Stoke proper — a square kilometre between the Minster, the Spode works, the station, and the canal — was the engine room of the British ceramics industry. This tour is not about the great potters' families. It is about the throwers and paintresses, the kiln-firers and flint-grinders, the navvies who cut the canal and the boatmen who legged through Harecastle in the dark, the railwaymen who carried the finished ware south and the hotel staff who fed and housed them. It is about Potter's Rot, the workers' cottages Josiah Spode II built at minimum standard in Penkhull Square, the named casualties on the North Staffordshire Railway's war memorial, and the memorial school that Herbert Minton's workers' skills paid for.
Stoke MinsterSt Peter ad Vincula — the parish church of Stoke, rebuilt on its present plan and consecrated in 1830. The churchyard contains the Grade II-listed tomb of Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795), buried outside the church because he was a non-conformist. Inside, a marble memorial tablet by his friend and former employee John Flaxman. Around him in the register: the ordinary dead of a pottery town.
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Trent and Mersey CanalThe towpath at the point where the Trent and Mersey Canal crosses the top of Glebe Street, north of the Town Hall. The canal opened in 1777 — the direct result of Josiah Wedgwood's lobbying — and ran from the River Trent at Derwent Mouth to the River Mersey at Runcorn, passing through Stoke and along the side of Wedgwood's Etruria factory village. The summit of the canal is nearby, at Etruria, where it meets the Caldon Canal.
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Stoke Town HallThe Grade II*-listed classical Town Hall begun in 1834 to designs by Henry Ward, with the north wing completed around 1842. The largest and most imposing municipal building in the six towns. In 1847 a School of Design was opened in the south wing, sharing space with the Athenaeum. In 1843, the ground-floor north wing was given to the county police.
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Spode MuseumThe surviving warehouse complex and bottle-kiln stub on the north-west courtyard of the original Spode factory, established by Josiah Spode I in 1776 on a site that had operated as a pottery since at least 1751. The only major internationally-known pottery in the area to remain on its founding site throughout its operational history. At its Victorian peak, around a thousand workers and twenty-two bottle ovens.
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North Stafford HotelThe Grade II*-listed Jacobean-revival hotel built in 1849 for the North Staffordshire Railway Company to designs by H.A. Hunt, at a cost of £8,843. First tenant: John Cuff, who opened it in August 1849. By 1851 Henry Robert Shirreff, Cuff's nephew, had assumed management aged twenty-three; by 1861 the live-in staff had grown from 7 to 27.
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Penkhull TerraceTwenty workers' cottages built by Josiah Spode II around a shared courtyard, entered through an archway, on land he purchased in 1802. Still standing on the west side of Trent Valley Road. Each dwelling originally contained a living room, a small scullery, and two bedrooms — one of them too small for a full-sized bed. Built to minimum standard, even for the period.
