History Explorer: British ceramics
Richard Smyth and Miranda Goodby explore Gladstone Pottery Museum, Staffordshire, home to some of the country’s last giant bottle ovens
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’.”
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.
What was it about this string of towns that gave rise to a world-leading industry and immortalised the names of Wedgwood, Spode and Minton, among others?
“A lot of it’s down to the geology,” explains Miranda Goodby, senior curator of ceramics at the Potteries Museum. “Basically, Stokeon-Trent is built on clay and coal. So you’ve got the two raw materials you need for making pottery. That’s absolutely key all the way through the 17th century.”
Jiggerers and jolleyers
These materials were used to create coarse Staffordshire ‘slipware’, which was characterised by the reds, yellows and browns of the local clay. The slipware would soon go out of style – but by then, the Staffordshire potters already had a head start. The emerging 18th-century fashion for ‘white ware’ required potters to source white clay from Dorset and Devon, 200 miles away, but the skills and infrastructure of the six towns meant that the area was nevertheless able to maintain its hold on the industry. Aside from anything else, the South West had almost no coal of its own. “To turn one tonne of clay into pottery you need between 14 and 20 tonnes of coal,” Goodby points out. This was a monumental endeavour. The Potteries lie 30 miles from the navigable waters of the Trent, Mersey and Severn. Between the factories and the riverboats, the raw materials coming in and the finished products going out all had to be transported on horses, in laden
panniers (containers). This all changed when a coalition of industrialists led by Josiah Wedgwood – in so many ways the founding father of industrialised pottery manufacture – pressed ahead with plans for a linking canal.
“The Trent and Mersey Canal opened in 1777 giving access by water to the east and west coasts,” Goodby explains. “It provided new opportunities to export to America and Europe. A horse pulling a canal boat can pull something like 40 times more weight than it can pulling a cart. And of course there’s less breakage. Canals made a huge difference: it was cheaper to get raw materials in and to get finished products out again.”
Pottery in the six towns – built on local resources, worked by generations of craftspeople, supported by a formidable infrastructure – dominated the district. In socioeconomic terms, it employed tens of thousands of local people, including children (in 1861, more than 4,000 children under 14 were at work in the Potteries). A factory, or ‘potbank’, would employ a bewildering array of specialists, from ‘mouldrunners’ (youngsters who carried moulds to and from the workshops) to ‘ jiggerers’, ‘ jolleyers’ (crafters who shaped the clay), ‘saggarmakers’ (who made the clay containers in which the ware was fired) and ‘stilt-makers’ (workers, usually women, who made the clay separators that supported the wares during firing). Add to these the thousands of jobs linked indirectly to the industry – in coal-mining, not least – and the enormous and enduring influence of pottery-making in these parts becomes clear.
Organic growth
The industry also came to define the urban landscape of the area. The bottle oven – a tall, tapered brick shell in which the oven was housed – was a familiar sight in the six towns for centuries.
“There were more than a thousand bottle ovens at the height of the industry,” says Miranda. “Like steam engines, each had its own personality, so it was important you had good fire-men who knew the peculiarities of their own ovens. Ovens tended to be clustered around the centres of towns. If you look at aerial views of the six towns in the 1950s, they’re thick with them.”
People lived cheek-by-jowl with the workshops and smoking ovens in which they made their livings. Says Goodby: “What you’ve got to remember with the pottery industry is that you don’t need a lot of heavy machinery – you certainly didn’t in the 18th and 19th centuries. When the textile industries took off in northern England, they needed steam engines and steam-driven machinery; the buildings used were often iron-framed and occupied large spaces to house this equipment. In Stoke, however, comparatively little machinery was needed. A series of workshops arranged around a courtyard were used instead, much like you can see at the Gladstone Museum today.”
Josiah Wedgwood, Goodby adds, did things a little differently. “Wedgwood was unusual. When he built his works at Etruria, he used a greenfield site just outside Burslem and built a model factory. This did also sometimes happen in the second half of the 19th century, but more often than not pottery-making sites grew organically.”
As is so often the case with industrial heritage, the bottle ovens of the six towns very nearly vanished without anyone really noticing. “The ovens were never built to last,” Goodby explains. “Invariably they’d be demolished and rebuilt after four or five years at most. They were constantly being heated up and cooled down, and if you look at their structure – a thin, domed form with a bottle-shaped chimney around the outside – it’s clear they could be rebuilt regularly.”
With fewer than 50 remaining in the whole area, the Gladstone bottle ovens are one of the things that make this site special. Visitors can take a walk around the hovel – the outer shell – and even step inside the oven. It’s a powerfully evocative insight into an icon of the region’s industrial history.
It was the Clean Air Act of 1956 that spelled the end for the bottle oven. Like most industrial districts in Britain, the Potteries