on the left was taken in 1993 and you can see how different it is with the technology in the living room. You will notice the television back then was a cathode ray tube television. It was a colour television made by Hitachi and an analogue and each button had to be tuned to a channel. we only had four channels back then. Not all televisions had remote controls so you had to get out of your seat and change the channel yourself. You can see a big electronic device to the left of the television. That was called a video recorder. It was the Ferguson Videostar 3V29 VHS Player and Recorder. It was something everyone had in the 1980s and 1990s long before DVD players and recorders came along in the mid and later part of the 1990s. Those of you born before 1995 will have known how to use one to set up and record a television program. You had to insert a VHS Cassette Tape making sure there was enough left to record on and not to record over anything else you wanted to watch. The Ferguson Videostar 3V29 was an early model and was released around 1982. Some models of video recorders had auto-tuning. The RF Out channel could be set from 30 to 60 by using a small screwdriver to turn a small screw at the back of the unit. The later models could be done via the remote control. On 30th of March, 1997 Channel 5 was launched. There was a problem with the channel that in some areas of the U.K. it would be on the same channel your VCR was transmitting out to your television via the RF Out. Not everyone at the time knew what to do about or how to change the output channel on the older VCRs. I did know how because I had learned how to change it when doing a training course at a television shop. A few people asked me to correct the channel on their VCRs. With modern digital smart televisions, there is no need to do all of that anymore with everything being on-demand and television tuning themselves. The photograph on the right shows how the living room is now taken in 2023 with a radiator where the sideboard used to be.
Haying Wood
During my childhood, I had many friends and we used to play in the woodland called the Haying Wood. In the school summer holidays, we would build dens and have small campfires. We did a lot back then because there was no internet or smartphones in them days. This was in the early 1980s long before game consoles like the Play Station and Xbox. There were computers but our parents could not afford Commador 16 or Commador 64. They cost well over £150 and wages would have been £65 a week. They had to pay rent and other bills out of all that so would not have had much. There were a few friends who had a Spectrum ZX and other computers but their parents were earning higher wages. We as kids then made our entertainment up. Not all of us had brand-new push bikes at Christmas either. A few did. I used to have bikes given to me that were almost in good condition but we used parts from other bikes that fitted. That’s how it used to be for us. The generations before me would not have had computers or bikes. They would of gone fishing made dens in the woods or made those wooden trolleys to ride on from pram wheels rolling down steep hills. I used to do all of that as well and crash sometimes and it hurt but we did not go crying to our parents. In the winter months, we were playing outside. We also played in the parks where there were swings, seesaws, and roundabouts to spin around on. There were also big climbing frames and some of us would fall off hurting ourselves or breaking bones ending up in the Accident Unit or A and E as it’s now known. There were remains of old Iron and Stoneworks in the Haying Wood and you can still see the remains if you know where to find it. There is a lot spread out. The two photographs taken in June 2019 are part of the Haying Wood Just behind Droitwich Close of Parksite Estate. You can see how much it has overgrown over the years and is an area where I used to play as a kid and climb up on the posts seen in the photograph on the right. The posts and wall are the remains of a bridge that led to the Stoneworks. The stoneworks closed in 1940 and there is not much information about it.
Maps
Below are three screenshots from Google Earth Pro showing the location of Parksite to the west of Silverdale. Google Earth Pro also has historical views dating back to the 1940s. The image on the left is what Parksite and Silverdale are like now from an aerial view. In the middle image, you can see that Parksite is not even built but you can see that there were a lot of industrial areas. Silverdale Colliery is visible in the centre of the image. You can see how some of the roads have changed over the years. If you look to the top left of the image you can see where there used to be a railway track leading the the lines at Silverdale. There is no information about the railway track and what it was used for. It might have been used for one of the nearby coal mines or other industries at the time because there was a lot around the area. The image on the right is both images overlaid together to give you an idea of how much the area has changed over the years. You can see how Parksite was before it was built. There used to be over 30 mini pits or footrals as we call them in the Potteries area. If you look near the bottom left where the railway track is to the left side of Silverdale Tunnel or Half Mile Tunnel as we called it you can see what was a Tile Works. There used to be a farm and you can see that in the middle image if you look where the postcode ST5 6QX is on the map.
The Red Rock
Another area of the Haying Wood we used to play as kids was on a big rock that we called the red rock. It is possible the ash that was dumped by the tile works or coal mines. There is no information about it. We used to jump off the rock and we had rope swings behind the rock and other places in the Haying Woods. There was a lot for us as kids to do back then and we never got bored during the school holidays. We had many happy times around those woods. The two photographs were taken in 1997 with my Olympus OM-10 35mm film camera. It was a hot day in the middle of summer.
The Bugs
Another area of the Haying Wood we used to play as kids was an area we called the bugs. I do not know where the name came from because it’s what the locals called it. It was a waste tap for the coal mine many years ago before Parksite was built. It was used by us as kids for riding our bikes around on and the older folks like teenagers would ride around on motorbikes and sometimes allow you on the back if you were brave enough to go on the back of a motorbike as a young lad of 11 and 12 years old. There was a mini pit right next to it but closed down in the mid-1980s. You had very good views from up there. You could see the Welsh Mountains and parts of Cheshire like Crewe. In the summer where my bike is seen in the photo on the right, you could sit and relax because it was so quiet up there and all you could hear was birds chirping away. The photographs below were taken in June 2019 and you can see some of the destruction caused by off-road vehicles because the land was bought by a company in Cheshire. The area now is not safe to ride a bike due to how the vehicles have worn down the ground with the wheels so if you ride your bike on the highest part in the middle of the track and you lose your balance you have no were to put your feet and you going to fall off your bike.
Further in the woods
Unless you are a good bike rider and do a lot of off-road mounting biking then the land is all good for you and you might be able to manage without falling off your bike. If you are not as you used to it you are likely to lose your balance and fall off your bike. I do not recommend going for a ride around there unless you like water as well and getting stuck in the mud. The two photographs below show two areas of the woods I walked through and it was very difficult due to all the mud trying to find a dry path, You can see all the water and mud in the photograph on the left. The area was just on the long dry path at one time and you could walk or ride your bike without any problems. The photographs on the right show the problems mentioned in the The Bugs section about losing your balance. You can see how the ground is worn down. The cavities on the left and right are too narrow to ride your bike in. You would be alright with a penny farthing but not with a modern-day bike. Mountain bike just about. Like I mentioned if you ride on the centre part you risk losing your balance if you have to stop and nowhere to put your feet if it’s all flooded. Are you alright if you like dipping your feet in dirty cold water?
Bobs Pond
Another area we played in the summer was a fishing pond called Bob’s Pond. The name Bobs was something that we called it because they used to a man who ran a farm not far from the pond and we were told he was called Bob. There was also a small Newt pond on the farmland as well. We had many names for some of the areas around the woods like the black rock and devil’s rock just made up from stories by us kids. You can see Bob’s Pond in the two photographs below—both were taken by me nearly 30 years apart. The photograph on the left was taken in 1993 when I was still living on the estate and you see not much has changed from 1993 to 2019. The only thing you can see is how the trees have grown bigger. If you look to the right of the photograph on the left you can see a tempted slurry pit. That was used by Silverdale Colliery to dump slurry waste and was fenced off to the public. It has since been filled in and trees planted at the front of it that you can see in the photograph on the right. You can see Scot Hay in the background. You can see the difference in both photographs because the one on the left was taken with my Premier PC-845 35mm Camera back in 1993 before we had digital cameras or smartphones. The photograph on the right was taken with my Samsung S10 Mobile Phone in 2019 and you can see the difference in quality of the photographs. I was standing roughly in the same place when the photographs were taken.
1993
2019
Silverdale Colliery
The main employer in Silverdale for well over 100 years was Silverdale Colliery also known locally as Kent’s Lane. The first shafts were sunk in the 1830s and the colliery initially mined ironstone as well as coal. The main user of both minerals was the nearby Silverdale Forge. The colliery was completely rebuilt during the 1970s when three new drifts were sunk to exploit new reserves in the Keele area. Production increased and the pit mined over one million tonnes annually but was closed in 1998, the last deep mine in North Staffordshire to close. One of the coal spoil heaps from the Silverdale mine on Hollywood Road between Silverdale and Keele caught fire in 1996, 2 years before the site’s closure, and continues to burn two decades later. While the fire is primarily underground there have been times when the heat and smoke have made it to the surface setting fire to parts of Holly Wood for which the road is named. Speculation has been raised that attempts to fight the fire or open it up for housing work could result in what is left of the Silverdale coal seam catching fire as well. The photographs below are taken in Silverdale with the coal trains on the railway lines looking in different ways and that is how I remember Silverdale Colliery from when I lived at Parksite.
Below are two photographs taken by me in 1991 with my Helina Tele Flash 110 Film Camera. Both photographs are grainy due to the quality of the film and camera, The photo on the left was taken looking towards Silverdale Coliery from Keele Golf Course in 1991. The photograph on the right was taken at the end of Silverdale Tunnel in 1991. It was taken from the Silverdale side and I forgot to turn the flash off resulting in the mist light up. There was a train on the line at the time I took the photograph and it was a clear line where I was. It was moving very slowly with the final four coal carriages being filled up. I still had to be aware of the train at the time because you never know what might happen.
Transport
Silverdale was served by a railway station which was opened by the North Staffordshire Railway in May 1863. The station was on the NSR Newcastle to Market Drayton line and was closed in the 1960s. The station buildings remained for several years as train crew accommodation for British Rail staff who worked the coal trains to Silverdale Colliery. The rapid loader was located adjacent to the old station. In 2009 the track was removed between the station and Silverdale Tunnel, however, the two short station platforms still exist. The line from the entrance to the former site at Pepper Street through the old train station and onto Knutton and Newcastle-under-Lyme has been regenerated into a public access foot and cycle path providing a single, safe, accessible footpath for Newcastle-under-Lyme College for much of its prime catchment area. You can see more about Silverdale on the Silverdale page. If you are interested in the history of my photography then you might want to head over to the Newcastle Under Lyme page.
