A taste of the Potteries

by Carole Barclay

A bottle-kiln from the old days

Stoke-on-Trent is not a major tourist magnet. This northern city is actually comprised of six towns brought together as one civic authority in 1910. Known as ‘The Potteries’, this was the home of the English ceramics industry that began in the 18th century and continues to this day in the six towns that make up modern Stoke.
    Thousands of workers once toiled in Stoke’s pottery and steel plants or went down the mines in the locality. But the pits and steel-works have long gone, and glory days of Wedgwood, Royal Dalton and Spode are of another day. Nowadays the largest employer is Stoke-on-Trent City Council – closely followed by the Royal Stoke University Hospital with over 7,000 staff.
    These days most people come to Stoke to use it as base to visit Alton Towers, the famed theme park and resort complex just 10 miles from the city centre, or to explore the magnificent pocket wilderness of the Peak District.
    Football fans will come to see the once mighty Stoke City play in its new stadium where the ashes of their legendary former player, Sir Stanley Matthews, lie buried beneath the centre circle of the pitch. Robbie Williams, however, the singer who was born and bred in Stoke, favours their humbler rival Port Vale. But artists, collectors and students of the Industrial Revolution that turned the six towns into ‘The Potteries’ will come to study the past and the still vibrant, although much smaller, ceramics industry in this north Staffordshire town.
    The city claims with some justification to be the “World Capital of Ceramics”, and visitors can see for themselves by going on the tours organised by the remaining pottery factories that continue the traditions of a bygone age or to visitors’ centres such as the World of Wedgwood and the Middleport Pottery.
    The first port of call, however, has to be the award-winning Gladstone Pottery Museum. Here you can see how the workers mass produced tableware in the appalling conditions that were considered acceptable by bourgeois society until outlawed by the unions in the latter part of the 20th Century.
    The first factory opened in 1787 to produce earthenware and decorate Wedgwood’s plates and dishes, but what we see today is the old coal-fired plant that was closed in 1970 and re-opened as a living museum in 1974.
    For kids of all ages there’s a maze of workshops and kilns to explore along with hands-on displays of throwing, moulding and decorating, and a gallery charting the history of lavatories from the times of the Tudors to today.
    In the engine rooms and the bottle-kilns of the old works we can look at examples of the skill and craftsmanship of generations of Stoke workers in the old plant, which goes back to the Victorian era. We can see what conditions were like for the men, women and children who slaved away at the centre of the world’s pottery industry. We get a glimpse of what it was like to work in the miserable and hazardous conditions of those days through the audio-visual displays scattered throughout the complex and see what it was like to live in the hovels for the workers that surrounded the factory. What we don’t, of course, see is how the factory owners lived in their luxurious mansions well away from the noise and the poisonous fumes that their workers had to endure throughout their lives.
    There’s the usual cafe and a museum shop that sells a wide range of gifts including ceramics, local paintings, children's novelties and local guides and history books, as well as pottery made and decorated at the museum.
    The museum in Uttoxeter road is open from Wednesday to Saturday from 10am–5pm and Sunday from 11am–4pm. The admission charge is £8.50 for adults, £5.95 for children, and £6.95 for students and senior citizens.