Pottering around in Stoke-on-Trent

Next time you’re driving up the M6 motorway to the north of England, turn off at Junction 15 for a detour into Stoke-on-Trent. That’s not something you’ll often hear said. Stoke epitomises everything that’s bad about the economic recession. Unemployment at 20%, a down at heel shopping centre where no one can afford to shop, and poverty that grinds and crushes the spirit. It does have a premier league football team, but they’ve a reputation for kicking the opposition and getting beaten by teams with quick skilful players.

In Longton, on the periphery of the city, is the Gladstone Pottery Museum, and it’s quite unique. It’s a collection of giant size bottle ovens and workshops where - at its peak in the 1850s – 41 adults and 26 children turned out pots of every description, shape and size. (Potteries were classed as workshops rather than factories, so the limitations on child labour, imposed by the Factories Acts of the 1830s, didn’t apply). This was no top of the range pottery. Forget the glamorous names of Wedgwood, Aynsley, Spode, Portmeirion; Gladstone stood for everyday, common or garden ceramics, made from local clay.

When the industry declined in the 1960s, with production moving to the Far East, modest Gladstone suffered as much as the big boys. The factory closed in 1970, and was about to be demolished when a local businessman, Derek Johnson, rode to the rescue and turned it over to a preservation trust.



Walking around the cobbled courtyard today, you can step inside the enormous coal fired kilns, explore the workshops showing the various methods of production, and watch demonstrations by real live potters. You can also have a go at decorating a pot or making a bone china flower. What really struck me was the water driven machinery, clattering and clanking like something out of a Heath Robinson sketchbook – but fully functioning today.



In the heyday of production, working conditions were atrocious. It was a payments by results business, so broken pots meant no pay, even if the breakages were someone else’s fault. Hazards abounded. Workers in the kilns could expect to be dead by the age of forty, and lead poisoning was common. But jobs were coveted, and there was always a waiting list of applicants to replace the dead.
You can easily spend a couple of hours here, longer if you want to get your hands dirty, and there’s a modest little cafe serving tinned soup and ham sandwiches – just the sort of unpretentious food you’d expect at a working museum. When we visited, on a cold March day, the museum was almost deserted. That’s a shame. The museum deserves to be visited and, goodness knows, Stoke needs all the success it can get.