Stoke’s baptism by fire
Simon Thurley explains how canals and coal fired up the pottery industry in Stoke-on-trent, where there is a by-election tomorrow, and helped to make it the world capital of ceramics
Simon Thurley charts the rennaissance of the Potteries
‘It was an industry that took 200 years to develop, but was crushed in 30
There is no manufacturing town in england more closely associated with its product than Stoke-on-trent. everyone has heard of its potteries and few houses are without a cup, mug or plate made there. Stoke was once the world centre of ceramics manufacture— in 1925, the industry employed 100,000 people and furnished the dining tables of the British empire and beyond. It was an industry that took 200 years to develop, yet one that crashed in only 30. During the 1980s, Stoke became a byword for economic failure, social dysfunction and architectural blight.
Before the Industrial revolution, the Potteries was just one of many places where pottery was made. In fact, due to the cost (and precariousness) of moving ceramics, most were made within a dozen miles of where they were sold. The canals changed all that. In 1777, due to the strenuous lobbying and deep pockets of potters such as Josiah Wedgwood, the Trent and Mersey Canal opened for business.
Ceramics were the perfect cargo, heavy and fragile, they now glided their way to Liverpool for export and down south as far as London for domestic consumption.
As well as plentiful local clay, the canals also brought china clay from Cornwall to make porcelain that started to be fired in Stoke from the 1790s. You need eight times more coal than clay to make pottery and 17 times more coal for porcelain (as it fires at a higher temperature), so it was coal that literally fired the Potteries’ economy.
This was dug out in Stoke’s big pits, including the largest of them all, Chatterley Whitfield, the first colliery in the world to produce a million tons a year.
To coal, canals and clay, all natural advantages, must be added the brilliant innovations of men such as Wedgwood, who seized both technical and commercial opportunities, perfecting methods of mass production that turned his business into a global trading empire.
The massive rise in pottery manufacture gave Stoke its unique skyline, dominated by curvaceous bottle kilns.
In 1913, there were 1,200 of them; a big factory such as Spode had 20. These bulbous brick bottles of every shape and size remained the architectural signature of the Potteries until the Clean Air Act 1956 shut them down. Today, there are only 47 left. What you see from the outside is only a skin, a sort of cloche (called a hovel)—the kiln lies inside. This was stacked high with some 2,000 fireclay containers (saggars) that contained the pottery to be fired. Firing was hot, filthy work, with the poor furnace men trapped between the hovel and the kiln shovelling in some 30 tons of coal per firing. As with so many industrial processes, the gritty horror and heat of the process contrasted very starkly with the elegant refinement of the finished product.