National Garden Festival, 1986

National Garden Festival, 1986This is a record of the last great reclamation project in Stoke on Trent and one of its great successes. There are three main sections to this five year project to create and stage the UKs first National Garden Festival A history section taking us through the closing of the Shelton Bar steelworks, the massive reclamation reclamation works on the site, and the planning and running of the Festival itself. All the key people who made the National Garden

The Victoria Theatre arrived to put Stoke on the international theatre map

From the 1840s the gardens at Trentham became nationally renowned

Cyril Kent

Christopher Stone was a popular BBC radio personality – his claim to fame being that he was the first ever radio disc jockey

and we end with scenes at the 1986 National Garden Festival

There are town centre scenes in 1926

the woodsman and other individuals

There are contributions from survivors and from relatives of others on board some who survived

These new prints were made from films discovered and preserved by Ray Johnson at the Archive and are the earliest moving images of this area

Imperial and Odeon

PAUL NIBLETT and film of volunteers restoring the site and of the Opening Day in 1975

The fast disappearing remaining buildings