Pottery dates from the earliest times in human history. Neil MacGregor in A History of the World in 100 Objects identifies a Japanese storage jar dating from 5,000 BC, but the origin is probably much earlier. In my journey around British manufacturing places I have found potteries great and small. Perhaps the greatest were in the collection of villages known now as Stoke on Trent.

The area was blessed with reserves of quality clay close to the North Staffordshire coalfield which ranked only a little behind Cannock Chase and the Black Country. Coal was perfect for firing kilns.

The efforts of the Duke of Bridgewater in commissioning James Brinkley to build Bridgewater canal opened the prospect of access to major markets. The subsequent cutting of the Trent and Mersey canal in 1777 both revealed yet richer seams of coal and in 1790 a link from the potteries to London, Birmingham and Liverpool. The arrival of the railways further improved the access to markets aided to by a ring track visiting each of the towns of Stoke.

The transformation of a cottage craft into the British luxury goods industry comes in the person of Josiah Wedgwood who not only explored the science of making pots, but also understood how to market them. There is an excellent book by Tristram Hunt, The Radical Potter, which speaks loudly of the man, the place and the time. The Wedgwood factory, founded in 1769, moved out to nearby Barlaston where there is now also the V&A Wedgwood Collection.

The pottery towns each had their particular focus. Langton, Fenton and Stoke specialised in bone china and porcelain, Hanley and Burslem in earthenware and Tunstall in bricks and tiles. Technology impacted with steam power by then gas to fire kilns instead of coal and finally electricity. Given the fine nature of some pottery, manual skills remained and indeed are still employed and can be seen by visitors to Barlaston. Pottery was not all for domestic use. I had a client which produced industrial ceramics.

Stoke itself is still home to a number of smaller potteries including Moorcroft and Middleport from where the TV programme The Great Pottery Throw-down is filmed. I write more on British ceramics in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Of at least equal significance to Wedgwood was Thomas Minton who in the late eighteenth century brought to Stoke the art of making porcelain. I am grateful once again to Neil MacGregor who writes of the Mongol empire and how it learnt the secret to porcelain from Persia when it became part of its empire. The Mongols also made safe the ‘silk road’, of which I write in my blog on silk making in Braintree, and so enabled the journey of Marco Polo from Italy to China. MacGregor recalls that Marco saw in the porcelain he found the translucence of a cowry shell the Italian slang for which is porecellana, ‘little piglet’. The Chinese exported porcelain, with its distinctive blue and white, across the world (as in the image). Minton imitated this in his willow-pattern. We can add the name of Josiah Spode alongside that of Minton and Wedgwood as the three leaders of Stoke pottery.

Iron and Steel passed few places by. Stoke had the Shelton Iron and Steelworks which installed continuous casting machines in 1964. The rolling mills finally closed in 2000.

GEC had a presence in Stoke with GEC-Elliott Automation power automation systems. Creda appliances was based here from 1919 and later merged with Simplex of Birmingham; they were both then owned by Tube Investments. Rootes ran a shadow factory producing Bristol Beaufighters at nearby Blythe Bridge in the Second World War. The Royal Ordnance factory at Swynnerton to the south of Stoke produced over one thousand million percussion bombs. The shadow factory and Royal Ordnance factory were re-purposed for Rists (part of Lucas) and AEI. Michelin set up a factory in Stoke in 1927.

Further reading:

  • Tristram Hunt, The Radical Potter
  • Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects (London: Allen Lane, 2010)
  • Eric Hambrook, Portrait of a city: Stoke-on-Trent – the past, present and future (Newcastle-under-Lyme: Penrhos Publications, 1989)
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