Editing Stoke-on-Trent (section)

=== The Five Towns conurbation ===
Stoke-on-Trent is often known as "the city of five towns", the name given to it by local novelist [[Arnold Bennett]], and is the only [[wikt:polycentric|polycentric city]] in the UK. In his novels, Bennett used mostly recognisable aliases for five of the six towns, although he called Stoke "Knype". Bennett said that he believed "Five Towns" was more euphonious than "Six Towns", so he omitted Fenton, now sometimes referred to as "the forgotten town". As it is a city made up of multiple towns, the city forms a [[conurbation]]. In this case, the conurbation is bigger than Stoke itself, because the urban area of Stoke is contiguous with that of administratively separate Newcastle.

The six towns run in a rough line from north to south along the [[A50 road]] – Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Stoke, Fenton and Longton. Although the city is named after the original town of Stoke, and the City Council offices are located there, the city centre is usually regarded as being in Hanley, which had earlier developed into a major commercial centre.

For [[Eurostat]] purposes, it is a [[NUTS statistical regions of the United Kingdom|NUTS 3 region]] (code UKG23); it is also one of four counties or unitary districts that compose the Shropshire and Staffordshire NUTS 2 region.