Unpacking the potteries

I’ve passed by Stoke-on-Trent dozens of times before. It’s a frequent stop on the north-south rail routes through England, but I’ve never hopped off until now. It’s an unusual, confusing and fascinating place is Stoke.

Framed by the rolling greenery of North Staffordshire, it’s the UK’s only polycentric city, formed out of six linear towns that became a federation in 1910. Collectively known as The Potteries, Stoke labels itself “the world capital of ceramics” by dint of the industry that once powered the economy, pockmarking the cityscape with brick bottle kilns.

Fewer than 50 kilns still stand, compared to about 2000 before World War II. Some have been converted into offices, homes and visitor attractions. Although a slew of factories closed down in the 1980s and 90s, several are still open and offer tours and hands-on activities, including the chance to have a go at the potters’ wheel.

Exiting Stoke’s Victorian railway station, built in 1848, I round a corner and cross a bridge above the Trent and Mersey Canal, which had opened 80 years earlier, part of England’s then-burgeoning canal network.

The first sod had been cut by Josiah Wedgwood, who was born into a family of potters in Burslem (one of the six towns of Stoke). The canal helped smoothly transport his pots and it also carried barges heaving with coal and clay, two of the key ingredients for pottery manufacturing.

Today I see a quaint narrowboat gliding along the water while cyclists and pedestrians navigate the towpath. Across from the canal, and the Queensway dual carriageway, I find the civic core of Stoke-upon-Trent, another of the six towns, which has a handsome neoclassical town hall (where city councillors meet), a Victorian pub with a brewery tap and a gothic revival minster church, in whose cemetery Josiah Wedgwood is laid to rest.

So is another Josiah — Josiah Spode, who founded his pottery business across the street in 1774. The Spode factory closed in 2008, but a free museum here (open Wednesday-Sunday) traces the company’s story and exhibits a range of ceramics.

Incidentally, Wedgwood’s original factory, in the canalside suburb of Etruria, closed in 1950. Production was transferred to the nearby village of Barlaston, now home to World of Wedgwood, an award-winning attraction with tours, stores, creative classes, a tea room and a free museum stocked with Wedgwood wonders, including bone china and jasperware that wowed empresses and impresarios.

That’s a 15-minute taxi ride from Stoke’s train station, running south past Stoke City Football Club, for whom local lad Stanley Matthews began his illustrious playing career, and Trentham, a sprawling country estate with gorgeous gardens.

North of the station, Hanley is another of the six towns and regarded as Stoke-on-Trent’s city centre. A short bus ride or a 30-minute walk from the station, past the expanding campus of Staffordshire University, brings you to the superb Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, which has the world’s largest collection of Staffordshire ceramics. Its cabinets and aisles flaunt jaw-dropping pieces, from elaborately hewn coffee and tea pots and cow-shaped milk jugs to a giant peacock and figures of Napoleon and Queen Victoria.

Panels chart pottery’s evolving trends and techniques and influential local personalities, including Wedgwood (the grandfather of Charles Darwin). Ancient pottery from Egypt and Arabesque glazed friezes also grace the museum, plus artworks by Auguste Rodin, L.S. Lowry and Leonard Griffith Brammer, best known for his atmospheric portrayals of the Potteries.

The museum also displays relics from the Staffordshire Hoard, the largest batch of Anglo Saxon gold and silver ever found (a metal detectorist stumbled across it in a farmer’s field in 2009). Jointly acquired by Stoke and Birmingham city councils, the hoard was buried between 650 CE and 675 CE when the Kingdom of Mercia ruled this region.

The museum also has a Spitfire. Hidden in the museum’s basement, it’s a well-preserved example of the WWII fighter plane originally designed by Reginald Mitchell, who was schooled in Hanley and has a pub here named after him.

I lunch by the Spitfire gallery in the museum’s well-priced cafe, enjoying a fresh, chunky prawn and salmon sandwich for $8 (the cakes are enticing, too — a slice of Victoria sponge and a pot of tea will set you back $10). There are more eateries close to the museum, including at Hanley Indoor Market, which has stalls open daily except Sunday on the ground floor of The Potteries mall.

A bit further up, by the Potteries Way, there’s more ceramics heritage at the engaging free Dudson Museum, which occupies the former bottle kiln of a pottery works established in 1800. And in a Victorian factory off Lichfield Street, Emma Bridgewater is a relative newcomer, founded in 1985 and specialising in earthenware tableware.

Like many post-industrial British town centres, Hanley is a mixed bag, with some streets in desperate need of TLC, riven with decaying buildings, empty plots and boarded-up windows, while other lanes are more appealing, furnished with Victorian architecture, modern sculptures and murals, theatres, concert halls and live music venues such as The Sugarmill, where Coldplay and Muse once performed.

Stoke lost out to Coventry, another Midlands city, to be the 2021 UK City of Culture, but entertainment-wise it has plenty to shout about. Lemmy from Motorhead was born in Burslem, which is home to Port Vale, Stoke’s “other” soccer team, a favourite of Robbie Williams, who grew up in neighbouring Tunstall (another of the six Stoke towns).

Before moving to Los Angeles as a child, Slash from Guns N’ Roses lived in a suburb between Fenton and Longton (two of the other six towns, in the city’s south). Retired world darts champion Phil Taylor (Burslem) and captain of the Titanic, Edward Smith (Hanley) also hail from the city, while another Hanley man was Arnold Bennett, one of England’s most prolific authors between the 1890s and 1930s, when he would regularly feature Stoke in his novels. There’s a bronze statue of Bennett, seated with a book, outside The Potteries Museum & Gallery.

Heading back to the train station, passing the city’s central mosque, with its striking green dome and minaret, I cut through Hanley Park, an attractive 25ha space built in the late 19th century over a sprawl of old pit shafts. Designed by landscape architect Thomas Mawson, it was geared at improving the quality of life of ordinary folk, who endured miserable living and working conditions, mired in grime and smoke.

A branch of the Mersey and Trent Canal runs through the park and its grassy lawns, tree-shaded paths, flower beds, a boating lake, tennis courts, terracotta balustrading and symmetrical flights of steps by a bandstand and pavilion.

I pause and reflect here on my long overdue visit to Stoke. While it can feel disjointed and downtrodden in parts — neglected and underfunded by successive governments — there’s beauty here, in the leafy spaces and peaks that pepper and fringe the city to the creativity in the galleries, studios and factories.

fact file

+ Stoke-on-Trent has regular rail links to Birmingham and Manchester (35-50 minutes) and London (90 minutes). For more information, see visitstoke.co.uk.

+ To help plan a trip to Britain, see visitbritain.com.