City in Staffordshire, England
Stoke-on-Trent
Stoke-on-Trent is a city that was only born in 1910 when six towns shook hands, and it still fires up much of the world's dinner tableware.
Key information
- County
- Staffordshire
- Nation
- England
- Population
- about 258,400 (2021 Census)
- Known for
- Pottery, bone china, Wedgwood, oatcakes, the Potteries bottle kilns
- What locals are called
- Stokies, or Potters
- Famous people
- Josiah Wedgwood, Arnold Bennett, Sir Stanley Matthews, Robbie Williams
- Football clubs
- Stoke City, Port Vale
About Stoke-on-Trent
The city built from six towns (and one famous mistake)
Ask anyone to name the towns of Stoke-on-Trent and you will get a lesson in confusion. There are six: Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Stoke, Fenton and Longton. In 1910 they federated into a single borough, and in 1925 the whole lot was granted city status. Arnold Bennett, the novelist from Hanley, famously squashed them into five in his books, since he felt "Five Towns" sounded better than six. The Potteries have been quietly correcting him ever since. The result is a city with no single obvious centre. Hanley is the shopping and cultural heart, while Stoke has the railway station and the football ground. Burslem, meanwhile, is known as the Mother Town of the Potteries. Each town keeps its own loyalties and its own identity.
Why the clay came here
The pottery industry was no accident. North Staffordshire sat on exactly what a potter needed: clay, coal to fire the kilns, and salt and lead for glazes. By the 1700s hundreds of small workshops were turning out earthenware. The landscape became dominated by bottle kilns, those chunky brick cones that once numbered in the thousands. Smoke from them hung over the area so thickly that the Potteries were sometimes described as being under a permanent haze. Only a few dozen survive today, and they are protected as listed structures. The Trent and Mersey Canal, opened in 1777, gave potters a smoother way to move delicate wares. Roads in the 1700s shook pots to pieces, so boats were a revolution.
Josiah Wedgwood: the potter who became a brand
No name is more tied to the city than Josiah Wedgwood, born in Burslem in 1730. He turned pottery from a craft into an industry, experimenting with glazes and bodies and developing products like Queen's Ware, which won the approval of Queen Charlotte. He also pioneered the kind of marketing we now take for granted, including showrooms and the use of royal endorsement. His famous Jasperware, with its pale blue background and white relief figures, is still instantly recognisable. He was also an outspoken opponent of the slave trade. His medallion showing a kneeling enslaved man, with the words "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?", became one of the best-known anti-slavery images of the age. Other names followed, including Spode, Minton, Doulton and Royal Doulton, and Emma Bridgewater and Moorcroft carry the tradition on. Spode's bone china formula, perfected around 1800, set the standard for English porcelain.
Oatcakes, lobby and a very local breakfast
The city's signature food is the Staffordshire oatcake, and it is nothing like the Scottish biscuit. It is a soft, griddled pancake of oatmeal, flour and yeast, traditionally cooked on griddles inside homes or small shops and sold through windows or hatches known as "holes in the wall". Locals fill them with cheese, bacon, sausage and egg, then roll them up. Oatcake shops are still dotted around the city. Then there is lobby, a hearty stew of meat and vegetables that was cheap, filling and ideal for working families. The name is thought to be shared with the Liverpool scouse, and locals still have strong opinions about both.
Stanley Matthews, Port Vale and a city of two clubs
Football runs deep here. Stoke City, founded in the 1860s, is among the oldest professional clubs in the world. Port Vale, from Burslem, is the city's other side, and the rivalry between them is fierce. Sir Stanley Matthews, born in Hanley in 1915, was the Wizard of the Dribble. In 1956 he was the first European Footballer of the Year, and in 1965 he became the first footballer to be knighted while still playing. He played top-flight football until he was 50. Stoke's Victoria Ground gave way to the Britannia Stadium, later renamed the bet365 Stadium. Stoke City won the League Cup in 1972, their only major trophy to date. The city also gave the world Robbie Williams, born in Burslem in 1974, and Lemmy of Motörhead, who was born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1945.
From smoke to a city rethinking itself
The old industry shrank sharply in the late 20th century, and many factories closed. The Gladstone Pottery Museum in Longton, a working pottery from the 1800s with its bottle kilns and courtyards, shows how the trade once worked. The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Hanley houses a Spitfire, a nod to Reginald Mitchell, the designer of the Spitfire, who was born in nearby Kidsgrove and trained in the area. The collection also includes the Staffordshire Hoard finds, shared with Birmingham. The Etruria area has been regenerated, and the city hosts the British Ceramics Biennial, whose venues have included the former Spode factory and, for its 2023 edition, All Saints Church in Hanley. Making things is still part of the local DNA.