About Us
Our Home in the Staffordshire Moorlands
A Place Of Wild Beauty
The 225 square miles of the Staffordshire Moorlands is rich in natural resource. Our upland backdrop (within the Peak District National Park) is of dramatic and bleak gritstone moorlands and rocky crags rising over 500m above sea level. This is a place of wild beauty and with a long history of hard and fragile living. The moorlands were home to some of our earliest settlers, and it is one of the putative locations for England’s 14th century poetic masterpiece, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
From Axe Edge Moor, the hills fall away into the Manifold, the Dove, the Goyt and Dane river valleys. It is these river valleys that frame a later story of the mixed economies of farming and industry. The packhorse and drovers’ roads, evidence of quarrying, lime kilning, coal mining, iron smelting, while canals and stone-carrying railways, intersect with a mosaic of grassland, woods and farmsteads. Together feeding the growing industries and their workers in the cities nearby.
Escaping the Urban Centres of Power
In our three market towns Leek, Cheadle, and Biddulph, we have the mills and homes that housed the industry and workers dying and weaving silk threads and textiles. Everywhere the evidence of the influence of late Victorian aesthetics via William Morris, William Sugden and Augustus Pugin. All in all, a story of the rural north-west Midlands embedded in our bones.
We will inhabit this rural landscape, this diverse ecosystem, away from the urban centres of power, with a radically new approach, developing a thriving cultural ecology everyone can participate in and identify with. We will embed creativity as a useful tool to respond to the challenges of rural living, as well as creating extraordinary moments that allow the residents of the Moorlands the opportunity to come together for transformative experiences and celebrations of this distinctive place.