By Antonia Charlesworth Stack
You can read this article in full on The Lead here

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.”