[ T42 | about the project ]

T42 | Tea For Two | About the Project

The Tea
First, there's a new blend of tea made. It's a blend of six leaves (to stand for the six towns), and it's called Stoke-on-Trent tea.

The Susie Cooper Teapot
Now everyone needs to taste the new tea. The best way to drink tea in Stoke-on-Trent is out of Susie Cooper teacups (as long as the tea has been brewed in a Susie Cooper teapot), so the artist finds a Susie Cooper tea set and then goes about setting up tea tastings in all the tea-shops in town. Sounds easy enough, you're thinking, so what's the catch?

The Catch : Conversations
When you come to taste the Stoke-on-Trent tea, the catch is that you have to have a conversation with the artist, and she's a bit nosey. Of course she'll start by asking your opinion of the tea itself, and then she'll get onto whether you think tea drinking can improve your health - she's interested in the way that the English always deal with an unusual situation or potential crisis by putting the kettle on for a nice cuppa, so she'll ask whether you think it's just about buying us time to pause and think? Or whether it can really help? She'll also be interested in your memories or anecdotes about Stoke and your life here. She doesn't know the city that well, so she'll probably ask you about your favourite parts of it - whether you think it's in good health or not - and which bits you wouldn't miss if they got torn down. She's heard that there's always been an air of competition between the six towns and that not everyone is happy to see Hanley become the city centre, and she'll probably ask how you feel about that. And there's one other thing. You see, one of the reason's she's started this T42 project is because she knows the council are keen to do some more work on the centre of Hanley, and they're interested in artists' opinions on what potential they think there might be. But you see, she read about Pottersville (and if you don't know what that is, she'll certainly enjoy telling you) and it started her thinking about how it might be to start dreaming up the ideal city from scratch - and if you did that, how might you design it? What might you put in it? And, well, if you get onto that you may need more than one cup of tea...

The Website
Of course, with all the tea tastings, the artist is going to be having a lot of conversations (and will probably be needing to visit the ladies quite frequently, but let's not dwell on that). It wouldn't be fair for her to keep all the conversations she has to herself, so the way she's going to share them is via the website. Every day, she'll write up what she can remember about the people she met and the things they talked about (and how they rated the Stoke-on-Trent tea). If the people she's talked to are ok about her taking their photo then she'll put one of those up on the website too. So soon this website will have details of all the conversations, pictures of the people she talked to, instructions of how to make a perfect pot of tea, information about where you can get a good cuppa in Stoke-on-Trent and so on. But it will also build up a diagnostic picture of the current health of the city - alongside a forward-looking blueprint for the ideal city - both as seen through the eyes of Stoke-on-Trent's inhabitants. She reckons that if you put those two things together, it's a pretty explosive mixture - and do you know what she's going to do with it? She's just going to hand it over to the city planners and let them deal with it. No wonder everyone thinks artists are a bit bonkers...

the rationale