Published:
January 25, 2021 at 10:56 am
To stand inside a Staffordshire bottle oven is to find yourself at the heart of an industry that once totally dominated this corner of the country. “No one calls Northamptonshire ‘the shoes’ or Sheffield ‘the cutleries’,” a volunteer at the Gladstone Pottery Museum tells me proudly. “But this corner of north Staffordshire is ‘the Potteries’.”
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The museum stands in Longton, one of the ‘six towns’ (with Stoke-on-Trent, Burslem, Hanley, Tunstall and Fenton) that since the 17th century have been the heartland of the UK’s pottery and ceramics industry. While the nearby Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Hanley holds the world’s largest collection of Staffordshire ware – some 50,000 pieces, with around 5,000 on display – Gladstone was established to preserve something of the industry itself: the skills, technology and, of course, the iconic brick bottle ovens.
It is not too late to transform the ‘five towns’, writes
Joan Walley, former MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, while
Richard Ross describes how
Thatcher’s deindustrialisation of Britain saw the destruction of the pottery industry
A worker at the former Wedgewood factory and pottery in Stoke-on-Trent paints a design on teacups. Photograph: Roger Bamber/Alamy
A worker at the former Wedgewood factory and pottery in Stoke-on-Trent paints a design on teacups. Photograph: Roger Bamber/Alamy
Letters
Wed 20 Jan 2021 12.02 EST
Last modified on Wed 20 Jan 2021 23.37 EST
Your editorial beautifully lures your readers into a gentle, entertaining but stark overview of the effect that pit closures and outsourcing had on the warm and caring people of the Potteries (The Guardian view on The Great Pottery Throw Down: eccentric and kind, 15 January).