“It’s just Tuesday, son,” Dave replied. He grabbed the “the Viper”—a brutal, high-pressure nozzle with rear-facing jets. He fed it into the pipe, braced his boots against the manhole frame, and pulled the trigger.

“It’s a monster, Dad,” Davey said, wiping rain from his face.

Dave nodded, pulling his hood over his bald head. He didn’t need to ask. The old bottle kilns of the city’s pottery past loomed in the mist, silent witnesses to a century of clay, slip, and secrets buried beneath the ground. Stoke’s drains weren’t just pipes; they were history books written in fatbergs and fragmented pottery shards.

The drain screamed. Water, mud, and ancient filth erupted. For ten minutes, it was a battle of man versus geology. Then, with a groan that seemed to come from the very earth beneath the city, the blockage gave way. The water level in the manhole began to drop, swirling into a vortex that sucked the filth away toward the Trent.

Later, as they packed up the pump, the rain finally softened to a drizzle. The clouds broke over the bottle kilns of Longton, and a weak, golden light spilled across the city.

The sky over Stoke-on-Trent wasn’t just grey; it was the colour of a bruised hip, heavy and low. For three days, rain had fallen in relentless, diagonal sheets, turning the six towns into a single, sprawling network of rivers where roads used to be.