Some days, we feel like we’re building a machine that only we can see.
A machine that doesn’t dig, drill, or destroy — but one that wages war on waste.
A machine built not from steel, but from cooperation, imagination, and time freely given. A machine powered by young people, working not for wages, but for recognition, belonging, and the hope of a better future.
This is what we’re building in Stoke-on-Trent. And it’s hard. Really hard.
Because most of it still lives in our minds, sketches, slide decks and half-written code. Because it’s being built by volunteers — young people, mentors, under-employed dreamers and old people like me and David Proudlove & Charlie Houston-Brown— all trying to find a new way forward, with no blueprint but
our values.
But here’s the thing:
Every great industrial project — from railways to the internet — started as someone’s dream.
A sketch on a napkin. A belief in something better. A refusal to accept waste as inevitable.
We’re not “re-industrialising” in the old sense. We’re re-tooling our economy to run on kindness, contribution, and collective intelligence. We’re trying to reverse engineer poverty — to trade our way out of it using a new unit of value we call the Potteries Pound.
Some days it feels like we’re miles away. Other days, just inches. But the work continues.
So if you’re watching what we’re doing and wondering “Why isn’t it all live yet?”, We hope you’ll understand that this kind of work takes time — especially when you’re doing it with volunteers, from the ground up, and without the luxury of a venture capital war chest.
What we have instead is belief. And the courage to imagine the machine before it’s built.
If you can see even a fraction of what we see, we’d love to talk.
Original article >
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