County in England
Staffordshire
In 2009 a man with a metal detector found more Anglo-Saxon gold in a Staffordshire field than anyone ever had. It's the start of a county that makes things, from teacups to Marmite.
Key information
- County
- Staffordshire
- Nation
- England
- Known for
- The Potteries, the Staffordshire Hoard, Alton Towers, Burton brewing, oatcakes
- What locals are called
- Staffordians; people from Stoke-on-Trent are Stokies
- Famous people
- Josiah Wedgwood, Samuel Johnson, Stanley Matthews, Robbie Williams
- Football clubs
- Stoke City, Port Vale, Burton Albion
About Staffordshire
The field that rewrote the Dark Ages
In July 2009, metal detectorist Terry Herbert was searching farmland near Hammerwich when his machine began to sing. By the time archaeologists finished, they had recovered more than 3,500 pieces of Anglo-Saxon war gear: roughly 5kg of gold and 1.4kg of silver, much of it sword fittings studded with garnets. It remains the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found. One folded gold strip carries a Latin inscription taken from the Book of Numbers, a battle cry for a warrior king. The find made sense of the area. This was the heartland of Mercia, the kingdom that dominated middle England in the 7th and 8th centuries. Tamworth was one of its royal centres. Lichfield was so important that in 787 King Offa had its bishop raised, briefly, to an archbishop to rival Canterbury. The hoard is shared between museums in Birmingham and Stoke-on-Trent.
Why a whole city is named after crockery
North Staffordshire is the Potteries, and for good reason. Local clay, coal to fire the kilns and, later, canals to carry fragile cargo made six towns (Burslem, Tunstall, Hanley, Stoke, Fenton and Longton) into the world's teapot cupboard. Arnold Bennett made them famous as the 'Five Towns' in his novels, deliberately leaving one out. Josiah Wedgwood, born in Burslem in 1730, turned pottery into a modern industry. He perfected Jasperware, with its pale-blue finish and white figures, and was a pioneer of branding and marketing. His factory at Etruria sat beside the Trent and Mersey Canal, which James Brindley engineered. The canal's Harecastle Tunnel opened in 1777. Spode, Minton and Emma Bridgewater grew from the same patch, and Royal Doulton, which began in Lambeth, London, in 1815, later became one of Burslem's great names too. Locals are said to speak a dialect that includes 'duck' as a term of endearment, and you will hear 'ay up me duck' without any ducks being involved. The bottle kilns that once smoked across the skyline are mostly gone, but a few survive as museum pieces.
Dr Johnson, three spires and a code nobody has cracked
Lichfield Cathedral has three spires, nicknamed the Ladies of the Vale. It is the only medieval cathedral in England with that many. Samuel Johnson was born in the city in 1709, the son of a bookseller, and went on to compile his Dictionary of the English Language in 1755. His birthplace is now a museum, and his statue stands in the market square. Stafford, the county town, gave the world Izaak Walton, born in 1593, whose The Compleat Angler is one of the most reprinted books in English. Then there is Shugborough Hall, home of the Anson family. In its grounds stands the Shepherd's Monument, carved with a mysterious row of letters between the Latin 'D M' dedication: O U O S V A V V. The sequence has puzzled codebreakers for centuries, and nobody has settled it.
Rollercoasters, moorland and a wallaby mystery
Alton Towers, near the Churnet Valley, has been a theme park since 1980. Its Oblivion ride, which opened in 1998, was billed as the world's first vertical-drop dive coaster. The Smiler in 2013 took the record for the most loops on a coaster, with 14. The county's wilder side is just as striking. Cannock Chase, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, is home to fallow deer. The Roaches, near Leek, are gritstone crags on the edge of the Peak District, and wallabies roamed wild there for decades after escaping from a private collection. At Mow Cop, a hilltop folly looks over Cheshire. In 1807 a huge open-air camp meeting was held there, the beginning of Primitive Methodism.
Oatcakes, Marmite and the beer that built Burton
The Staffordshire oatcake is nothing like the Scottish kind. It is a soft, griddled, pancake-like round, folded around cheese and bacon. People in Stoke-on-Trent have bought them from hatch windows in terraced houses for generations. Burton upon Trent is the county's other food and drink capital. Its water, rich in gypsum, made it perfect for brewing pale ales, and the town's breweries, Bass among them, once shipped beer around the world. Its by-product was brewer's yeast, which gave the town Marmite in 1902. Love it or hate it, it was born here. The Staffordshire bull terrier, recognised by the Kennel Club in 1935, is the county's four-legged ambassador.
Stanley Matthews and the Potteries' football passion
Stoke City trace their story to 1863 and are among the oldest professional clubs in the world. Their greatest name is Sir Stanley Matthews, the Hanley-born winger. He was the first Footballer of the Year in 1948 and the first European Footballer of the Year in 1956. In 1965 he became the first footballer knighted while still playing, and he played top-flight football until he was 50. Port Vale, from Burslem, are the Potteries' other club, and Burton Albion have climbed from the brewing town's non-league scene to the Football League. The county has produced plenty of other names. Robbie Williams comes from Burslem, Lemmy of Motörhead was born in Stoke-on-Trent, and R. J. Mitchell, designer of the Spitfire, grew up in the area.