For the last century and a half, people stepping out of Stoke-on-Trent railway station have been greeted with what many consider to be the defining image of the city’s identity.
The mock-Jacobean Winton Square is framed by the Grade II listed North Stafford Hotel and, at its centre, a bronze statue of Josiah Wedgwood. A pioneer of the industrial revolution and radical abolitionist, Wedgwood is considered the father of English pottery, on which Stoke’s fortunes and legacy were hand crafted and fired. At the height of production, Stoke-on-Trent supported 70,000 jobs in the ceramics industry, earning its moniker the Potteries.
But, just as Stoke has had to shift and adapt in a post-industrial landscape, the view in Winton Square is now set to change too. Plans for a new transport interchange and improved pedestrian access to the station – part of a £9m revamp of Station Road – mean less room for Wedgwood, who will be shifted across the road to the front of the train station.
City planners say Wedgwood’s new position in the square, a designated conservation area, will give him more prominence. He’ll also be illuminated from beneath as lighting is incorporated into a replacement sandstone base for the plinth. But others, like councillor Ross Irving who opposed the move, are sceptical.
“The statue positioning was decided well over 100 years ago as the best position within the square,” he tells The Stoke-on-Trent Lead. “I just fear that, with its new proximity to the station, the impact of the statue will be lost. When people walk out it will suddenly be looming large and I think it will compromise the balance of the square.”
Tracy Bentley, a ceramic artist who continues the tradition of producing hand-crafted stoneware in Stoke-on-Trent doesn’t agree with the move either.
“I think it should stay where it is,” she says. “It’s an iconic landmark that people see as soon as they step off the train. It’s got a nice view with the hotel behind it at the moment.”
And Neil Brownsword, an artist who learnt his craft in Wedgwood’s factory as a school leaver and now educates young ceramists at Staffordshire University, agrees with her.
“There’s no space for the statue by the doors of the station,” he says. “At the moment you have that iconic vista. It gives you space to walk over and walk around the statue. If you come out the door and it’s right in front of you, you will barely notice it.”
The marginalised histories of Stoke-on-Trent’s pottery workers
But Brownsword, whose family worked at the old Wedgwood Etruria factory as far back as the 1800s, and who says the company has a deep connection to him as a practitioner, doesn’t believe Wedgwood is “the be all and end all”.
“There are a lot of histories in this area that are not shouted about as much as Wedgwood,” he says. “He was a brilliant marketeer, he was from a wealthy family and he was educated, so he could cash in on the history and the knowledge that was already in operation from the 1750s.”
The marginalised histories of Stoke-on-Trent’s pottery workers are, to him, equally if not more important. He believes there should be statues of them.
“Pioneers of the industrial revolution get the press but it’s the unsung histories of the industry who I think should be at the fore as well. We’re told Wedgwood was a genius by the connoisseurs who write the history. Not to downplay his contribution, because it was huge, but there are other stories to be told.”
Along with Irving and Bentley, Brownsword agrees that progress, investment and regeneration in Stoke-on-Trent is a good thing. But all agree too that ceramics should remain at the centre of the city’s identity.
Like the Wedgwood statue, Brownsword says “the nature of the industry has shifted”, but it is still very much present in the city, where clay slip runs through family lines for generations stretching back 300 years. And where ceramics continues to be important to the economy.
“We need to embrace that history rather than saying, ‘Well, that’s gone and it’s failed, it’s nostalgia.’ You work with that history. You build on it. You don’t get rid of it or push it to one side.”
“Our heritage isn’t sung about enough,” agrees Bentley. She began her career in ceramics at Naturecraft in Congleton and honed her craft in various potteries in Stoke-on-Trent, including Moorcroft and its short-lived offshoot Cobridge Stoneware.
Traditions continued
Today Bentley runs Burslem Pottery, a historic brand that she revived in 2008, and continues the tradition of making unique stoneware – from grotesque bird sculptures to vases and lamps – by hand from start to finish.
Her self-contained studio and shop sit within the famous Middleport Pottery, its recognisable bottle kilns among the structures restored under an ambitious £9m project funded by the Prince’s Trust in 2011. Middleport is also the home of Channel 4’s The Great Pottery Throw Down, hosted by ceramicist Keith Brymer Jones, who is frequently moved to tears by what contestants manage to create from a bag of clay.
“When the Pottery Throw Down was being filmed here we had visitors from as far as Australia and Alaska,” says Bentley. But when the cameras stop rolling the footfall dies down. “If it was pushed, and more of our heritage buildings were done up and used, we could have a fantastic tourist industry off the back of it. When you look at Stratford and Chester, they haven’t knocked their old buildings down. A lot of ours have been left to ruin.”
Hoping to revive two of them is Simon Davies, an entrepreneur who started his business in Burslem 10 years ago.
“The people here were just so nice and welcoming but it just used to depress me seeing all the old buildings crumbling,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about it for quite a long time and I got to the point where I thought I need to do something about this.”
Davies’s vision is to breathe new life into a derelict flour mill and listed calcining works, complete with towering 19th century kiln, on a stretch of the Trent and Mersey Canal just south of Middleport Pottery. The canal route was commissioned by Wedgwood himself, to allow for the import of coal and raw materials, and the export of finished products from his Etruria factory, a further two miles south of the site Davies has his eye on.
“My family goes back to 1820 in Burslem. They came from Wales when there was a gold rush in Stoke because the canal enabled the pottery industry to grow tenfold,” he says. “It’s an incredibly important asset but completely unloved and we don’t get much canal tourism through it because there’s nothing here for them. A lot of people go to the pottery and then leave the area.”
Simon Davies, an entrepreneur who started his business in Burslem 10 years ago
Davies’s vision is the Teapot Factory, a multi-use arts and countercultural venue with street food and bars in the vein of the Custard Factory in Birmingham and Manchester’s Freight Island. The aims are threefold – to repurpose post-industrial land into multi-arts and cultural space; to nurture and retain creative talent within the city; and to raise the profile of Middleport canal front and attract investment.
“I’ve been working on selling this vision to influential people and they are getting on board and excited about it,” he says. He’s now assembled a board of eight people from a range of backgrounds and they are in talks with the buildings' current owners.
"We think there’s a deal to be done. I want the buildings to be owned by a charitable trust but there’s opportunity for the businesses to have outlets there,” he says. “We would start with shipping containers in the outside space and renovating the smaller outbuildings. We’d have to do an organic phased approach.”
A creative village
A further mile south along the canal from Wedgwood’s former Etruria site is the old Spode Works, the site of pottery industry for another pioneer – Josiah Spode. Manufacturing halted in 2008 and in 2011 the factory reopened its doors as Spode Museum. Since 2017 the six-acre site has undergone huge renovations, part of plans for a ‘creative village’.
Success stories at the site include the Quarter at Potbank, a restaurant and music venue, and studios for creative businesses including a burgeoning tech hub. And there’s China Hall, the festival hub of the British Ceramics Biennial since it launched in 2009.
Aiming to develop, sustain and expand innovative practice, the Biennial presents artworks from the UK’s leading ceramicists alongside international artists in exhibitions and special events held across the city.
Brownsword has been involved from the beginning, contributing as a curator, an advisor and as a practitioner.
“It’s a great thing for the city. It brings a footfall of nearly 38,000 people and they’re all spending money and staying over,” he says. It’s driving the perception of ceramics away from just industry too, he adds.
“People need to realise that ceramics isn’t just a cup and saucer and a toilet. To be globally competitive you embrace all the ideas of what ceramics is. Have a global vision, a global design perspective, and bring new people into the mix.”
But Spode Works has been dogged by problems too. The latest phase of redevelopment was earmarked in 2021 with £10m from the government’s Levelling Up fund. The deadline to spend the money was originally the end of this month, but in October the company chosen to develop the plans for the former pottery was dissolved.
The future of Spode is uncertain, and Davies doesn’t feel it is a good example of the regeneration of heritage buildings anyway. By being “parcelled up” into different businesses, he says, “the grand vision for it went out the window”.
Brownsword is a trustee of Spode Museum but agrees that the wider site is “fragmentary and disconnected”.
“That whole place should be a cultural site. Not a load of disparate shops that mean nothing to the heritage. It goes back over 230 years of ceramic production – it should ooze its ceramic-ness.”
He points to a post-industrial site he visited in China that’s been turned around in the last 20 years as an example of good practice.
“It’s got young people there eating out but it’s got shops that are thriving selling ceramics. The culture is all ceramics. Spode could be that site.”
Statue of Josiah Wedgwood in Hanley. Credit: garyroberts/worldwidefeature
A further four miles south along the Trent and Mersey canal in Barlaston, the World of Wedgwood houses the world-renowned brand’s V&A collection. Here production continues too, though on a much reduced scale than when Wedgwood moved its operation there in 1950. In 2009 it went into administration and mass manufacturing was moved to Asia, marking the loss of 1,500 jobs. But in 2014 a £34m restoration of the Wedgwood site brought 100 manufacturing jobs back with it.
Today Stoke-on-Trent supports around 5,000 jobs in the ceramic industry, but that figure represents a concentration of around a quarter of the number of jobs nationally. In December industry body Ceramics UK, based in Stoke-on-Trent, called on the government to recognise the industry’s “indispensable” role.
“It’s a really positive industry that’s absolutely fundamental to the UK economy…”
Chief executive Rob Flello, who served as Stoke-on-Trent South Labour MP in 2005-2017, is keen to stress that traditional pottery is only a small proportion of the industry today, although still an important one. Ceramics also include bricks, roof tiles, pipes, floor and wall tiles. Then there are advanced ceramics.
“Ceramics are involved in brakes on cars and trains, engines, panels that go on the side of space shuttles, and filtration systems that are used everywhere from domestic settings to within relief agencies when they go to places with no clean drinking water, and in the military on submarines,” Flello tells The Stoke-on-Trent Lead.
“Then you have refractories that are used in the glass industry, the steel industry and other high-temperature production. Advanced ceramics are needed to make things like the turbines of jet engines and in Stoke-on-Trent there is a company that makes ceramic cores that are used to manufacture Rolls-Royce turbine blades.
“It’s a really positive industry that’s absolutely fundamental to the UK economy,” he says. “Whilst across the UK there are 20,000 plus people who work directly in ceramics, those jobs and the products they produce enable hundreds of thousands of other jobs. From the glass industry, to construction, to Formula One – these things wouldn’t exist without it.”
Companies producing these advanced technologies are all represented in Stoke-on-Trent too, which Flello says is central in leading the charge in advanced ceramics. The city is home to the AMRICC Centre – the UK's only advanced facility for the development of advanced ceramic technologies. The future of Stoke’s ceramics legacy, he says, is in both new development and sustaining traditional potteries.
“We still have Wedgwood, Steelite, Portmeirion, Churchill, Duchess, Walpole, Burleigh and I could go on. There’s a whole raft of traditional potteries producing very good products, innovating all the time, bringing out new lines and ranges, and finding ways of producing their products in a low carbon way. They’re also very much embracing the future.”
But high interest rates and soaring energy and material costs have had a knock-on effect on the industry and businesses are feeling the pressure. In January Portmeirion announced it was axing 35 jobs in Stoke and Emma Bridgewater, one of the largest employers of potters in the city, announced a fresh round of 36 redundancies following another 32 last year.
Bridgewater also announced a 13-week period of short-time working, a pattern seen throughout Stoke potteries including at Burleigh last year.
“Redundancy is still a common story but more so people go on short time. They know the traditional skills aren’t there and if they get rid of them they won’t get the skills back,” says Bentley, who was made redundant five times throughout her career before setting up her one-women shop.
“I’ve got no education in pottery, it’s all from the shop floor,” she says. “No art at school - all learnt in house. Now young people go to uni and get a degree. Great! But they don’t get the experience or pick up the same skills. They need to keep those skills because when our age group’s gone the skills will go with us.”
The dichotomy between potteries needing to cut back on staff and a skills shortage due to a 30-year gap in traditional recruitment is one Brownsword is familiar with. He agrees with Bentley that you can’t match the skills learnt in a traditional six-year apprenticeship, but on Staffordshire University’s ceramics courses, he says, they try to expose students to a broad range of experiences.
“Digital technology is a fantastic tool and a shortcut but we believe in giving students a grounding in material knowledge and craft skill in conjunction with digital,” he says. “You keep them working in tandem. You don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.”
He believes that championing technology while also taking an ethical position to keep manual craft skills in production is vital to the future of the ceramics industry in Stoke.
Neil Brownsword. Credit: Joel Chester Fildes
“When you buy a piece of Emma Bridgewater it’s about buying into someone’s working history.
“To understand that that object has probably gone through 20 people’s hands to get to that point – that’s the buy in. You’re keeping people in work and that human connection is so important. It’s about sustainability. If people buy fewer but better things then there’s an argument to keep it going.”
But, points out Bentley, “if people can’t afford their heating and their food, then they can’t afford pottery, which is a luxury”. She believes pressure should be applied to businesses to buy local pottery.
“When you go in cafes round here you’re drinking a cup of tea out of cups that aren’t local. But when we go abroad, and my husband is always tipping his head to see what the backstamp is, you’re drinking out of Churchill China. Why can’t we have it here?”
Bentley also rails against mass produced imported pottery.
“It needs pushing into people that our stuff is better quality than stuff you buy from China in Home Bargains. People still don’t understand that but if you don’t use it you lose it.”
Along with a race to decarbonise, lower energy consumption, changing fashions and attracting workers, Flello also cites “unpleasant imports” as a challenge facing the ceramics industry.
“These are products that are quite often produced in countries that don’t do as much for decarbonisation, don’t have the same taxation system, that are heavily subsidised, or indeed have free energy to produce the product, and quite often the health and safety and employment laws are woefully below the standards we have in the UK.”
Ceramics UK, he says, has suggested a traffic lighting system for imports to the government.
“If it’s a country that has low standards of carbon emission, low standards of employment and health, then they should have an import duty on them. If they have one or two areas that aren’t too good then they’d be given an orange rating and pay a lower duty. If they have the same standards as the UK then give them a green rating and, fine, we can compete fairly.”
But, having worked there on numerous occasions, Brownsword challenges the perception that China in particular is a place of mass-produced cheap ceramics.
“Without China we wouldn’t have a history of industry here,” he says. “Our whole industry is based upon an appropriation of Chinese culture and knowledge.”
Porcelain, he points out, came from China, and it took Europeans hundreds of years to master the ancient skill of crafting it.
“Chinese ceramic history with porcelain goes back over 1,000 years to the Song dynasty, and earlier to the Tang Dynasty in the 7-10th century. Porcelain came to Britain, we made our own version of it, bone China, and then we used images like the willow pattern. It’s an English piece of appropriation.”
Stoke-on-Trent as a Unesco World Heritage site?
Instead, Brownsword feels Stoke-on-Trent should look “beyond the front doorstep” and learn from how other cultures embrace their ceramic heritage.
“Just before Christmas I was in Jingdezhen, the porcelain capital of the world, and I was blown away by how they embrace history and technology working side by side. And the craftsmanship was exquisite, I was knocked out by it. I came back feeling a bit depressed.
“Stoke-on-Trent has got some of the best histories and knowledge bases in the world and we don’t shout about it. China has huge government investment in protecting its heritage alongside developing it so the two go hand in hand. If you do that properly then economies can drive themselves.”
Before that, he says, there must be initial investment in heritage infrastructure. He believes Stoke-on-Trent should be a Unesco World Heritage site and that the knowledge and skills of his generation, who came up through pottery apprenticeships, should be protected and secured for the future by passing them down.
“It’s about cultural value as opposed to economic value, but once cultural value works then the economic value follows,” says Brownsword, pointing out that Stoke-on-Trent doesn’t have to reinvent the potter’s wheel. “It’s already being done in other places which have got a ceramic history. Plant that model into Stoke and it can be successful.”
