​Welcome To Stoke-On-Trent: Dartopolis

The Premier League of Darts, the Professional Darts Corporation's (PDC) hugely popular four-month jamboree that kicked off last week in Leeds, began life in January 2005 at the King's Hall in Stoke-on-Trent. It is entirely fitting the Premier League should have started in Stoke. This is a city that has won 16 of the PDC's 23 World Championships – largely thanks to Phil 'The Power' Taylor, 14-time winner (16 in total, 11 more than the next man, Eric Bristow, who for a long time ran a pub in the Potteries and now lives up the road in Leek) – and is the self-styled "cradle of darts." Stoke is also the only city in which the sport section on the website of the regional newspaper, The Sentinel, has darts as the fourth option on the menu bar, behind only football, cricket, and rugby union. This is Stoke-on-Trent: Dartopolis.

It's also not particularly surprising that the Premier League has never been back, not when you contemplate the slick, big-arena phenomenon it has become, the now familiar ritual darts bawdiness corralled into ever swankier, ever more cavernous surrounds. King's Hall, meanwhile – a grime-covered multi-purpose municipal building housing the 106-year-old federated city's council chambers and whose main hall has hosted everything from Question Time to Northern Soul all-dayers – is not so salubriously well-appointed. Its vaulted ceilings and ornate stonework friezes may speak of civic grandeur, a prosperity founded on pits and pots, but closer inspection reveals the shabbiness and neglect of a place down on its luck, its cold blue walls and grubby, lead-lined windows redolent of an asylum, a hospital, some Victorian bio-political violence.

Given this 10-year absence, it's little surprise that, last October, the locals turned out in their hundreds – in their ton-forties – for a rare glimpse of the city's darting dignitaries, its arrowstocracy. Milling about excitedly outside the King's Hall, the darting pilgrims – men that look like security; security – are here to see Stoke's four PDC stars: Taylor (then number three in the rankings), 'Jackpot' Adrian Lewis (five), Ian 'Diamond' White (eight), and Andy 'The Hammer' Hamilton (27). It's all in aid of a local cancer charity, the Donna Louise Children's Hospice. "Darts comes home," reads the promotional material (which, if not historically true, is certainly sentimentally the case), and the King's Hall has been primped up especially by the PDC, who've brought along cameramen, doormen, a lighting rig, and a stage, the full kit and caboodle of their travelling roadshow, their tried and trusted darting template.

The event first sees four local qualifiers duke it out for the Darts For Donna Louise Masters before then being given the chance to upset one of the PDC stars in the Donna Louise Exhibition, the pro-am mini-tournament that follows. The amateurs have embraced the darts blueprint – the garish shirts, the booming walk-on music, a gauntlet of high-fives through the Dorothy Parkers of the placards ("the pens smell like Amaretto") – and it's a little taste of the big time they clearly relish, deploying the full repertoire of darting moves and receiving the appreciation of the crowd.

It may not be an official tournament, but that hasn't stopped the self-styled "Clayheads" of the Potteries coming out to pay homage to men who have done much to reinvigorate Stoke's battered civic pride, as the city seeks out its 21st century identity, its transition from industrial to darting powerhouse. They are kindred spirits. The punters and players are differentiated essentially by their ability to propel a 20-odd-gram steel-tipped tungsten projectile into a bed perhaps only 260 square millimetres. Hamilton sums up their bond: "I feel proud of coming from Stoke-on-Trent and feel that I give something back to the city in what I do. It's an amazing feeling and it's great to be back."

So how did this dartomania arise? How did Stoke – famous in a sporting context as the only place (given certain midweek meteorological conditions) that Lionel Messi couldn't turn on his preposterous array of skills – become a darting hotbed?

There are certain corners of the world that punch way above their weight and dominate a particular sport to a disproportionate degree, be that for natural (physiology, landscape) or cultural (tradition, systemic know-how, money) reasons. Take Kenya in middle-distance running, Jamaica in sprinting, New Zealand in rugby union, Finland for rally driving, Egypt for squash, or Essex for snooker.

In darts, that place has been Stoke-on-Trent. Why? Is it something in the water, in the Potteries gene pool? Perhaps, conjoining the physiological and the cultural, it has been the breakfast diet of cheese and bacon oatcakes, helping with any unwanted sway on the ochre?

A clue to darts' initial foothold is provided by the presence of a BBC film crew at King's Hall, here to make a documentary for Inside Out about declining darts participation as the result of the erosion of pub culture. And the dedicated dartist is most definitely an habitué of the boozer: it's his practice ground (where, like Ronaldo with his free-kicks, they'll frequently stay back for extra sessions), his university, his bolt-hole. Of course, a game forged in the pubs – back when you could smoke in there to your heart's content – was easy to take up, a low barrier to entry (unless you were barred from entering the pub, of course). Further help comes from darts being cheap: no small thing during the 1980s, the first wave of darts' popularisation, when the city's two main industries felt the pinch of Thatcherist privatisation and "market forces". They say that during economically straitened times the sales of lipstick go up. In Stoke during the '80s, it wasn't only the women that were hitting the lipstick…

Perhaps these inexpensive leisure pursuits were the "compensations" to which the playwright JB Priestley (no relation to two-time former world champion, Dennis) was referring in An English Journey in 1932. His impressions of the Potteries were of "a grim region for the casual visitor," one that resembled "no other industrial area I know…a fantastic collection of narrow-necked jars or bottles peeping above the house tops on every side." He concluded that "this is no region to idle in, and the pity of it is that…so many good workmen here, men who have learned a fine old craft, are compelled to remain idle… For the man who is in regular work at decent wages, there are some definite compensations…but as a district to do anything but work in, it has nothing to recommend it."

The Potteries' skyline has been transformed since Priestley's visit, the bilge-spewing pot banks giving way to vast distribution hubs. Still, there are lots of struggling post-industrial cities that haven't become darting hotbeds. So, again: why Stoke?

History is always a matter of contingency rather than necessity, and the genealogy of this darting dominion is best seen as the confluence of two happy accidents. First, the decision of Yorkshire Television in 1972 to broadcast The Indoor League, a programme fronted by England fast bowler Fred Trueman, that gave nationwide exposure to a variety of esoteric pub games, including shove ha'penny, bar billiards, skittles, table football, and darts. Indoor League's producer was a Cambridge-educated Geordie by the name of Sid Waddell, later to become the game's chief proselytiser.

Second was the decision in 1979 – the year Thatcher settled into Downing Street – to move the BDO World Darts Championship from Nottingham, where Leighton Rees had won the inaugural tournament the previous year, to Jollees Cabaret Club in Longton, one of the six towns (along with Fenton, Hanley, Burslem, Tunstall and Stoke itself) that in 1910 federated to form the city of Stoke-on-Trent. Sitting atop a brutalist carbuncle of a bus depot on Commerce Street, Jollees was a shrine to un-self-conscious working-class leisure – more string vest then Stringfellows – and would enjoy seven prime years hosting the BBC's flagship darting extravaganza.

What really brought the unlikely pub glamour of this hit new TV sport to life was the serendipitous innovation to split the TV screen between the board and the players' faces, upon which were etched the tensions of what Waddell would describe, entirely without irony, as "working-class theatre". Suddenly, the characters came to life. Rees, Jocky Wilson, Bobby George, John Lowe, Cliff Lazarenko et al were the stars, though they were soon upstaged by Eric Bristow. An upstart with preying-mantis grip and plenty of swagger, Bristow bossed the sport through that '80s Golden Age, reaching 10 finals in 12 years, winning half (including four at Jollees), before succumbing to darts' variant of the 'yips': dartitis.

Bristow emerged at a time when darts' popularity reached never-to-be-repeated heights – not even later, with the cash injection and success of Sky – with a peak of 15 million viewers tuning in for the darts-themed gameshow, Bullseye. He was the game's first bona fide superstar, a tabloid backpage regular with his own Spitting Image puppet.

Throughout his time lording it at Jollees, Bristow was in a relationship with Maureen Flowers, the world's first professional female darts player and, handily, a publican from Stoke. He relocated to the city, buying a pub with Flowers in Burslem that he named – what else? – The Crafty Cockney. And it was here, while searching for someone with the skill and stamina to spend eight-hour days at the practice board, that Bristow forged his now fabled relationship with Phil Taylor.

Taylor came from a famously impoverished background. As a small child, the upstairs of his house in Tunstall was condemned, while the family had to run a wire from a neighbour's socket so they could work a new TV. Driven on by those memories of hardship, he would become dedication personified (even now, says Barry Hearn, the impresario who would later transform darts commercially as he had snooker, Taylor "loves a pound note"). But, despite matching Bristow in the marathon pub sessions and quickly graduating to the Staffordshire side, Taylor still couldn't afford to leave his job making ceramic toilet-roll handles in order to take the plunge and turn pro. So Bristow stepped in and gave him a £9,000 loan, sponsorship for flights and hotels, while mercilessly driving his protégé toward excellence, hanging up the phone unless Taylor had stories of tournament success to relay.

They may not quite have known it at the time, but the pair's stars were headed in opposite directions and, as the Apprentice fine-tuned his game, the Master's dartitis grew worse. Taylor's mother told Bristow that the only way to get rid of it was to "do what Phil did" and repeatedly throw a brick in a bin, but Eric refused. Soon he was getting unsolicited advice from his own parents, too, his father calling in the aftermath of a 7-1 loss to Taylor in the 1990 World Championship final to tell him: "Never teach someone how to do your job".

Still known at the time as 'The Crafty Potter', this was Taylor's first world title, a poignant passing-of-the-baton between friends and rivals. Yet despite having usurped Bristow's position at the top of the sport there still wasn't a huge amount of money to be made from the game, which by 1989 had contracted to a single, measly televised tournament. The players agitated, laying the blame squarely at the feet of BDO Chairman Olly Croft (whose running of the sport as a personal fiefdom even prevented players from advertising their own sponsors during BDO events), and after an acrimonious court battle 16 players, including all present and past world champions, defected, setting up what eventually became the PDC. Meanwhile, the BDO stubbornly persisted in calling itself the World Championships with Tony Green, Jim Bowen's Bullseye sidekick, behaving like North Korean state television, trumpeting some no-mark from Towcester with a three-dart average in the seventies while everyone else knew people were having much more fun in Seoul.

Darts' schism opened the door for Barry Hearn, who took control of the PDC in 2001 and, with the aid of Sky's cameras, revived the sport with a gloriously simple televisual formula: walk-on girls to provide the glamour, walk-on music for the excitement, and nicknames to help create the personalities that drive the dramatic narrative – a crucial component of the product, as Hearn explained to VICE Sports in 2015. Part of the process of making darts more telegenic was imagineering out some of the old pub associations, a process that hasn't been entirely successful. Indeed, while players now sip water on stage, perhaps lumbering off during the frequent ad breaks for something stronger, whenever the crane-cam does a sweep of the audience prior to those ad breaks there is an unchanging darting backdrop of fancy dress and lager and improvised placards and lager, a merry multitude chanting in delirious, percussive unison: Stand up, if you love the darts, stand up…

Not everyone is able to stand, but they all love the darts.

@reverse_sweeper

Read part two of our journey through the past and present of Dartoplis tomorrow on VICE Sports.