Last year A Little Bit of Stone was approached by a producer who was putting together a show about towns that fly under the national news radar. As massive advocates for our town, we jumped at the chance to talk about Stone and the great people in and around the town.
If you want to get straight to listening to the show, it’s here on BBC sounds, Inside Pages – Stone -> https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m001h3z4
I booked a day off work and met show producer Ian Wylie at Stone’s Crown Hotel. Here are some details of what the series aims to portray:
“Journalist Ian Wylie journeys to some of the hidden corners of Britain to view small towns through the lens of the people who don’t ignore them – their local reporters.
Some of the towns are struggling, others are thriving. The one thing they have in common is they’re pretty much invisible in the eyes of the national media, even though they are home to tens of thousands of people. They don’t have football teams. They’re not pretty resorts that attract tourists. They can’t even claim to be a contested marginal seat that will determine the outcome of a general election. Our guides are the passionate people who remain committed to telling the stories of what’s happening in their small towns. Through their newspapers, websites and social media posts they refuse to turn the page on local news reporting – often at some personal cost.
Ian visits Stone in Staffordshire to meet Jon Cook, editor of a local news website.”
Ian and I spent several hours talking about Stone, the town, and the people who make it what it is. We spoke about what the catalyst was to the launch of A Little Bit of Stone, and it’s 12th year, how things were!
Ian was keen to take a look around the town, so after our interview – still mic’d up, we went for a walk around the town. We talked about Stone High Street, how it goes in cycles of businesses coming in, some moving around, and some leaving. Pre-covid, Stone had an incredibly healthy High Street in terms of occupancy, here’s an article we wrote in 2019 comparing the make up of businesses in the High Street from 2009 and 2019. We talked about the amazing support the community gives to our independent and national retailers and how I hope that we will still the empty units around the town begin to fill up once again.
At the time of Ian’s visit, Wandering Bee had just opened in Adies Alley so we popped in to have a quick chat on our way down to talk to Leo from the new Crown Wharf Theatre.
If you’ve listened to the radio show, you’ll know it starts off with the piece about the Crown Wharf Theatre, this was actually the last part of our time together and it was great to talk about this new community space that will be coming to Stone soon!
Thanks to everyone who gave kind feedback on the show, A Little Bit of Stone means so much to me and I know it means a lot to the people of Stone too.
Here’s the link to the show if you didn’t click on it at the top of the article! – https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001h41r
