The Housing Market Renewal programme, aka Pathfinder, pursued by English Partnerships, "The National Regeneration Agency" and promoted by John Prescott, has meant the gratuitous demolition of great swathes of sound Victorian terraced housing (Eyes passim).
The "regeneration" of Hackney demanded by the imposition of the 2012 Olympic Games, has meant the destruction of many local businesses and much housing; the only real beneficiaries being (as usual) large building contractors, developers and architects. The same will be true of Hanley.

Two years ago the North Staffordshire Regeneration Partnership was set up by Stoke-on-Trent city council and other local authorities and "stakeholders". This agency hopes to pump £1bn into Stoke. £120m will go into building new office space to create a business district in Hanley; and many more millions will go to rebuild the existing East West Centre, a tawdry shopping development.
This £250m redevelopment by Realis Estates, formerly Highland Hanley, and its architects, the international firm Benoy, which gave us Bluewater (mission statement: "To create successful destinations that delight and engage") envisages "a new department store, a wide range of shops, cafes, restaurants, vibrant public spaces, a multi-screen cinema, an hotel, a modern bus facility and improved parking". Unfortunately it also involves destroying the surviving fragments of old Hanley that stand on the site.

These include the terrace on the north side of Lichfield Street that contains the Coachmakers Arms pub. This will be replaced by a multi-storey car park, while the existing car park on the south side of the street will become the new bus station. English Heritage reported that "these buildings constitute a lively and interesting group, in generally good condition and mainly in use. Many of the buildings retain a high level of historic detail."

"these buildings constitute a lively and interesting group"

The Coachmakers Inn, Hanley - June 2008

The Coachmakers Arms is a jolly early 19th century building which was made into a beer house in the 1860s. It is popular and was declared Staffordshire Pub of the Year in 2007 by CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale. Even Stoke-on-Trent's "Regeneration Directorate" notes that it is "one of only 14 pubs in Staffordshire retaining a 19th-century beer-house type floorplan and that its extant historical and architectural features warranted the preservation of the building, as a functioning public house, within any development scheme".

Of course, any competent architect could incorporate The Coachmakers Arms and its neighbours into a modern civilised urban development, but the task is evidently beyond, or beyond the brief anyway, of the developer's award-winning architects Benoy.
It's not as if conservation is entirely unknown in Hanley. Close by, in front of the museum, is the Bethesda Methodist Chapel - the "Cathedral of the Potteries" - which, after years of neglect, is being restored by the Historic Chapels Trust and local supporters (and a mere £600,000 is needed to complete the work), which suggests the ordinary people of Hanley, rather than all the regeneration executives, would quite like interesting and useful old parts of their town to be retained.

Despite a 10,000-name petition against demolition collected by the Save the Coachmakers Arms Campaign, supported by the local MP Mark Fisher, Stoke-on-Trent city council granted outline planning permission for the East West redevelopment scheme last month. The fight for the pub goes on, however, and it must be uncertain whether Realis Estates can realise its "regeneration project". In Hanley, as elsewhere, the dark cloud of the credit crunch may have many silver linings."