Vis unitas fortior: Strength in unity

nity House is no more. For most of you, that will mean nothing at all, and those who live in the area will already be aware of that fact, for it was infamous. It was built with dark brown bricks and was extremely ugly. It cost a lot of money to repair and maintain, then it lay empty for years after a new civic centre was built during the early 1990s. Its demolition has been widely desired, demanded, heralded, postponed and re-scheduled for many years.

It used to house most of the office workers of Stoke-on-Trent City Council, and for several years I was one of them. It was the tallest building for miles around, so it seemed that, wherever you went in North Staffordshire at weekends, even into south Cheshire, it was prominent on the skyline, an inescapable reminder of the Monday to Friday routine.

My desk was on the top floor, the 18th. That's not high by many standards, but it was enough to make you dizzy when going down stairs in fire drills, and it was enough of a climb whenever the lifts ceased to function which they seemed to do regularly. But on the whole, the benefits of such a location outweighed the disadvantages.

As an energy-saving exercise, all of the ceiling lights in the building were fitted with timers and individual string-pull switches so that you could turn them back on when they automatically switched off. The building was designed to sway gently and imperceptibly in strong winds, but you were made aware of the motion by the oscillation of the string-pulls building up in a natural harmony, so that many people added sea-sickness to the claims of Sick Building Syndrome.

One morning I went to work in thick mist, only to discover from the top floor that I was above the cloud, and I could see the hills also breaking through in the distance, all the more beautiful for the surprise.

Unity House was too close to other buildings to be demolished by controlled explosion, so it was dismantled brick by brick. Some of these bricks remain in a large pile, but most have been taken away, and the site, on the edge of the city centre, will eventually be developed. Current plans are for offices.

It somehow seems fitting to end with the old joke: how many people work in the City Council? Answer: about half of them.

Tags: Unity House | demolition | Stoke-on-Trent | City Council